132 THE POWER OF VISUAL STORYTELLING a powerful focus group. Understanding what your consumers’ frequently asked questions are, plus what they gush or gripe about, will help to drive your visual content strategy. It can also help you prioritize what social media platforms you invest more time in and the types of visuals you use. Here’s what you should be listening for: • Frequently asked questions • Conversation topics • Conversation sentiment: overall and by popular topics • Conversation spikes by topic, time of day, and day of the week • Favored social media platforms • Frequently used visuals: for example, photos, videos Arguably the best way to glean this information quickly is to invest in a tool like Radian 6, Sysomos, Social Mention, or others. But if you are on a tight budget, these can be a little spendy. If you don’t have budget and resources for a social listening tool, you can do this the old-fashioned way. Analyze your social media platforms when you’re conducting your con- tent audit to gauge how responsive your fans were to each piece of content. For example, if you’re on Facebook or Instagram, look closely at the com- ments. See if fans responded in line with the content topic, the sentiment of their comments. If their responses are largely off topic from your con- tent, look closely for key themes. You can also search for your company across all of the major social media platforms to take the temperature of the general chatter. Facebook may be challenging with privacy settings, but the introduction of hashtags may gen- erate some interesting findings. Platforms like Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Vine, Pinterest, Google+, and Tumblr are all very searchable. Learn what and how people are sharing—news articles, photos of their in-store experi- ences, reviews on a product or service, and more. Social listening tools rely on users with public account settings, which means you won’t be able to get data from all of your customers, but it will serve as a good sample size.