Remington Begg
People could be talking about your business right now. They could be asking questions. They could be complaining about service. They could be letting others know how awesome you are. All this online chatter gives you a tremendous opportunity to meet the needs of current and future customers and effectively manage your online reputation. Are you listening?
Listening is one of the most important aspects of social media marketing. Social media monitoring is being aware of what is being said about you on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the hundreds of other social networks. Listening gives you the opportunity to respond to people appropriately and effectively manage your online reputation.
Social media shouldn't be a one-way street of broadcasting out messages. You need to engage with people, solve their problems and bring them value. Show the people talking about your brand that you care, listen to what they are saying, and you'll build brand loyalty, increase engagement, improve customer service, gain market knowledge and become an industry authority.
Some things you might want to monitor and listen for are:
- People asking questions about your company, competitors, or products
- People having a problem with your products or website
- People commenting about your industry
- People that have reviewed your product or services
Great! Now that you know you should be listening to what is being said about your brand, how do you do that? Here are six social media monitoring tools to help you manage your online reputation and engage with the very people talking about you.
Topsy
This is a great tool for monitoring what is being said about you on Twitter. You can search for specific keywords that might relate to your brand, industry, and competitors. Anytime these keywords are mentioned by anyone they will show up in a feed and give you the opportunity to respond appropriately. Topsy also gives you the ability to identify industry influencers that have large followings. Creating relationships with these influencers can significantly boost your brand's reach.
Price: Starts from free
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a fantastic social media tool that does a little bit of everything. It gives you the ability to schedule and post to social networks, respond to followers, source content, and coordinate a team of people. Sprout Social gives users an impressive reporting system that pulls stats from Facebook and Twitter, then uses them to monitor influence, engagement, and growth. If you're working with a team, you can use the team report to see how effective your team is. You'll be able to see published messages and assign and track tasks.
Price: Starts from $59/month.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a great tool that captures anything said about you all over the web. All you have to do is provide a list of keywords to look for and it will email them to you. You can get your alerts either as they happen, once a day or once a week. Google Alerts is a master at monitoring mentions on blogs, news sites, videos, and other non-social media sites. Don't forget to add your competitors and industry influencers to your Google Alerts, this gives you a great ear to the ground in your market.
Price: Free tool
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo offers a wealth of tools to help you monitor, research and mine the social web. You can use it for tasks that include influencer research, content ideas, and content analysis. Let's say that you want to identify trending or popular content that is getting shared heavily within your industry. Type a topic into BuzzSumo and hit search. You'll see the most shared content and will be able to see who is sharing it. Pro users will get access to content analysis which enables you to dig deeper and see average shares by a network, average shares by content type, total shares by date published and more.
Price: Starts from free, pro accounts start at $99/month
HubSpot
HubSpot is a one-stop-shop online marketing juggernaut. It not only offers users a social inbox that allows them to monitor social mentions on Twitter, but it also gives you the ability to manage email marketing campaigns, build websites, create landing pages, and much much more. With the Social Inbox tool, you'll be able to track social conversation that matter to you the most. HubSpot then uses the mentions and compares them to contacts that people already on your email lists. This gives you a timeline of touch points, allowing you to see how hot a lead is.
Price: Starts at $200/month. Social Inbox is part of their Basic package that includes blogging, landing pages and email marketing.
HootSuite
HootSuite has been a powerful social media monitoring tool for a long time. It not only lets you monitor social mention is convenient real-time streams, but it also lets you post to your different social networks, schedule those posts, and gives you some basic analytics. HootSuite is optimized for managing Twitter accounts, but you can also post to your personal Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Price: Starts from free, pro account costs $9.99/month
You have to listen before you engage. Just like our parents taught us, listen first, then speak. That truth holds true in the online marketing world as well. There's a lot being said on social media and it's a good bet that somewhere, someone is talking about your brand. Don't let that talk fall on deaf ears, keep your social media ears open and engage with those people. Test the tools mentioned and see which ones work best for your marketing needs. They will open your business up to a new level of customer service and new potential customer.
