What is Social Listening:
Social listening is that the monitoring of your brand’s social media platforms for customer feedback, direct mentions of your brand, and discussions regarding related keywords, topics, competitors, or industries, followed by an analysis of this data to realize further insights and act on these opportunities.
Social listening may be a two-part process. The primary part is social monitoring, which keeps track of social media mentions and conversations. The second part is that the analysis and actionable responses, which assist you make improvements to satisfy your customers’ needs. Social listening finds root causes for social conversations and implements changes to enhance social media strategies at the end of the day.
Features of an Ideal Social Listening Tool:
As we know, all social listening tools help your company evaluate social conversations and engage your clients and the general populace with your social media platforms and content. There are ample tools designed for this role, but choosing an ideal tool is a daunting task. This post presents some listening tool features that make up an active social listening tool; you can use these tips when wondering for a perfect listening tool.
Clientele Segmentation:
Social listening tools help you understand your clients and what they are saying about your services and products. These tools also assist you in knowing more about your prospective clients. But without a proper and satisfactorily understanding of your customers’ psychographic behavior, interests, and other demographic factors. It is not feasible to use your listening tool beneficially. So it would help if you always went for listening tools that can segment your clients and prospective clients. Such segmentation enables you to understand specific demographic groups well, and such understanding can help you make appropriate adjustments.
Comprehensive Engagement Metrics:
Social listening tools help you determine the number of customers and prospective clients who are appealing and engaging with your brand on social media platforms. These tools can get you simple metrics like views, re-tweets, or likes. But you will need more than these simple metrics to understand your clientele. For example, it will be better to understand the content that draws them in, the channels they engage in most cases, and keywords that feature in their searches. It would help if you always go for listening tools with the most critical metrics to comprehensive data on your consumers and prospective consumers.
Platform Convergence:
Fortunately, there are numerous social media platforms that you can use to present your content and products and services. These platforms have varying levels of effectiveness in reaching out to your clients. To make better and improve your outreach programs, you will need to know the kind of social media channel that works perfectly for your company. As such, you will need a listening tool that can compare different social media platforms’ performance. Such comparisons will assist your company in choosing and using the most effective social media channels.
Geographical Comparisons:
Is your brand global or local? Whichever the case, you will need to understand how well your brand is performing across different regions. It’s necessary to know how famous your brand is across various jurisdictions. Such information can help you improve marketing activities in specific areas by making adjustments to enhance markets or niches that perform poorly. It’s always a sense to go for a listening tool that can segment your market and present social media metrics from different regions.
Multimedia Recognition:
Social media platforms use different sorts of communication. To analyze multimedia content, you will need a social listening tool capable of analyzing text, images, emojis, GIFs, videos, and other forms of content. Your listening tool should have the capability to identify content issues to ensure all your presented content is ideal.
Best Social Listing Tools:
- Awario
- Agorapulse
- TweetDeck
- Keyhole
- Mention
- Brandwatch
Final Thoughts:
There are numerous listening tools out there, but they do not all work in the same way. The effectiveness of such devices in improving your listening capacity vary, and you will need to assess them in a careful approach to find the perfect tool that can better your listening capacity. The insightful tips provided in this article can assist you in choosing an ideal social listening tool. But if you have doubts about choices, it’s better to consult an IT expert in this area or a firm like NetBase, which specializes in social media listening, audits, and analytics.
