In session 18 of A Marketing Podcast I discuss how to get started in Social Media Listening. I identify several tools you can use to perform your listening as well as an approach as to how you can listen to develop actionable insights through what people are saying in social media.

Session 18: Show Notes

What is social media listening?

Monitoring social media channels to identify mentions about brand, topics, specific keywords, and social accounts.

Social Media Listening Tools

Social Channels

Make use of social channels directly. Log in and use the search functionality of those channels.

Hootsuite

Make use of social channels directly

Nuvi

Makes use of automated tasks and analysis of bulk data. Nuvi crawls the internet for more than just public facing social media, it includes blogs, comments, social communities like Reddit, and general web content.

Sysmos

The power house in the social listening world. Makes use of “big data” by using powerful crawlers of more than just social media channels, just like Nuvi.

How to use social listening

There’s two ways to approach social media listening.

* Work to answer a specific question – devise a specific thing you’re trying to prove or disprove

* Observe in a way that you can derive actionable insights

How to observe in a way that identifies the unknown

Divide how you listen into 3 main groups:

* Industry

* Competition

* Brand (your company)

Industry

Listen for keywords and phrases that reflect common terms in your industry.

For example: If you own a mountain bike store you’ll want to listen for terms related to mountain biking. Such as: mountain biking, down hill biking, mountain bike competitors, buying a mountain bike, etc.

In doing so you will gather sentiment on the particular topics within your industry.

Industry is great for developing products or services to fulfill certain shortfalls in the industry, identified by regular negative sentiment.

Competition

Listen to what people are saying about your competitors.

Listening to your competition can achieve two things:

* Understanding what people think about your competition

* How they use social media

Listening to what people are saying about your competition can help you to deliver a better service or product based on the feedback people have about your competitors.

Brand (Yourself)

Finally, listen for what people are saying about your business.

When listening to your own brand, it makes sense to reply and interact with those who mention your brand. This can take on a customer service style approach depending on the mentions. Or simply saying thanks for mention how great your product or service is.

Links & Resources

* Hootsuite

* Nuvi

* Sysomos.com

* Small Business Digital Marketing Setup Checklist

* Join the AMP Community

Thanks for listening in!

If you have any questions about this session, leave them in the comments section below. If you enjoyed the show, let your friends know by using the social sharing buttons below. Your help sharing the podcast will allow me to help more business owners and marketers just like you be more strategic!

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