When brands want to know more about their customers these days, it is easy for them to get the information. Thanks to social media and social listening, brands can now tune in to a global stream of online chatter. Customers are on these platforms talking about their experiences and sharing reviews. Social listening helps marketers track these mentions and derive actionable insights. Social listening tools can be a great help, but without proper guidance, you could be disappointed with the tool. Hence, here are some social listening best practices that will help you get the most out of your social listening tool.
What is Social Listening?
If you chose to read this article, you probably already know what social listening is. If however, you don’t, social listening refers to the activity of collecting and analyzing data collected from digital sources, of all the online mentions and conversations related to your brand or industry.
Marketers have been using this tool to help with daily operational decision-making. The tool helps with almost all business activities:
- Market Research
- Lead Generation
- Online Reputation Management
- Customer Service
- Relationship Building etc.
Social Listening Best Practices
An incorrect approach to social listening will not yield the best results. Here’s how you implement the features the best way.
The Right Keyword
This advice may seem redundant but setting up the right keywords for your search makes a remarkable difference. Customers often face difficulty at this stage when most of the words of their keyword seed list aren’t viable.
The best keywords to set up the first time on your social listening platform are your brand name, your brand hashtag, your company’s product name, and so on. However, while setting this up most people commit typos. This will produce incorrect results. The other things to avoid while setting up your keywords:
- Do not use long phrases
- Do not use generic keywords (Like apple is the name of a fruit and a company)
Monitor your Industry News
It is equally important for any business to keep up with what’s going on in their industry. Social listening to keywords relevant to your industry basically provides you with business intelligence. You would otherwise spend dollars upon dollars to gather such intel. Monitoring industry keywords helps you keep track of all the:
- New trends
- New product ranges
- New players (competitors)
- Trending Events
Keeping an eye on all of these helps you determine any pain points that your customers might be facing. When you address these pain points yourself, it helps you identify market opportunities. Also, keeping track of the trends helps you to spot any emerging crisis situations or threats in the future.
Set up Alerts
You don’t really have to be stuck to the dashboard to be able to manage your social listening platform. One of the ways to never miss an update is to enable alerts. The tool sends you an alert or notification every time there’s a negative mention. Another alert you may set up your tool for is when there’s a sudden spike in social media mentions. Alerts help you to take immediate action and make the best of the situation at hand. This could be to address a crisis situation or to engage with audience members over a viral post.
Social Listening is meant to inform you about your audience members. Hence, one of the most important social listening best practice tips is to reach out to your audience and respond to the mentions. Hope these practices help you get the best out of your social listening tool.