Information is critical for discovering opportunities. Data seekers are getting smarter, and so is technology. Insights essential for your business is quite commonplace today – available from sources like the internet, social media and review boards. Social media listening is the process of gathering all such data at one place and analyzing it to give you the business intelligence required to discover future opportunities and scopes.
Why Should You invest in Social Media Listening?
The foundation of your marketing strategy begins with analyzing customer satisfaction data. Social listening is a tool which helps you in the process. Gathering all the data related to your purpose, mining the relevant ones, structuring the data, analyzing it for insights and presenting you with the report. All the hard work is done by social media listening while you take the back seat for a while.
There are examples galore, of companies employing social media listening to address critical issues and projects. In brief, social media listening keeps track of your performance for you and provides a benchmark for your brand as well by keeping a constant eye on your competitors.
4 Tips from the Social Media Listening User Manual
All said and heard, social media listening is not a genie from the magic lamp. It will help you reap benefits when you follow some useful tips, like the following:
Why do you want to monitor Social Media?
Social listening has multiple uses. Be it to gain customer feedback, or to track your campaign #hashtags. You can use it for all these purposes or concentrate on one. Whatever it is, make sure you are clear about your needs before initiating your social media listening project.
Goal Setting
Goal SettingSimilar to the previous tip, this is about planning what your project is aiming to do? This helps you chalk out a real plan of action. Say you want to improve your overall online reputation and currently 75% of your customer comments are positive, you should work to have actionable goals on how to increase the figure to 85% positive comments and so on.
Choosing the Right Social Listening Platform
Being aware of your social listening needs can be really helpful when you have to choose from about a hundred options. Your needs help you define what particular features you require out of a tool. There are many social media listening tools out there with varied functionalities. Making an informed decision is the key to a successful campaign.
Spend Time on the Results
Building a demanding brand presence online is a tough task especially in the world of web 2.0. Starting a keyword search and abandoning it midway only to recheck it after a month will do your company no good. Spending some quality time with the results each day is what will go a long way in helping you formulate more powerful brand campaigns.
6 Major Things to Look for in a Social Media Listening Platform
Social Listening adds value to your business but only if you invest in the right kind of tool. Any marketer will tell you that the thumb rule for selecting a social listening tool is, to have your own goals and needs defined to choose the most suitable tool. The best one wins. If you are in need of some guidance with the selection, here are some of the key features you should look for:
Data Coverage
There are simple tools to track your likes and retweets, and there are tools with really fancy high-end features ranging from reports to video analysis et cetera. A full league of other tools fall in between these extremes. If your company needs an extensively detailed analysis, go for the tools which crawl the most data.
Customized Reports
Most of the tools in the market are now offering a report. Opt for a report which is fairly comprehensive, easily understandable, and even customizable to your needs. A clean report would be lucid with most of the analysis presented well via graphs and pictorial representation. Pages of text analysis in a report is a big negative since no busy marketer has enough time for that.
Platforms covered
Platforms coveredSome social media listening tools may not have the option of listening on all social media platforms. For instance, TweetDeck works only with Twitter data. However, if your company’s presence is limited to Twitter alone, this may work just fine for you. If you are a fashion brand with the majority of your client-base active on Instagram, investing your time on TweetDeck will reap you no benefits.
Industry-specific Listening
Every industry has a specific set of problems, goals, and needs. A one-size-fits-all approach will not help when you expect your business to grow. Social media listening tools with the facility to extract industry-specific data and create benchmarks and reports for you are definitely a better choice than others.
Sentiment Analysis
Marketers focus on sentiment analysis when they initially adopt social media listening. One of the most prominent features of social listening tools is sentiment analysis. Every comment and conversation that a customer posts online has an undertone. Manually judging each one of them can become tedious, sentiment analysis helps you understand what percentage of your customer base is happy with you and what is going wrong.
Customer Service
Like every service provider, the tool which has the best customer support and can extend quick help for troubleshooting is the one you should choose. Proper guidance in case of doubts is essential and a mark of the right service provider.
Armed with such information about the features of an ideal social media listening tool, you should be able to make a sound decision. Yet, if you want to test the waters first, you can always opt for the trial versions of a promising tool to judge it better before making a final choice.