In our most recent blog post, we discussed the importance of engaging in social conversation. One of the two steps we talked about was social listening. I wanted to take some time to discuss social listening and the tools you can use to make it happen.
Social listening is just as it sounds, which is listening into social media conversations about your particular brand. Whether you know it or not, there are certainly conversations happening on social media about your brand. They happen every day, every hour and there’s lots of it. People love to discuss and chat about their interests, so it’s important to be sure you know what people are saying about your brand so you can join the conversation.
Here are some tools and strategies we use on a daily basis to monitor conversations about our own brand and our clients.
Google Alerts
This is a very simple tool to use and it provides great results. All you have to do is go to Google.com/alerts. Once there, you can log in to your Google account and start typing in keywords you want to be alerted of. You definitely want to use your business name, and can include other keywords such as your website address, employee names, etc. Thankfully there’s no limit on how many keywords you can be alerted of.
You can then select your alert preferences — type of content, how often, volume of search results, etc. Once you’ve established this, you will begin seeing alerts popping up directly in your inbox. It’s that easy!
Tracking Social Mentions
A majority of the conversations about your brand are going to take place on social media platforms, so you want to be monitoring the various channels. There’s a massive amount of great little programs out there that can help you with spotting anything being said about your brand. You can include certain keywords like your business name, Twitter handle, etc.
A great tool that we use is Mention. We are able to set up our alerts and view what is being said easily and quickly. We monitor our brand as well as our clients on a daily basis, and I would recommend the same with your brand.
Monitor Reviews
One of the hardest things to manage is your reviews, and that’s because there are a large collection of review sites that will create pages automatically for your business, sometimes with you not even knowing. There’s 2 basic strategies to keep on top of your reviews.
- The hard way: If you want to save money, you can take the time to track down as many of your business review pages as possible. Put those links on a document and access the pages every day and skim through the reviews. This takes time and effort, but it’s free.
- The easy way: Just as there are tools to monitor social media conversations, there are tools to monitor reviews as well. These cost money, but can save you time and effort of having to look at every individual page every day. Keep in mind, there are programs out there that monitor both social conversations and reviews. So if you want to pay for both, try and find a program that offers both.
In The End
There are many other tools and strategies on the market to put yourself in the right position to listen in on the social conversations about your brand. These are just a few of the simple strategies that we use on a daily basis. Every business is going to find their own tools and strategies. The most important thing is to make sure you are making the effort to listen in.
This article was syndicated from Business 2 Community: Tools & Strategies You Can Use For Social Listening
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