Monitoring and managing social media can be a lot of work these days. With so many old and new social media sites, it can be hard to know what your audience is talking about.
Do you often wonder what your competitors are doing or if your marketing plan is at risk? Well, if you practice social listening, you can know instantly and take control of any conversation about your industry happening on different platforms.
Here, I’ll tell you why these practices are important and how you can use them.
What is Social Listening 101?
In a nutshell, social listening is the practice of tracking, analyzing, and responding to all kinds of conversations that happen on different social media platforms.
The idea might sound like something you already know about social media monitoring, but the two ideas are just related. Listening to social media is all about learning about our audience or competitors and making decisions based on data and different metrics. On the other hand, social monitoring gives you a way to manage multiple platforms that is reactive and flexible.
If you listen to social platforms, you can find out how people see your brand and what the current marketing trends are. It can also help you keep track of your customers, find risks, analyze customer sentiment, and so on.
If you’re not sure if social listening is worth your time, consider the following benefits:
Customer Engagement
Customers love to interact with brands on social media, which is a known fact. With these practices, you can keep track of all kinds of conversations, from talking about an upcoming product to answering their questions.
Crisis Management
Some of the most important reasons to listen to social media platforms are for risk analysis, management, and prevention. You can figure out where all the negative conversations are coming from and take steps to stop them.
Tracking the competition
Do you want to know what your competitors are posting on Twitter or how they are using Facebook? Then, they should think about setting up their analysis metrics on any good social listening tool.
How to Get New Leads
It’s one of the best ways to find out what your customers are having trouble with or to find out who is unhappy with your competitors. This makes it easy to get in touch with more leads without too much work.
Identifying Trends
Most importantly, keeping track of related keywords makes it easy to know what’s in your domain and what isn’t. You can also find key influencers and experts in your field to work with in the future.
Tips and Plans to Follow for Listening to Social Media
Now that you know how social listening works and what its main benefits are, let’s move on to how to use it and make it a key part of your social media marketing plan.
Tip : Know ahead of time what you want to track.
First, you need to figure out what the most important things are that you want to follow or listen to on different social media sites. First, you have to choose which platform you want to track, such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Reddit, Quora, etc. I would suggest choosing some platforms where your audience spends the most time.
Most brands should try to keep track of the following things on multiple platforms:
- Mentions of brands (Brand name and handles)
- Hashtags for brands and industries
- Keeping an eye on competitors
- Trends and drivers in the industry
Tip : Make a list of keywords that will help your business.
Social listening is an art, and your keywords could be your best way to learn about a lot of different things. There is no one right way to research and analyze keywords. You would have to take a “hit or miss” approach and look for keywords related to your industry by hand.
Aside from listening for keywords related to your brand name, you should also keep track of terms that are specific to events and products. There are also a lot of hashtags and long-term keywords that you can use to find things. I would suggest using a dedicated keyword research tool that can help you find useful information about your domain.
There are so many ways to track and monitor social media out there. Some platforms, like Twitter, have a built-in feature for social listening, but others only have limited options.
If you use Twitter, you can just go to the Analytics section to learn interesting things about how your brand is doing. Besides that, you can also try out some of the following platforms to track social media for your business:
Hootsuite HubSpot Recently Sprout Social Awario AdView Audiense
Since most of these tools have free trial versions, you can try them out first before buying a subscription to their full version.
Tip : Find out where your audience hurts.
One of the most important ways to use social media tracking is to find out where your customers are having problems. In addition to helping customers with their questions, it can also tell you what your audience is saying about your brand.
Not only that, but you can also use these methods to keep track of how your competitors are doing in general. For example, if you can find people who are unhappy with the services of your competitors, you might be able to get them to try your services instead.
Tip : Make a plan to deal with risks.
With the help of social media monitoring practices, it is also much easier to spot and avoid crises. It is recommended that every digital marketer make a risk management plan so that they can act quickly in case of a crisis.
To keep putting your strategy into action, you should already have templates and content on hand that you can easily change. You can get ahead of your competitors and the media with the help of social listening. As soon as a crisis happens, you will know about it and can take steps to deal with it right away.
Tip : Make decisions based on facts.
Last but not least, social listening would help you make decisions about your sales and marketing practices that are based on data. Let’s say you’ve created a product or service and want to learn more about how well it works. With social media monitoring, you can find out how your audience sees it and what else you can do to make it better.
Your turn
Now that you understand how social listening works and why it’s so important, you can use it to take over any social media conversation. Social media monitoring is now the most important part of any business’s marketing strategy, and you should definitely take advantage of it.
Keep your eyes and ears open to see what your audience is talking about and never miss a chance to sell your products. Aside from that, if you want to run your dropshipping store like a pro, you should use a tool like dropship-empire.