I’m sure most of us care about what people think about our brand, how they recommend our brand to others and what words or phrases do they use to describe us. True, isn’t it? But, how many of us actually monitor what people are saying about us online? And, how many of us use this information to enhance our businesses? I guess, not many of us!
Social Listening is nothing but tracking and analyzing all online mentions and conversations about a company or brand, as well as its products and services. Since the volume of information exchanged online is immense, this can be a rich source for companies to analyze their customer sentiments and also take actionable decisions to deliver a consistent and satisfying customer experience.
Social listening is becoming an important customer intelligence tool. Monitoring your brand can help you take decisions around what sort of content to push to existing and prospective customers. It can also help companies in other aspects such as business development, product management and customer service by identifying gaps and filling for them efficiently. For instance, by actively monitoring for terms related to your product offering, you will be able to get a sense of people’s feedback on your product, their problems and their needs. Analyzing all of this information, will help you improvise your product based on customer expectations and fill for gaps where your product is falling short.
So, how do we listen? Here are a couple of tools that will help us do this:
Mention gives you live updates of your brand from the web and social media. Through this tool, you can set alerts for the keyword phrases that matter to your brand and choose all appropriate channels you would like to monitor such as Facebook, Twitter, Web etc. Once you have created your customized alert, you’ll receive notifications on all mentions of your chosen keywords phrases from the channels you opted for.
With Google Alerts, you can get notified as soon as a website posts about you. All you need to do is set a Google Alert for the keywords that matter and you will receive results to your email inbox, at the frequency you choose. This is an effective online reputation management tool for businesses and popular entrepreneurs to keep a tab of what is being said of them on the internet.
An alternative to Google Alerts, TalkWalker helps in tracking mentions of your brand on social channels, news sites, blogs and forums. It also boasts about being the only platform that analyzes social, print and TV/radio content, with a global presence in 187 languages.
Now, coming to keywords — apart from including keywords that includes your personal name, brand name or company name, it’s important that you include certain variations as well such as:
- Variations of your brand/company name and abbreviations of your company name
- Alternate spellings or misspellings of your brand, company or personal name.
- Slogans, key messages, or mottos.
Social listening provides you the tool that can assist you gauge an understanding of what your targeted audiences are thinking, helping you be in a better position to understand and deliver what your customers need. If done effectively, this can be a very effective customer intelligence tool to understand the market, the competition, the customer, the prospect, the buyer and above all, offer a great customer service.
