8 ways to use social listening for your business
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8 Ways to Use Social Listeningfor Your BusinessBy Zoe Summers
Published March 31, 2015
Do you monitor what people are saying aboutyou online?
Are you using this information to enhance yourbusiness?
The insights you gather about your customers,prospects, products and competitors withsocial listening can be valuable.
In this article you’ll discover eight ways to use social listening for your business.
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Why Social Listening?Social listening (or media monitoring, as some people like to call it) is about searchingthe web and the social space to see what’s being said about your company, yourcompetitors and other topics of interest.
Discover 8 w ays to use social listening for your business.
With a little time and creativity, you can go beyond just monitoring your brand and usesocial listening to enhance content marketing, business development, productmanagement, human resources and customer support.
Here are eight ways social listening can benefit your business.
#1: Generate Leads by Solving ProblemsOne way to find new business opportunities is to monitor keywords that relate topeople’s problems and needs or their frustrations with a competitor’sproduct.
Monitor terms like “[competitor’s brand name] can’t” or “[competitor’s brand name]won’t” to identify pain points.
Once you identify these potential customers, reach out to them. Ask them whattheir expectations are for the product and where it’s falling short. Then explain yourproduct’s benefits and added value, and make yourself available for questions. You
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may also want to provide a demo of your product.
#2: Attract New CustomersTo generate new leads for your business, brainstorm for keywords that peoplemight use when researching a product and track these terms across forumsand social groups.
Join the conversations and find out more about any potential customers’ needsand expectations. Be genuine in your interactions.
Join in conversations that lead to conversions. Image: Shutterstock.
Later, check your database to see if anyone from the forum signed up to try yourproduct. Send those new customers an email offering to personally helpthem get started.
#3: Identify Influencers and AdvocatesAfter a big product launch or update, track the link to or the title of your pressrelease to see who’s sharing it. This information helps you identify influencers inyour industry. Reach out to them to start building relationships.
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You’ll also want to identify your biggest brand advocates. Find and reward themwith giveaways or special offers. Continue to keep them engaged as your brandgrows, because satisfied customers are one of your greatest marketing resources.
#4: Discover Where Your Community HangsOutSocial listening enables you to find out where your potential and current communitymembers carry on important conversations—Twitter, Facebook, Quora, comments onblogs or somewhere else. Track these conversations, and when the time is right,join in.
Know ing w hich platform to focus on also helps you improve your social media marketing. Image:
Shutterstock.
#5: Improve Customer CareWith social listening, you can instantly identify both positive and negativefeedback.
Monitor your brand name with and without the @ symbol (many people forget to addthe @ symbol when communicating on Twitter).
Also, track common auto-correct misspellings for your brand name andmonitor your website mentions (for example, www.yourbrand.com and
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yourbrand.com).
This gives you the opportunity to show your appreciation for positive commentsor to find and respond to disappointed customers, turning potentially negativeexperiences into positive ones. If people take the time to write about issues withyour product, they’re open to your help.
#6: Get Feedback on ProductsSocial listening also helps you identify potential issues early in a product’s lifecycle .
Use mentions like this one to address issues w ith your product.
Track your brand name’s mentions and if someone posts a bug about your product,assign the issue to your development team so it can be fixed as quickly aspossible.
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Then, respond directly to your customer to nurture transparency. If feasible,use your personal email account rather than your company account to show thehuman side of your business.
#7: Find Top TalentYour human resources department can benefit from social listening, too. Hiring toptalent is frequently a challenge, but tracking conversations in forums, in social groupsor on blogs can help you identify key candidates with remarkable skill sets.
#8: Drive InnovationAsking your customers what they want, as tempting as that might be, can result inskewed answers, misinformation, and potentially, failed products.
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Henry Ford famously said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d havesaid a faster horse.” It’s often easier for people to comment on something that is infront of them than to imagine something that doesn’t exist.
Find out w hat new features your customers are asking for.
With social listening, you don’t have to ask people what they want; just listen in ontheir conversations and use these insights to figure out what they need.
Tools to Monitor Your Brand Reputation
Google Alerts is a powerful tool for tracking your brand’s mentions, trends andother interesting topics across the internet. To create an email alert, type in yourcompany’s name or the keyword you want to monitor. You can even useadvanced operators in the search box for better results, just like you would inGoogle Search.
Quora is another free resource to track what people are saying about yourproduct or other relevant topics. However, you can only monitor those mentionswithin the site itself. Search for specific questions or topics related to your targetmarket’s needs and follow those relevant to your business. You’ll receiveupdates in your Quora feeds and notifications by email.
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Mentions from Quora.
Twitter Advanced Search is often overlooked, but it’s a valuable tool forrefining Twitter search queries and zeroing in on the people talking about yourbrand or competing brands. You can use operators—and exclusion operators—to filter your results. There are also options for targeting a specific group ofpeople or a geographic location.
Social Mention works in a similar way to Twitter’s Advanced Search, except youget the results from all over the social media space, in addition Twitter. To getstarted, enter the keywords or topic you want to search and select the type ofresults from the drop-down menu. Use the advanced settings for more filteringoptions like geo-location and language. On the results page, your influencescore is divided into four categories: strength, sentiment, passion and reach.You can also see your top keywords and brand advocates.
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Tools to Create a Keyword List
Rather than just compiling a list of keywords by trial and error, use tools likethese to make the process quicker and easier.
Keyword Tool gives you keyword ideas based on what people type into theGoogle search box. For example, want to track conversations about “socialmonitoring,” you may see suggestions like “social monitoring software” or “socialmonitoring service.”
Use free tools to research keyw ord ideas.
Google Trends analyzes search queries, looks at the number of searches forkeywords and shows how trends evolve so you can find out how people searchfor your brand or competing brands. You can compare trends by adding asecond search term, plus it suggests a list of related search topics you might addto your keyword list.
Get More Out of Social Listening
Social listening goes well beyond just monitoring your brand’s reputation. You can use
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social listening insights to improve many aspects of your business, includingbusiness and product development, human resources and customer care .
Now you need to find out how to make social listening work for your business. If you’reinterested in how to build a social listening dashboard, be sure to check out thisarticle.
What do you think? How are you using social listening to improve yourbusiness? Please share your thoughts and tips in the comments below!
Lead to customer photo and Website and internet icons photo from Shutterstock.
Tips for using social listening to track
mentions for your business.
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Related Posts
Tags: brand reputation, content marketing, customer care, customer f eedback, customer insight, media monitoring, reputation
management, social listening, social media monitoring, zoe summers
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, Zoe Summers
Zoe Summers is an exper ienced Soc ial Media Consultant and Co-
Founder of Mass Planner , a soc ial automation sof tw are. If you liked
this ar t ic le check out her blog here. Othe r pos ts by Zoe Summers
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David Tien • 5 hours ago
Great article Zoe. Couldn't agree more with #1 and #2. We did this extensively at our startup the past few monthsand that's led to very actionable leads. Even better, these leads were already very far along in their purchase cyclethat we didn't have to do much customer development to get them to convert.
One word of caution is to not be too pushy or intrusive when jumping into someone else's social conversation. with most interactions, coming off too aggressively can be a turn off and deterrent to making the connection.
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