One of the biggest misconceptions of social media is that being “social” means posting and tweeting constantly and blowing up your followers feeds. And while there is something to be said about being active and conversational, many times people forget that listening is 50% of the conversation equation. One of your goals with social should be to have authentic conversations with your community and if you are purely focusing on self promotion it can be extremely difficult to cultivate these types of relationships and even get people to respond to you.
For any company using social media, listening is much more than checking your Twitter @ mentions or perusing your Facebook comments. Listening should involve tracking keywords and phrases about your brand, product, competitors, or even your industry. Understanding what is being said about you and your competitors can help you to position future campaigns and gain a better understanding of your consumers.
Today we wanted to share some of the most effective ways to “listen” to the ongoing social media chatter.
1. Regularly check the social media platforms that your brand is on for comments, complaints, praise, and spam.
2. Use Twitter’s search function to find tweets that mention keywords. This could be about your brand, products, industry, a specific hashtag, or even a competitor. Twitter’s search only allows you to view a limited amount of mentions so if you experience high volume of mentions consider purchasing a tool to capture all your mentions.
3. Monitor Facebook Pages and Google+ communities on topics related to your brand or industry. It very easy to search for these communities on Google+ and with Facebook’s Graph Search being released shortly, finding these Pages should become easier too.
4. Find influential bloggers that cover your industry to find out what their community is saying and how they are reacting to products and services.
5. Use a tool to help find all mentions of the keywords you’re interested in. With Viralheat you set up custom keyword search profiles on words and phrases you are interested in tracking. Viralheat will then monitor the conversation across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, and blogs and gather analytics about these mentions.
As mentioned previously, social media is so much more than self promotion. Make sure you are getting the most out of social media by listening to what is being said. Have questions about how Viralheat captures mentions across the various platforms? Feel free to leave a comment and we’ll get back to you with the answer.
