Social media listening has come a long way in the past decade. These days, every brand is using brand-name monitoring.
Yet, few brands take full advantage of social media listening. While it is great for improved customer support (for example: helping unhappy customers via social), there’s much more to social media monitoring. Today, you can:
- Find and connect to niche influencers (especially those active social media users with an engaged following who are currently interacting with your competitors). Social listening is one of the most effective steps to a successful influencer marketing campaign.
- Spot your competitors’ unhappy customers and win them over on your side.
- Turn your happy customers into brand ambassadors.
- Identify your product or service weak points so you can fix them.
- Understand your current customer base and target audience better.
- It can be a powerful lead generation tool for your business.
- Collect feedback on your product or content.
- Find engaging content ideas — discover your customers’ interests and struggles.
All in all, social media listening can provide you with a huge amount of insight, provided you are using the right tools.
With that in mind, here are 5 awesome social media listening tools to consider for your martech stack:
1. SentiOne: AI-Powered Social Media Listening Tool
SentiOne is a dedicated social media listening platform that really gets the real power of social media monitoring and takes it to a new level.
The tool implements artificial intelligence to:
- Prioritize social media messages that need your (or your team’s) immediate attention and response
- Help your team to compose replies faster by suggesting possible messages which would work best for each mention
- Talk to your customers on your behalf through a smart chatbot
The cool thing about this platform is that it keeps a record of those interactions, so next time you have an encounter with the same customer, you will have all the background information.
SentiOne can make your customer support team much more efficient and productive, which is likely to result in many long-term benefits, like higher customer satisfaction and more positive mentions (from customers who get help immediately).
2. Agorapulse: Collaborating Social Media Management and Listening Tool
Agorapulse is a multi-purpose social media management tool that helps you create your social media editorial calendar by scheduling updates to multiple channels. It also comes with a powerful social listening feature that is perfect for cross-team collaboration.
Let’s face it: your brand mentions on social media are not created equal.
- Some of them are from customers who are currently in the buying process and need help immediately.
- Others are generic complaints that may not even require an immediate reply but need to be forwarded to product or site development teams.
- There are those mentions that can be turned into testimonials (to use on your site as social proof).
- There are social media messages that your outreach team may use to get some links to your site (similarly to how you’d use Google Alerts for those purposes).
How can one person handle this process if there are so many elements to it?
Well, it is quite doable if you treat social media listening as project management (which often involves many teams as well).
AgoraPulse enables your social media manager to assign different social media mentions to different teams or people. Once assigned, this team member will receive an email notification, as well as a reminder if the status of the assignment remains untouched.
This is a great way to make the most of social media listening.
3. Tweetdeck for Real-Time Interactions
Because of its real-time nature, Twitter is where customers expect to get an immediate response.
Tweetdeck is a Twitter management and monitoring tool that is free. It can also be used to manage multiple social media accounts (like your personal one, your business one, etc.)
I use Tweetdeck in combination with more advanced social media tools because it is so easy and fast to use that sometimes it’s just easier to quickly check Tweetdeck to see if there’s anything that needs your attention.
Tweetdeck integrates with Twitter lists, so it is perfect for quick interactions with niche influencers or your brand ambassadors throughout the day.
Here’s how I use Tweetdeck:
- I add people I want to regularly interact with to separate Twitter lists (those may be “Bloggers”, “Journalists”, “Brand ambassadors”, etc.)
- I create separate columns in my Tweetdeck to pull tweets from those lists
- When I have a minute or two, I open Tweetdeck and reply to recent tweets in those tweets.
This way, I keep interacting with my friends and niche influencers on a regular basis while keeping those interactions natural and meaningful.
4. Bonus: Keep an Eye on Your Social Media Traffic
There’s no perfect way to measure the effectiveness of your social media listening efforts. There are so many long-term goals (brand loyalty, trust, etc.) that are not easy to measure.
With time, what you to see in your analytics is the following:
- An increase in type-in traffic (those people that type your site address directly without searching your name)
- A gradual growth of your brand-driven search queries (those queries that contain your brand or product name)
- The steady growth of on-site conversions (as customers see you on social media responding and interacting, they will start trusting your brand and buying more from you).
You can track all (and more) of that by using Finteza, an independent web analytics suite with a strong focus on conversion optimization.
Conclusion
If you’re already doing some type of social media listening, invest a little more effort to achieve longer-term and more important goals. At the very least, it’s worth a try.
