One of the things you are forced to do when listening to social media conversations is to describe what those conversations are that are relevant. You can't listen to everything, so you need to listen to just that tiny slice of conversation that's about your company.

To do that, you need to identify the words that people use when they talk about issues you care about. Do they use the same words you do or different ones? Do people who are positive on the issue use different words than those that are negative? No matter what you do, it starts with identifying the words that are in the conversations that you care about.

And what does this sound like? Search keyword research! If you engage in listening with your customers, you'll find one of the best and easiest ways to research the keywords you should be optimizing your organic search campaigns for, and that you should be buying ads for in paid campaigns. If you've never used this tactic, start figuring out how to super-charge your keyword research with social media listening.