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This Tool Is the Key to Enhancing Your Social Media Presence

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Social listening tools can be a great addition to your social media and marketing incentives. Here’s what to look for when deciding on the best app for you.

Any marketer knows that social media is fertile ground for effective brand promotion and lead generation. A well-built business page on Instagram or TikTok brings thousands and thousands of followers that can eventually turn into a couple of hundred loyal consumers and brand advocates. Many businesses use social media listening tools to build a strong brand image and enhance their social media presence.

What is a social listening tool, and why do you need it?

The effectiveness of any social listening tool depends on the features it holds. Before we get to the features, let’s recap what a social media listening tool is specifically and who can benefit from it the most.

Social media listening tools are special digital solutions used for tracking diverse brand metrics on social media in real-time. These metrics include brand mentions, followers’ engagement, customer attitude to the brand or a product, target audience segmentation and many others.

You can use social media listening results for:

  • Evaluating the success of your marketing campaigns on social media
  • Tracking activities and marketing campaigns of your competitors
  • Discovering effective social media marketing strategies
  • Finding top influencers in your business area on various social media platforms
  • Learning about how to improve your product or marketing campaigns
  • Performing effective and timely brand reputation crisis management
  • Enhance SEO performance on your website
  • Learn about the latest trends in your business niche
  • Better adjust your content to your audience
  • Market research

How to choose a social listening tool

When choosing a social media monitoring app, you can easily find yourself like a kid in the candy store, not knowing where to look first. I’ve gathered the essential features that top social media listening tools should possess. Here is what to look for.

Mentions insights

Advanced social media monitoring platforms provide their users with an insights feature based on deep analytics. The feature detects any unusual activities in the created mentions and focuses users’ attention on them. This can be a sudden rise in the number of followers mentioning your brand, shifts in product perception and other unusual behaviour.

Historical data

Viewing data by history is another important feature any social media listening tool should possess. It allows users to track social media posts in certain periods. This can be useful when you run your marketing campaigns and want to track their success or find out how effective your previous campaigns were.

If a social media listening tool is empowered with advanced analytics, it will provide you with detailed results on the demographics of your target audience. This way, you can better understand who uses your product and your competitor’s products.

Alerts comparison

It’s great when a social media listening tool can provide detailed statistics on your brand performance and marketing campaign’s success. However, data analysis becomes even more valuable when equipped with cross-brand analytical tools. This way, you can deeply analyze your and your competitor’s brands and compare them by various metrics, from mentions, author gender and age, sources, and much more.

By comparing your data with your rivals‘, you can gain insights into how to position your brand on the market, make your offering stand out, or enhance your marketing campaigns to attract even more followers.

Sentiment analysis

Brands need to know what their customers and followers think about their products. For this, social listening tools provide their users with sentiment analysis features. They analyze customer attitudes to your brand, product and marketing campaigns and wrap this diverse feedback into simple and visual statistics.

Sentiment analysis can help you improve your brand positioning, quickly address negative mentions, heighten your followers’ interest and increase engagement in conversations, and analyze what you and your competitors are doing right and wrong in your and their marketing campaigns.

Share of voice

Share of voice is a compound measure that shows how much of your brand’s market share is compared to your competitors. You can measure it by comparing various metrics such as sentiment, mentions, hashtags, organic keywords, reach, and others. Professional social media listening tools can compare several brands and view the results in visual diagrams and graphs.

Whitelist

Sometimes you need to monitor only certain profiles or websites instead of gathering data from the entire web. For this, social media listening tools provide a Whitelist monitoring mode. It restricts the search to whitelisted web pages or social media profiles, focusing your attention on them. The feature allows tracking only your brand activities, critical social media influencers, brand ambassadors or competitors online.

Reporting

Imagine that you’re running a marketing campaign, but the results aren’t as obvious as they could be yet–the leads get generated slowly, or maybe everything just works smoothly, though you’ve just resolved a looming crisis.

How do you show your company’s head managers that you and your marketing team put a lot of effort into supporting your brand image and results are just pending? For this, most social media listening tools provide detailed reports with statistics and everything that’s going on with the brand.

With social media monitoring reports, you can show how much your brand has developed by comparing key metrics, e.g., how much awareness has grown or how customers’ sentiment has changed over time.

Social selling opportunities

Social media listening tools help marketers discover how to create relevant content for their social media, who are their potential buyers, and how to work with their followers. All these create the conditions for effective social selling.

By closely monitoring what’s happening with your brand on social networking sites, you’ll be able to keep up with the latest trends and stay on the same page with your audience, offering them precisely what they need and want. Apart from gathering valuable stats, some social monitoring tools allow users to quickly find and generate leads.

API integration

Marketers and business owners usually use several digital tools in an integrated environment. The social listening tool you choose should easily connect with any tools you’re currently using for your business development, whether a custom-built CRM or a ready-made solution.

Many social listening tools offer their clients integration with other digital systems via API. This way, you don’t have to use social listening tools’ to access and use their functionality.

Before you go

There is a wide variety of social media listening tools and platforms that offer diverse marketing services. Before opting for any of them, you need to consider all your marketing goals and objectives and understand what you will use this solution for. By doing so, you’ll make the most profit from the application, and it’ll be an effective instrument in your business development kit and a worthwhile spend in your company’s budget.

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Sourced from Entrepreneur

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In News

Boost Your Content Strategy With These 14 Free Social Listening Tools

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By Rachael Johnson

Ever wonder what people are saying about your brand? Not only is this information interesting, but it’s also incredibly useful and important in developing your marketing strategy.

But how can you gather social data outside of direct customer interaction? Social media monitoring is the answer, and luckily, there are plenty of free social listening tools out there you can use.

What Is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring, or social media listening, is the identification and extraction of online conversations that contain mentions of your brand. For example, if someone posts something about your company on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube or another social platform, you can learn a lot about how your brand is perceived through that social media post as well as the comments or replies.

But how can you possibly monitor all of the online conversations out there? If you wanted to comb through all of the online conversations on every social channel available, you would need a team of hundreds of people consistently scrolling through social media accounts, and you still wouldn’t even scratch the surface. Luckily, there’s such a thing as a social media listening tool — or a social media monitoring tool — that does that work for you.

What’s a Social Listening Tool?

If you’re familiar with how search engines work, you already have a basic idea of how a social media monitoring tool works. Search engines send crawlers to scan through the internet and find content that matches search queries. Similarly, a social media monitoring tool spreads out across social channels to identify every brand mention it can. The data is then collected and stored so that a social media marketing team can respond to questions, concerns and feedback as well as conduct social analytics.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

Social media monitoring and social listening are essential for any brand. Customer reviews and data will reveal important information about your target audience, but it leaves out an important part of the story.

Social media listening is important because it:

Improves Customer Service

Often, if a customer is unhappy with a product or service or if they have a question, they may try to reach the brand on social media instead of emailing them or going straight to their website. When this happens, it’s essential that your brand notices and responds. Ignoring this type of outreach — whether accidental or on purpose — is sure to make a potential customer feel neglected. But responding will make them feel heard. In fact, 21%of consumers are more likely to purchase something from a brand that is accessible via social media, according to Sprout Social.

Assesses Brand Awareness

You can’t improve your brand awareness without first gaining an understanding of how it’s already performing. Social listening helps with brand monitoring because it gives your company data on where the most conversations about your brand are taking place, and where there needs to be more awareness. Let’s say consumers are raving about your company all over Instagram, but they’re quiet on Twitter. That may mean that you need to increase your Twitter engagements to reach a larger audience.

Keeps Tabs on Brand Reputation

Not only will social media monitoring help you find out where and how much consumers are talking about your brand, but it will also give you valuable information about the general sentiment towards your company. People turn to online conversation for many reasons — whether they are happy, angry, confused or curious about your company, they may convey their feelings through a social media channel.

Sprout Social found that 59% of consumers reached out to a brand on social media as a result of a great experience, while 40% of consumers will reach out due to a bad experience and 47% will contact a company through a social channel seeking an answer for a question.

So now that we’ve established how useful and important social media monitoring is, let’s talk about how to do it affordably. Luckily, there are a number of free social listening tools on the market that your brand can start using today.

14 Free Social Listening Tools To Try

1. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening tool that works across multiple channels, plus it is a direct partner of Twitter. This tool’s bread and butter is consumer intelligence and trendspotting. When you use Brandwatch, the tool uses an algorithm to find and analyse brand mentions and discover common trends across social networks.

2. Brand Mentions

Brand Mentions is exactly what its name implies, and more. This free social listening tool searches the internet for your brand name in online conversations. Once the mentions are located, they are collected and organized into categories that coincide with trends. Therefore, the result you get when you use Brand Mentions is a convenient, streamlined report on all of the conversations in which your brand appeared across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and more.

3. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content analysis tool with an impressive amount of social listening capabilities. This tool allows you to search the internet for content that includes mentions of your brand. Once the examples are found, BuzzSumo will compile engagement metrics for each social media post — like views, likes, clicks, shares and more. This way, you can find out not only which channels contain the most conversations about your brand, but also where the lengthiest and most interesting conversations are taking place.

4. Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a social listening tool specifically designed for Twitter. It allows your company to search through Twitter bios to find and connect with relevant users, and it also allows you to compare Twitter accounts with one another. You can also analyze your followers, gaining valuable information on their demographics, locations and other valuable customer data. Furthermore, Followerwonk provides insights on possible relationships between your activity on Twitter and the gain or loss of followers.

5. Google Alerts

If you aren’t already using Google alerts, you should be. They couldn’t be easier to set up, and they inform you of when your brand is mentioned in news story titles. If someone posts a blog or article about your company on a social media channel, magazine or other online platform, you’ll get an email notification. This will help you keep tabs on the bigger topics of discussion related to your brand.

6. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform with a subsection for social listening called Hootsuite Insights. This tool provides a convenient platform when you can view and respond to social media posts that mention your brand. Surfing Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and every other social media channel for brand mentions would take far too much time and effort. Hootsuite, luckily, compiles all the posts and lets you engage with them in one easy-to-use tool.

7. Lithium

Lithium recently acquired Klout, a social media management tool that allows you to more easily interact with your followers. Through this tool, you can respond to direct outreach from your followers, including direct messages, Tweets, Facebook posts and more. As your brand awareness increases, it becomes more overwhelming to respond to all the outreach you get. Lithium makes this process much easier by providing a simple and convenient platform.

8. Mentionmapp

Mentionmapp is another social monitoring tool that connects to your Twitter account. It shows metrics like who mentions your brand the most, as well as who most often retweets or replies to your tweets. Since the tool is interactive, you can do quite a bit of investigation into these metrics. For example, you can look at each tweet to see how they are related to one another.

9. Socialmention

When you use Socialmention, you type a term into the search bar — likely your brand name or a term very closely related to your company — and the tool scours the internet and fetches all mentions of that term it can find. These might be in the form of social media posts, blogs, news articles, images or video content. It gathers this information and presents it in one convenient platform.

10. SumAll

SumAll functions as the name implies. It gathers information from all of your social media accounts — Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and more — and presents it in one easy-to-read summary. Using this tool, you don’t need to check the insights of each social media channel individually. Information about engagements is all right there in front of you.

11. TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is a tool provided by Twitter itself, and it helps you view and assess Twitter engagements in real time. You do this by monitoring live feeds across Twitter, so if someone Tweets something, adds to their story or starts a live video, you’ll know as soon as it happens.

12. TweetPsych

TweetPsych is a social listening tool that helps you find out about your brand’s reputation. If you give this tool your brand’s Twitter handle, it will compile a series of Tweets that unveils the general sentiment toward your brand among Twitter users.

13. TweetReach

TweetReach helps you navigate the wonderful world of hashtags. If someone is to discuss your brand on Twitter, there are a number of terms they might use for the associated hashtag. TweetReach makes it easy to search through Twitter for mentions of various hashtags.

14. Twitonomy

If you want to investigate a specific Twitter user or hashtag, Twitonomy is a useful social listening tool for that. Just type the hashtag or user handle into the tool, and it will find and extract metrics like mentions, followers, retweets, replies and more for that particular search criteria. This is useful for if you need information on one influencer or a trend that’s circulating around social media.

By Rachael Johnson

Rachael is a content writer located in Chicago. When she’s not typing away, you can find her running the pool table at her local dive, crocheting her own clothes or reading under a blanket and working her way through the 20 different types of loose leaf tea she bought in bulk on an impulse.

Sourced from Brafton

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