Social Media Listening: A Comprehensive Guide

Social Media Listening

As more people in the world are joining the essence of technology and, of course, the internet, the importance of social listening in e-commerce has been very great. Accordingly, today social listening services have gained a lot of advantages for firms in terms of both marketplace and technologies. These services are designed to measure customer relationships, acquire marketing intelligence, and respond to customer complaints. It goes without mentioning the opportunity this blog will offer you in learning how to handle social listening in your own business. It will teach you the basic principles of social listening by giving you the exact steps to make it work.

What is Social Listening?

Social Listening

Social listening or otherwise referred to as social media monitoring or social intelligence is the practice of monitoring keywords, mentions, and conversations on social media sites. This technique is aimed at  proposing to any business entity the possibility of understanding how the publics' take on different aspects will change over time as well as the way they feel about the services or products supplied and the possible evolution of the different industries.

Social Listening is also employed to be able to:

• Analyze how happy a customer is
• Recognize emerging trends
• Follow the activities of your competitors
• Predict a possible crisis

Meantime, social listening is one of the ways to analyze the audience and the competition which become the other part of the process. It assists business entities in decision-making by enabling them to use real-time data.

Step 1: Listen for Your Brand Keywords:

Listen for Your Brand Keywords

The most critical action for successful social listening is ensuring your brand keywords are included in the streams you are blasting. The following are such phrases, for instance, the names of the company, the products that the company produces, the hashtags that represent the company, and even the names of some important employees like the CEO or likes such as the spokespersons are included as well.

Consider the following:

• For every brand name, assess these names in all possible forms
• Include common misspellings
• Search the relevant hashtags and see which ones are being used for your campaign/brand

One way of gathering intelligence is by looking for these keywords on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Here you can find out how the public is engaging with your brand.

Step 2: Listen for Competitive Intelligence:

 Listen for Competitive Intelligence

Knowing who your rivals are is also essential. The first step is to set up an alert system to track mentions of your own name. The next step, then, is to create alerts for your competitors too. To start with, you can use the common misspellings of their brand names; and track their products as well as their company hashtags.

Try this method:

• Arrangement of your major rivals in the list in order of top to bottom.
• Trusting your competitors’ consumer dealings on them.
• Determining their strong points and weaknesses.

You will get a map where you can learn that your competitors are getting complimented about some product but they are disliked for others. This way, you will understand how you can introduce new and better products and how you can set new marketing strategies to introduce them.

Step 3: Listen to Industry Keywords:

 Industry Keywords

The final step is to shift the focus on to the whole sector of land business so that one can analyze public remarks. In part, these contain engaging discussions connected to your specialized area.

For example, if you are someone who owns a landscaping company, you can be sure that you can look up topics related to:

• Lawn care
• Hardscaping Ideas
• Landscaping guidelines

Additionally, geotagging your searches can help you filter out irrelevant results, ensuring you only see discussions pertinent to your area.

Bonus Tip: Using Boolean Search Operators:

These characters are designed to be more specific, start your search in your domain, decrease the number of irrelevant messages and hitting the jackpot of the conversations you are looking for. Using Boolean search, you can do the following tasks:

• Combine keywords with AND, OR, NOT
• Group terms with parentheses
• Use quotation marks for exact phrases

Your personal information such as name, company, or project must be entered to find the respective link. It is essential that you start by experimenting with keyword variations.

Advanced Social Listening Features:

If you have already understood the practice of social listening quite well, why not consider the following more advanced strategies you can employ in order to improve your practice of social listening.

Track Sentiment:

The interpretation of sentiment is key to learning audience views. Emotions are hard to pin down. How can the feeling of real humans be approximated?

• Identify positive or negative trends
• React proactively to changes in sentiment

Watch for Spikes:

The important thing is to keep track of the conversation activity. Sticking points of conversation in social media can be extremely important. It can be a tell-tale sign of a critical issue or a golden chance.

By understanding these spikes, you can:

• Investigate the cause
• Respond appropriately

Share Your Insights:

Dissemination of information collected during social listening is especially important. Make sure to summarize data for your group on a regular basis so they can be used in planning and deciding. The “MTA” rule is meant to be implemented, whereby you need to point something out if you find it.

Such as, when the likeness of an opponent goes up, it may be good to let your marketing team know the good news. They can look into the case and shift plans accordingly.

Handling a Social Media Crisis:

Handling a Social Media Crisis

The abrupt outbreak of crises via social media is the main source of their unpredictability. Hence, there must be a budget that is directed towards problems that can pop up. This is the set of practicable stages which can bring a crisis to a successful management:

Prevention is Key:

It is better to use an ounce of prevention than to need a pound of cure. Utilize social listening tools such as such as Social Mention to pinpoint the root cause of the problem when it is in its infant stage and before it escalates. Acting proactively is achieved by listening to discussions and thus responding to the clients’ needs before they get out of hand.

Respond Quickly:

If by any chance a crisis takes place, then your response must be to quickly handle it. First, you should address the issue and give customers regular updates on the situation in the most transparent way possible.

Learn from the Experience:

It is very important to note that crisis should not just be embraced once resolved, but be analyzed. Finding out the root cause of the problematic case, and identifying the ways to avoid it in the future, is the way to deal with the matter. This acquired knowledge is subsequently used for more effective social media strategies.

Conclusion:

Being successful in the digital space requires a keen attention to feedback, not just to numbers and trends. Having a well-structured social media service can help in every stage of the whole process, e.g. the first step of a weekly listening program.

Besides, elaborate measures and applying new improvements will increase your social quiescence processes. Social listening, in fact, is the quintessence of the wisdom of the market segment of your forum but it also serves as a way of getting ready for possible crisis.

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