What is Social Media Listening and Steps To Make it Work [6 Ways to Make Social Listening Easier!]

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:

1. Choose a tool.
2. Choose your keywords.
3. Choose your platforms.
4. 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:

1. Increased engagement opportunities with target audiences.
2. Track and oversee trends.
3. Crisis management.
4. Keeping an eye on competitors.
5. Finding influencers.
6. 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

Effective Email Marketing Strategies that Actually Work [8 Concepts You Can Use Right Now!]

Everybody out there receives more than just emails from family, friends, or people they know from the businesses they work at, they also receive emails from companies that are trying to catch your attention so that they can draw you in and makes purchases on items from their websites. Today, I’m going to tell you how you can go about creating an email marketing strategy using eight different concepts that actually work and you can use them right now!

First off, I know the title of this blog post sounds like a scam, like some YouTube video titles, but I’m here to reassure you that this actually is not a scam.

So, how do you go about creating an email marketing strategy that actually works at bringing in people and making them clicking your email to learn more? The first thing you have to do is personalize your email.

1. Personalize the Email

As easy as this part may seem, it’s actually quite hard to come up with a way for making this sound like it’s geared toward the customer, but also not too personal because then that would be crossing the border of coming off as creepy. The main factor you have to keep in mind is the relationship the customer has with your company. If they trust you, then that’s a good sign. If they don’t know you and you send out an email too soon and you force familiarity too soon, then that will definitely not leave a good impression at all.

2. The Subject Lines of Emails

There’s a specific way that you should go about titling your email’s subject lines and here’s one thing you should avoid: make sure to not title your subject line in your emails with 60 – 70 characters in length. I know it’s very specific, for some reason, and I don’t know why that is, but other than that, most email subject lines that have 70 or more characters work really well with getting customers to click through the email and read more about it. If the subject line has 49 characters or less, then it ends up still doing really well with open rate. The kicker out of all of this is that even emails with 10 characters or less had over half the amount of people opening them, according to (Buffer), the source I collected this data from. All in all, if you want people to read the content you have in your email, keep the subjects longer. If you want people just to open the emails, then go about keeping them shorter.

3. The Time Frame for Email Sending

When making an email, it's always important to figure out when that email will get sent. According to Buffer, they found that the best time of the day to send out emails is actually from 8:00 PM to midnight. I personally would've never known that that time would actually be a great time to market your emails towards people. The reason why is because it's the least used time frame compared to every other time frame.

4. Give Away Freebies!

Everybody likes getting free stuff, and there's no denying it. Depending on what your email is about, I would try and think about what your customers would most likely want to have as a freebie by imagining if you were on the receiving end.

5. Make Emails Mobile Friendly

About half the people that check their emails nowadays usually check them on their phone or tablet, so you should make sure that your emails look nice to view on both phones and computers. Some things to keep in mind when designing the email would be to keep everything in a one column template, make the font a little bit bigger, make the call-to-actions more obvious and easier to tap, and lastly, anything that's important for customers to tap, keep those things in the middle of the screen.

6. Don't Use Twitter or Facebook

No matter how much more everybody uses Twitter or Facebook to keep in contact with friends and family and find businesses on there, email still has a better time at bringing in customers than those platforms do. Buffer mentions that according to a company they know called SocialTwist that monitored campaigns from leading brands and companies, out of 300,000 referrals of new customers, 50.8% were reached by email, 26.8% were from Twitter, and 22% was from Facebook. So no matter how you might think about it, email will always do better than any other platform in reaching its audience.

7. Weekends are the Best Days!

I know I told you earlier in this post that 8:00 PM to midnight is the best TIME to send out emails, but there are better DAYS to send out those same emails too! Out of all seven days of the week, Saturday and Sunday would be the best time to send out emails because, just like the time frame, Saturday's and Sunday's volume for sending out emails is really low, and that just gives you a better opening time to send them out to your customers.

8. Reconnect with Your Inactive Subscribers

When people join your mailing list from your company, most of the people won't follow-up with the other emails that are to come. This is something that everybody has to deal with and there's not really any way around it. One thing you can do to try and lessen the amount of inactive customers in your mailing list is by trying to send out an email that mentions that the company hasn't seen you in a while and also by adding an unsubscribe link or button in the email for them to unsubscribe If they choose to. It definitely helps me since I keep getting emails every day. Lol.

I hope all of this helps y'all in figuring out what strategies you can use to make your emails even better and marketing them towards the people around you.