3 tips to get a head start with Social Listening: Learn how to start social media monitoring to hear what your customers have to say

Social media listening or social media monitoring is a
data-mining process to identify and assess what people are talking about. Going
through all the information/data can be a daunting task, so here are 3 easy
tips to start your social listening journey:

1. Start with the objectives / goals:

Social listening is one of the strategies to fulfill your
customers’ desires before they have the desire for it. Through
monitoring their social media activities, we can find out their interests and
complaints that wouldn’t seem relevant to us at first; However, if we aggregate
the data collected, and then carve out the trends that we see, we can quickly
respond to those findings.

For instance, a lot of people are complaining about their
morning commute to work; however, working from home reduces the instantaneous collaboration
and human interactions that an office environment provides; maybe it’s high time
for a seamless holographic communication technology which allows employees to
have a more personal interaction with their colleagues.

Here are some questions you could ask yourself when
detailing out your goals:

1. Who do you need to persuade?
2. What do you want them to do differently/better
   than what they do today?
3. Why aren’t they doing what you’d like them to
   do?
4. What are their interests/complaints/pet peeves?
5. How would you want social listening to benefit
   you?

2. Improve your social media accounts/personal brand:

Social listening is about being able to quickly respond to
what you’re listening to. If you don’t have a professional, well-built social
media account, your customers may not believe that the account is legitimate.
Improving your social media accounts is easy and takes less than 30 minutes for
each social media. Here’s a quick guide on improving your LinkedIn profile.

3. Get familiar with at least one free social media listening tool:

Social media listening tools are designed to be
user-friendly enough that you’d utilize it every day. However, using too many
tools at once can be overwhelming; so, just start with one social media
monitoring tool that you’re comfortable with. My favorites are:

1. TalkWalker
   • Gives you alerts on articles / mentions of the
     keywords that you want to monitor – it could be anything from the name of your
     customers/company to the specific topics that you’re interested in (e.g. Social
     Listening, Lead Generation, etc.)
2. SocialMention
   • It works like Google search, so it’s apt for
     quick searches without a database of your past searches. This tool organizes
     your search results based on the source (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc.), so you
     can get in touch with the social media user personally.
3. HootSuite
   • Aggregates all your social media accounts under
     one platform for easier monitoring of all your accounts.

This article is the first in a series of three:

Second article

Third article