Using a Social Media Listening Tool
Social listening provides a powerful tool to identify conversations, topics and trends that resonate (and don’t) with your target audiences.
Observe User Data Where People Are Hanging Out
Social listening allows you to track and analyze your unfiltered brand conversations, keywords, and competitor information from the eyes of customers.
Social listening has become an important focus for many social marketing leaders and it’s understandable why. According to Socialmedia.org, 13% of social leaders have prioritized social listening for their new marketing plans.
You’re not constrained just to people that interact with your brand or visit your website either. You WANT many more of these community people out there to become attracted to what you offer.
You can find out what motives your competitors’ social followers. With careful listening you can find weaknesses in their strategies, messaging, products and more and identity how you can use this information to make your brand more powerful.
Let’s say you find your biggest competitors don’t provide enough education and help after the offerings are sold. Or they don’t offer something many people are talking about. These are perfect opportunities to provide huge value where others have missed the boat.
By using one of these tools in your communities, you’ll learn more about their needs and pain points too.
LinkedIn Social Listening
It’s not Just for Meta and TikTok. Many of these tools include LinkedIn, for your B2B business.
LinkedIn has become more conversational with more free flowing information being shared all the time and the same reasons to listen on other social channels applies to LinkedIn.
Deeply understand your audiences so you can create detailed personas that drive your targeting. See what other businesses are posting and sharing on LinkedIn to further refine your content strategy.
Some of The Tools
Most of the tools also provide social posting and monitoring so you get a bit of an all-in-one tool with the services. Later and Sprout Social provide solutions although with some of the services the social listening is an add on that also adds to the total price so it’s best to do your research before signing up.
A tool that provides less expensive services is SocialChamp. It provides unlimited posting, six users and social listening for $99 a month. Most small business services provide a free trial.
You can spend a lot for these tools so we’d recommend starting small (and inexpensive) and if you outgrow your tool, scale up. Dash Hudson claims to provide a visual-first approach to analysis. It starts at $499 a month so it’s not cheap but often you do get what you pay for.
Start Listening
So document some things you want to know and get in there with one of the tools and start listening. You are guaranteed to find valuable information that can grow your business.
