Social Listening: Whats Being Said About Your Business

Use social listening to learn what other people are saying about your business on social media

Are you checking your social media channels daily, seeing the feedback and answering the questions people are leaving? – If you’re not, you should be.

Finding the negative comments and reviews people leave about your business online can be challenging – they’re not always on your Facebook page or tweeted at your business’ twitter handle.

So how do you find out what people are saying about your business online if their comments aren’t directed towards anyone of your social media properties? Well, not all hope is lost – there are a few social listening tools we can use to hear what others are saying about your business online and on social media.

Social Listening Tools

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of many social listening tools out there referred to as a Social Media Management System. Basically, Hootsuite helps you to manage and keep track of your social media networks in one simple and clean interface. You can see what people are saying about you or your brand online and respond to them instantly. You can even post updates to your social media accounts through Hootsuite.

Hootsuite offers a free but somewhat limited version of its software – but for the purposes of a small business it might be all that you need. You can monitor up to 3 streams and have some basic analytics available to you as well with your free account.

The stream is where this social listening tool allows you would set up the basic keywords you’d like to keep tabs on and monitor. Something along the lines of your small business’ name or some industry terms that would help keep a pulse on what’s new and how things are going. Hootsuite has a great tutorial on how to get your started on social listening.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the more popular social listening tools out there and for good reason. It’s simple, easy to use, and you get notifications right to your inbox. Google Alerts detects any changes in the content is crawls based on the keywords you have set up and send subscribers a notification when it finds new results – and all you need is a Google account

What’s nice about Google Alerts is that the service is free and you can set up as many keywords as you’d like to monitor – or as many as your email inbox can handle. One thing to mention about Google Alerts is that you can set the frequency in which you get your notifications. Set them up to receive emails daily, weekly, or as they happen.

Google Alerts steers a little bit away from social listening but helps to keep tabs on who’s mentioning you, your product or service, and even your website in other places on the internet. Here’s a great little tutorial on how to set up Google Alerts and make the most out of your efforts.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck covers all the basics any Twitter user would ever need, which makes it a great option for those just jumping into the world of social listening. TweetDeck allows you to schedule tweets, and monitor the interactions and conversations you’re having on Twitter. You can also manage multiple accounts and set up some streams for certain keywords and hashtags.

As the name suggests TweetDeck helps the Twitter part of social listening but can be useful for managing multiple accounts and setting up keywords or hashtags streams – and it’s all for free! Set up a stream to listen in on what people are talking about around a certain keyword, hashtag, your business/service, or even industry conversations.

Social listening, or social media monitoring as it’s sometimes called, is simply the process of identify and assessing what is being said about a business, individual, product or brand online. The tools mentioned above are a few easy ways to get listening to what’s being said about your product or service on the internet but the process can be a lot more complicated

There are other social listening tools that are much more comprehensive than the ones mentioned above and do a great job providing actionable metrics and other analytics. Tools like Nuvi, which we’ve worked with a lot at Strong Coffee Marketing, allow for much more in depth and refined social listening. If you’d like to learn more about social listening or how we can use the process to dig deeper into the conversations surround your business please feel free to drop us a line.