So, you may be wondering or asking yourself "What is social media listening and how do I use it?" Well, you came to the right place because that's what I'm going to talk about with you today. Not only that, but I'll also help you make it easier to learn why it's good to do some listening.
What is social media listening? Well, besides the fact that some people call it social listening for short, according to Cyberclick, it's basically the continuous monitoring and analysis of social media channels for positive and negative mentions and feedback about your company's brand, products, services, and then using that information to take action. This means that you're constantly looking out for specific words or keywords that someone online may mention, whether they relate to your company or your competitor's company.
Here are the steps you need to take into consideration when learning how to do social listening:
- Choose a tool.
- Choose your keywords.
- Choose your platforms.
- Analyze and take action.
1. Choosing a Tool
Regarding how you'll keep track of when someone online mentions your business, you will need a tool to monitor keywords, phrases, and topics that relate to what your company does. An example of a tool that would work and be easy to work with would be HubSpot because it gives you a lot of the important measuring factors for you to use like what was mentioned up above.
2. Choosing your keywords
Keywords are what help an article or YouTube video become more known to the public by you entering words that you believe other people will use to find said article or video in the first place. Another way of simplifying what I mean for finding what you can make keywords from is taking your brand's name and handles, your product's names, and even their misspellings, your competitors' brand names product names, and handles, industry buzzwords, your company's slogan, campaign names, and lastly, even unbranded hashtags that are related to the industry.
3. Choosing your platforms
Now after all of the preparations you've made, you've got to choose where you will be conducting your listening. There are a lot of social media platforms to choose from, but it would probably be best to use the most well known ones instead since you know what to expect from them. Now there are two different approaches to this: B2B and B2C. If you choose to go the route of B2B (Business-to-Business), then you'd be better off with choosing LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter or YouTube to get the word out there to other businesses. If you choose B2C (Business-to-Consumer), then utilizing all of the platforms including Facebook and Instagram, will help you to reach an even wider audience.
4. Analyzing and taking action
After all of what you've learn so far, make sure that it all doesn't go to waste. As long as you keep on checking your data and what you collected from listening, then you should be golden. All in all, everything that I've talked about will help influence the decisions you make, so make sure that you make great decisions!
Before I Go
Before I go, I just wanted to let you all know about some benefits of conducting a social media listening strategy and what this means for you.
So far, all I've found for the benefits conducting this gets you are six different benefits:
- Increased engagement opportunities with target audiences.
- Track and oversee trends.
- Crisis management.
- Keeping an eye on competitors.
- Finding influencers.
- Event tracking.
Increasing Your Engagement
Going along with increasing your chances to engage more with your audience, it will help you to understand more of how your customers think and what you believe they will want from you next.
Paying Attention to Those Trends!
The main thing to take from trends is that it can help you grow your research and development team, public relations team, and in taking your company to new heights in new directions!
Crisis Management
If something bad happens, like a customer doesn't like a product and more and more people follow them in the backlash towards the company or if something bad happened to the company, you should always be ready for anything to happen by taking your time and assessing what went wrong and how or if there's a way to fix that wrong.
Knowing What Your Competitors are Doing
If you use keywords that relate to your competitor's products, then it can help you find if the other company has any weak spots that you can then use to your advantage.
Influencers!
You see this all the time, whether it's on TV or your phone, you always see a commercial with some very well known actor, sports player, etc, showing how much they love using this company's product or service. It does take a lot of paperwork to hire someone to be in a commercial, but they can gain a lot of attention faster than one might think to help your brand thrive!
Event Tracking
This one is especially helpful if your company has an event that they are hosting. It helps you to better know how people feel before, during, and after the event happens and what the customer experiences. If something needed to be improved on, now would be the time to address it.
I hope you all were able to make sense of what I have written in my blog post today and I hope y'all were able to talk something from this and be able to apply it to your daily life. Anyways, I hope y'all have a nice day! :D
