3 tips to get a head start with Social Listening: ...
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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:
Who do you need to persuade?
What do you want them to do differently/better than what they do today?
Why aren’t they doing what you’d like them to do?
What are their interests/complaints/pet peeves?
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:
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.)
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.
HootSuite
Aggregates all your social media accounts under one platform for easier monitoring of all your accounts.