Empower my brand
Empower my brand

How to Improve your Social Listening?

With the rise in the use of artificial intelligence tools for marketing processes, social listening tools are often being discussed. Marketers and experts speak often about the concept of social listening and its uses. But, if you have been using a social listening tool, you may feel confused by all the information sometimes. Hence we decide to put this guide together for you to understand how to improve your social listening. 

Improve your social listening

What is Social Listening?

If you are reading this article, chances are that you already know about the concept of social listening. But just to give a quick brief:

Social listening is the process of tracking all mentions, hashtags, news items, reviews relevant to your brands. It does not stop at that. Social listening tools also segment the data more systematically and analyze it to provide you only the relevant and the most important insights. 

If you wish to know about social listening in more detail, do give our previous articles a read. 

How to Improve your Social Listening Results?

Like any other automation tool, social listening tools need some human intervention too. This tool learns more with time and the manual input goes down significantly. Here are some ways you could start improving your social listening. 

1 Research Work

This tip is a no-brainer. As educated consumers today, we put in a whole week of research before deciding to buy even a simple item like a comb. And this step becomes all the more critical when you are trying to build your business. 

Start with researching social listening tools. There are a lot of social intelligence tools out there in the market. You need to pick one that best suits your brand’s needs. We emphasize on how companies should note down their goals and work with tools that best deliver on those. 

Next, social listening tools will require you to feed in a seed list of keywords most relevant to your brand or industry. You also need to integrate your social media accounts to the platform. Do enough research to be sure about the keywords you want to track. And start your social media page if you don’t already have one. 

2 Follow Your Competitor

It is essential for you to keep a check on the other players from your industry. Few companies can maintain the same pace of growth from inception to maturity. Most marketers would study their competitors at a superficial level without diving too deep. But a little digging can actually help you identify gaps in the market and more. Social listening to what your competitors are doing helps you design and market your product better and sell more effectively. So ensure that you utilize this feature if you are investing in a social listening platform. 

3 Make Use of the Insights

Social listening is only a good tool as long as you use the insights provided by it. ln order to make optimum use of the tool, start deriving the insights for business decision-making. The tool makes you aware of your audience. It gives you detailed insights about their needs, wants, perceptions et cetera. Use the data to start engaging with your audience members. Personal interaction always shows you care for them. In fact, 48% of customers report having shopped from a brand that was responsive. This brings in new leads and is the best customer service you could offer online. 

The best thing about using a social listening tool is that you get custom reports. We at GenY Labs use our tool to generate reports which study industry trends in-depth. And cater to your needs based on your specific industry-standards. These custom reports are one of the key elements of improving your social listening efforts. These provide a final understanding of what needs to be done to help your business sky-rocket. 

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.

Hootsuite - social listening tools

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.

Keyhole - social listening tools

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.

TweetReach

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.

TweetDeck

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.

Mention - social listening tools

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.