Social listening tools are an essential part of every marketer’s day-to-day operation. While social media marketing is still a relatively new industry, it has emerged as a crucial component of every business marketing strategy.
This is clearly demonstrated by the fact that nearly a quarter of the world population is on Facebook, which holds more than an average of 26 billion posts per day. Other social media platforms, including Twitter and Instagram, have also become vital channels for reaching audiences.
With the help of social listening tools, you can utilize social media and web presence and improve your company’s reputation. But what are these social listening tools? How do they work? There benefits?
Keep reading to learn how to improve your overall marketing strategy with these tools.
What Are Social Listening Tools?
These tools help you monitor the web for keywords related to your brand, competitors, products, and services. They enable you to analyze your social media and web presence and that of your competitors.
You have to understand that social listening is more than just monitoring mentions of keywords and trends. It’s about understanding how these trends affect your audience and how you can effectively adapt your marketing strategy in response.
Ultimately, these insights can provide a competitive advantage over your competitors since they help you know consumer needs and pain points.Â
How Social-Listening Tools Work
Social listening platforms aggregate and analyze real-time content from various social media sources. They then report the results in various formats that are displayed on their website. These reports can be broken down by topic, location, organization, and other criteria.
Typically, social listening tools will scan the web for any mention of your company name, products, or services. They will also pick up on mentions of related keywords, such as industry terms or the names of your competitors.
Some will even alert you based on these conditions in real-time via email or a desktop notification so that you can respond as soon as possible.
In addition to simply monitoring keywords, some platforms will go beyond and analyze the emotions behind the posts. For instance, Hootsuite Impact can categorize those emotions into positive, negative, or neutral sentiments. This way, you can get an idea of how people feel about your brand at any given time.
Ultimately, a good social listening tool will ensure that all conversations with your brand are captured and reported back to you.
Social listening software provides you with a variety of benefits:
You can see trends, even if they aren’t reflected in the traditional metrics you read, like search engine rankings and site traffic.
You can identify topics that have the potential to become news stories, which can help your company or organization stay in the news.
It can help you better understand and respond to your customer’s needs by collecting information on what they say on social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Saving money by avoiding PR disasters
Several companies offer these tools at different prices; however, many require a paid subscription. But one tool stands up to be the best; NetbaseQuid. It has proven how effective it can be in collecting mentions and marketing trends.
With NetbaseQuid, you’ll be able to take advantage of our brand health alerts and improve your campaign performance before it’s too late. And with our revolutionary crisis management tool, you’ll be able to track and report everything from media mentions to customer complaints in a centralized location. So you can triage issues as they arise.
To sum it up, there are various social listening tools out there, and each offers its unique value. Before you jump in with all of them, it’s important to define exactly what your objectives are.Â
Once you have that down and have considered which tools could best help you achieve said goals, you can begin fine-tuning your social listening strategy to meet your needs. This can be time-consuming, but the effort will ultimately pay off, allowing you to leverage social media to its fullest.
