Are You Social Listening? What is it, And Why is it Important?
Ever since social media has gotten attention, and the number of people that started using it grew exponentially, it began to be seen not only as a tool for people to socialize and communicate, it also became a news outlet and classified ads, and for businesses at least a very comprehensive tool that they could take advantage to connect to their customers that are already using the platform which makes the work of getting them in the platform out of the equation. It is the perfect platform because there are no extra steps that your customers need to take to do business with you and see what you’re up to, unlike print ads or emails, it just flows naturally to the platform.
Aside from promoting your products, services, or your brand, social media can also be a handy tool for you to monitor your business’ reputation. It works just like literally interviewing your customers, only more automated. This is where social listening comes in.
Defining Social Listening
Social listening is the act of setting up facilities that allow you to keep tabs on how your brand is performing on social media platforms. It will enable you to see where your brand is being mentioned, listen to the conversations that happen around keywords that are relevant to you, find out who your competitors are, what new industries are there that is relevant to you, list what topics fit your brand, listen and immediately respond to customer feedback, and allow you to see all the data you need to obtain suggestions on when and how to act on future opportunities.
There are two steps to doing social listening. First, you have to be able to keep a record of your brand’s social media conversations and mentions, and secondly, you should analyze what data you have gathered and craft actions that you need to take, which would make improvements on how you serve your customers.
To help you implement social listening in your business, we have listed you ten tools you can use to help you employ this beneficial strategy for improving your customer relations.
1. Buffer
Buffer is an increasingly popular all-in-one social media management tool the features an omnichannel experience that consolidates your interactions with your customers across multiple platforms. Using Buffer, you can compose the content, and it will get published on all your social media platforms, and Buffer also allows you to participate in customer interactions through a central command screen that uses a shared inbox. Buffer allows you to easily find discussions that are most relevant to you, hop to it, and amaze your audience on how responsive you are.
2. HootSuite
HootSuite is a centralized social media management tool that enables you to check your comments, brand mentions, and messages on all major social media platforms, which are displayed in a single clean dashboard, which also allows you to respond and interact with your customers directly. HootSuite also allows you to keep tabs on top influencers and your leads, which it lists and allows you to be able to import them and share with your team members. They have three distinct tiers that best fit your budget and your business’ requirements.
3. HubSpot
Unlike the first two tools we have mentioned, HubSpot is more than just a social media management tool. This tool features blog posts and landing pages creation, digital marketing campaign builder, and it automatically posts content across all your social media channels, it also works out correctly for you on when is the best time to publish social media posts, all of these features in one neat, easy to use the tool. You can think of HubSpot as a standalone tool for social listening. Still, it offers way more features beyond that; it is a tool that includes every element that helps your team to meld social media into the company as an integral part of its daily operations.
4. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool that makes you able to see the number of eyeballs and engagements each one of your content receives on a specific platform. This tool also allows you to monitor the performance of your brand on Facebook; it provides you with extensive details about every post you have on Facebook, which gives you insights not only on how to improve them but also to identify which types of posts attract the most interactions. But we think that the coolest feature of BuzzSumo, on the other hand, is that it can tell you which days and specific time of day when you should post, and what the ideal length of the content should be.
5. TweetReach
While the other tools we have mentioned here are made for multiple social media platforms, TweetReach is a reliable tool for accurately monitoring a business’s brand performance on Twitter. This tool can also accurately count how many accounts on Twitter your keywords, hashtag, and people have reached. It can also provide you with a detailed analysis of your Tweet impressions, when users mention your brand, and what exact time their Tweets are being sent. TweetReach would ultimately help you find followers that are most likely to interact with your Tweets.
6. SumAll
SumAll is a tool designed specifically for small to medium-sized businesses. This tool would let you analyze how you can use your social media channels to work with each other. SumAll also allows you to write your content in advance and post it on a scheduled date and time. This tool has an amazing range of metrics that is relevant to how your posts are performing. You also get real-time, daily, and weekly updates that help you effectively keep tabs on the rate of your growth so that you can act immediately when problems arise, and opportunities come.
7. Awario
Awario is built specifically to be used as a social listening tool that specializes in building awareness around business’ brands. The way the tool does this is that it traces all the relevant keywords across all languages throughout the world. This is especially useful for businesses that have global operations and distribution that have customer bases all over the world to reach them using the power of social media. The tool empowers businesses to be not only able to track and engage their social media comments, but also create relevant connections between them and their potential customers.
8. Keyhole
A keyhole is a tool built with a certain focus on Instagram and Twitter brand monitoring. This tool is good at tracing mentions, usernames, and hashtags on both social media channels. This tool prominently features a cool looking heat map that depicts how your brand is being mentioned, engaged by your customers and how they differ in different parts of the world. This information will ultimately help you craft better posts that would suit your potential customers more, thus creating more interactions between the demographic and your brand.
Another striking feature of Keyhole is their advanced hashtag analytics tool; it can give you never seen before insight on your brand’s hashtag performance, which can be used as a real-time monitoring tool as every Mention and posts that are relevant to your brand is being recorded as soon as they happen, which gives you absolute control over your brand’s online sentiment. Keyhole also features a tool powered by artificial intelligence that is able to predict how good your keywords and hashtags would perform; it does this by analyzing the time the hashtag would be used and the topic which your hashtag belongs to, along with the predictions around reach, impressions, and even the amount of engagement it will receive.
9. Mention
Mention is built to be able to follow millions of pieces of content that is written across 42 languages; this makes Mention the ultimate tool for you to allow you to monitor how many times your brand is being mentioned across the whole world. This tool also allows you to pick the only type of content you want to follow, which is great if you only want to focus on stuff that matters. Mention has a specialty tool that allows you to accurately compare your brand performance against your actual competitors; this would help give you insights for your next move in ensuring that you are always ahead of the competition.
10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a tool that also focuses on Twitter, but unlike TweetReach, it is also compatible with almost all of the major social media platforms. This social media management software gives suggestions to help you improve how you interact with your customers. It features a dashboard called the Twitter Listener, which allows you to analyze reports about your brand’s presence on Twitter. As a bonus feature, Sprout Social showcases brand monitoring to trace brand-relevant keywords and direct messages as soon as they happen. They also offer unique insights just for your brand on how you can constantly improve your social media strategy and monitor your performance.
Founder, Editor-In-Chief // A native Angeleno. John studied engineering at UCLA; founded Schmoozd, an offline social tech networking event in LA with 30,000 subs; ran a startup accelerator (StartEngine). Worked for several major brands like Toyota, DIRECTV, Hitachi, ICANN, and Raytheon. A mentor at Loyola Marymount University (LMU) Entrepreneur School, Dr. David Choi. And advises a dozen local LA startups building amazing tech in various industries; and invested in some. // Let's Connect: john@lastartups.com
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