Salve Regina launches a social media listening lab for students

As the world becomes increasingly digital, social media will continue to play a vital role in society. With this in mind, a highlight of the fall semester has been the installment of a social media listening lab in the O’Hare Academic Building. The lab was endorsed by faculty who expressed a desire to have social media monitoring technology for use in the classroom.

The lab utilizes SproutSocial, which does real-time natural language processing to determine sentiment analysis – the process of detecting positive or negative sentiment in text. This allows students to track platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter across industries, political campaigns, and marketing and advertising campaigns to assess what kind of messaging is resonating with audiences.

Overall, the key function of social listening is to uncover critical insights – like helping a brand build a deeper understanding of the target audience, generating insight into sentiment around the brand and monitoring global social conversations around a particular industry.

Classes use the social media listening lab

Dr. Hyoyeun Jun, assistant professor in the Department of English, Communications and Media, has been using the lab for ENG360: Social Media Strategies this semester. While she also lectures on social media and public relations theory, the lab helps students gain experiential skills.

For her current class, Jun has each student creating a fictitious business that they will then promote through social media, and SproutSocial is helping each student monitor trends of their chosen industry so that they can see firsthand what works, what doesn’t and how to help promote a business online.

“It’s exciting, because students really get to practice the hands-on experience of what they will do after they graduate,” Jun said. “They will be professionally ready for any kind of social media managerial jobs or social media strategy communication jobs.”

Claire Daly, a communications major and a marketing minor, is planning to create a fictitious business around slow fashion and vintage resale thrift, because these ideas are popular with her age demographic. “I’m listening in on businesses like Depop and Poshmark – bigger companies that sort of own the resale space at the moment – and trying to hone in on my idea for a business,” she said. “It’s going to be a smaller business, but I think it’s helpful to be able to have access to this information about bigger companies, so you can carve out your niche.”

Dr. Jennifer Bonoff, assistant professor in the Department of Business and Economics, is using the lab for MGT422: Marketing Strategies and MGT490: Strategic Business Planning. “A highlight is that teams of students are taking part in a nationwide digital marketing competition, where they will use SproutSocial to conduct research, craft a paid and owned strategy, choose appropriate media, and pinpoint methods of evaluation for the sponsored company,” she said. “I’m excited to see the outcome of materials produced for this competition with the added social listening tool.”

Salve Regina’s Center for Business Outreach (CBO) is also likely to use the lab. “Over the past five years, the CBO has partnered with over 1,000 Salve Regina students and roughly 150 companies to assist with marketing strategy, social media, survey research, entrepreneurial endeavors, and business planning, totaling more than 50,000 hours of experiential engagement for Salve students,” she said. “The lab will further facilitate this process and open up other avenues to delve further into analytics, engagement and cutting-edge research.”