10 Points to Consider before Planning your Social Media Listening Project

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

Similar 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

Some 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.

The Most Popular Social Listening Tools

Business intelligence holds the key to a company’s progress, and the simplest way to gain crucial business insights is to interact directly with the most valuable stakeholder – your customer. Listening to what your customer has to say helps build your brand in today’s wired world. Once you realize the importance of this, you will want to know all about the best and most popular social listening tools.

Social listening helps you track the direct mentions or discussions which refer to your brand, by name. There’s a huge advantage in this knowledge, as you can effectively deal with any customer issues and inquiries. Moreover, you can also respond to negative comments about you on social media, stopping them from presenting a unilateral viewpoint which could turn away any potential future customers.

Social listening tools are available in plenty, but it’s important to ensure that the tool meets your specific needs. The complexity or simplicity of the tool you use depends on the size of your company and your requirements.

How to Choose the Right Social Listening Tool?

Small businesses would need a simple CRM system to be able to reply, engage and manage the company’s interaction with the customer. Basic social listening tools like Tweetdeck and Boardreader, are efficient and help achieve these root objectives.

Larger companies would need a suite complete tool with real-time listening, competitive insights, ability to engage with consumers, which can monitor their advocacy programs and draw up their future strategies. The list includes names like Hootsuite, Keyhole, TweetReach, and Mention.

A factor to consider is the volume of data and sources. For example, if most of your brand’s chatter is on one channel, say Twitter, a free tool such as TweetDeck should suffice.

A great tool caters to your present and possible future needs. One good way of picking a suitable tool is to go for trial versions before making an informed decision.

We list some of the popular social listening tools here:

1. Hootsuite

This tool tops the list because this free platform offers its services across almost all possible social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, WordPress. Hootsuite is well known for the array of services they offer which include social monitoring, help with the organic and promoted ads, and analytics among others.

The platform has a very thoughtful approach to the needs of a business. Some of the features worth mentioning include their weekly reports, options for task delegation and team management with a real-time search facility.

2. Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool that can be used for social listening and management on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Their analytical reports are a complete package with not just real-time data but also historical data. Heat maps, one of their reputed features, shows the activity levels at specific geographical locations.

Moreover, the layout of their reports, decked with neatly laid out charts and graphs, is very easy to go through.

3. TweetReach

TweetReach’s snapshot reports make it a great free social listening tool. This can be your go-to tool if you are interested to know the reach and actual impact of your posts and that of your competitors’. Influencer marketing will prove a cakewalk since you can figure out who are the most influential followers you have.

4. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free, simple and user-friendly social listening tool. The simplicity of this app makes it one of the best-fitted options for beginners. The app helps you listen to and follow all chatter related to any hashtag or keyword, retweet, reply, engage and maintain your overall twitter account. The tool has three versions – the web platform, an app for mac and one for chrome.

5. Mention

Mention’s most noteworthy feature is that it allows you to monitor millions of sources in 42 different languages. You have access to all the possible chatter out there and not just in English, making you stay on the top of all the information flow. This tool also lets you keep track of your team members, to delegate tasks and to generate and download reports by exporting mentions.

6. Boardreader

Boardreader helps you follow chatter from regular pages, handles, and message groups as well. Most social media sites have message groups, and this is where major discussions and conversations take place. Boardreader helps you monitor such chatter from messaging boards and newsrooms.

Simply fill in a term and a list returns with all the mentions from over the past two years. Graphs and charts can also be generated from the options given. This tool has options for other languages as well.

By this time, you must already be feeling overwhelmed by the number of these tools. Yet these are only a select few from a large pool of social listening tools. The market is brimming with such tools ready to help you take your brand a step further, all you need to do is select the right one to get started.