As a business owner, deciding whether to hire a consultant or manage branding in-house is an important decision. Whatever you choose, it's important to know what customers think about your brand.
For all you know, you could have 15 one-star reviews on Yelp, 3 scathing blog posts being shared on Facebook, and 7 nasty tweets about a bad customer experience. This would undo all your hard branding work.
Social media is the most popular way for customers to speak their minds and they share almost everything about their life and preferences on these platforms. Simply take advantage of this opportunity and you will be able to generate meaningful conversations with them.
Here are five social media listening tools to help you identify and track conversations about your brand, monitor the internet for mentions of your business, and engage with followers.
Listen to the key conversation that matters most to your business
How do I know what
people are saying? How do I know who is speaking? These tools will tell you.
Google Alerts is a great social media listening tool for busy entrepreneurs that don't have time to watch their brand on social media, Google Alerts is a terrific social media listening tool. When any of the search phrases you've set up are referenced, Google Alerts will send you an email. You can customize the frequency of these notifications to keep your finger on the pulse as closely as possible.
Search for terms and observe overall frequency, sentiment, influencers, sources, and reach with social mention, a hidden gem among social media listening tools. This snapshot gives you a lot of useful information about the online health of your company and allows you to export the data for your records or to analyze it in Excel. With the sentiment ranking, you can observe how customers feel about your business and listen out for any unfavourable references so you can help alleviate the problem.
Identify relevant keywords and phrases to look for conversations happening in your space or directly tied to your business
What are the keywords and phrases that consumers or prospects might use to find your company or the services you provide?
Google TrendsGoogle Trends is an excellent tool for determining which phrases people use more frequently than others, as well as for locating similar search terms and geographic interest.
Knowing this, we may concentrate on discussions regarding the most popular keywords. Try typing in keywords relating to your industry, brand name, and products or services to discover which ones are most frequently searched for. This can help you focus your content strategy, sales campaigns, and email blasts on the terms that consumers are searching for.
BuzzsumoUse Buzzsumo to find influencers to promote your content or to learn what keywords your competitors are ranking for right now.
Monitor channels and keep an eye on where the conversation is happening
Mention
Mention is similar to Google Alerts in that it allows you to create an alert, but it aggregates all of this information into a huge feed that assigns a sentiment score to each mention and flags key mentions that require action. Mention also monitors your complete online presence at a look by pulling data from millions of sources.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite offers easy feeds that display all of your social media accounts in one place; you can simply listen in on your Facebook page, monitor Twitter mentions, hashtag and keyword searches, and follow influencer tweets all from one place. The main strength of Hootsuite lies in its listening and search capabilities. When you search for a hashtag or keyword in Hootsuite, you can see every tweet containing that keyword and who is sharing it right away.
Your customer's actual voice is on social media. Don't lose out on the everyday opportunities to aid your customers and your business since it is usually unfiltered, unfettered, and unrestrained (for better or worse).
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