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Any marketer knows that social media is fertile ground for effective brand promotion and lead generation. A well-built business page on Instagram or TikTok brings thousands and thousands of followers that can eventually turn into a couple of hundred loyal consumers and brand advocates. Many businesses use social media listening tools to build a strong brand image and enhance their social media presence.
What is a social listening tool, and why do you need it?
The effectiveness of any social listening tool depends on the features it holds. Before we get to the features, let’s recap what a social media listening tool is specifically and who can benefit from it the most.
Social media listening tools are special digital solutions used for tracking diverse brand metrics on social media in real-time. These metrics include brand mentions, followers’ engagement, customer attitude to the brand or a product, target audience segmentation and many others.
You can use social media listening results for:
- Evaluating the success of your marketing campaigns on social media
- Tracking activities and marketing campaigns of your competitors
- Discovering effective social media marketing strategies
- Finding top influencers in your business area on various social media platforms
- Learning about how to improve your product or marketing campaigns
- Performing effective and timely brand reputation crisis management
- Enhance SEO performance on your website
- Learn about the latest trends in your business niche
- Better adjust your content to your audience
- Market research
Related: How to Use Social Listening to Find Clients
How to choose a social listening tool
When choosing a social media monitoring app, you can easily find yourself like a kid in the candy store, not knowing where to look first. I’ve gathered the essential features that top social media listening tools should possess. Here is what to look for.
Mentions insights
Advanced social media monitoring platforms provide their users with an insights feature based on deep analytics. The feature detects any unusual activities in the created mentions and focuses users’ attention on them. This can be a sudden rise in the number of followers mentioning your brand, shifts in product perception and other unusual behavior.
Historical data
Viewing data by history is another important feature any social media listening tool should possess. It allows users to track social media posts in certain periods. This can be useful when you run your marketing campaigns and want to track their success or find out how effective your previous campaigns were.
If a social media listening tool is empowered with advanced analytics, it will provide you with detailed results on the demographics of your target audience. This way, you can better understand who uses your product and your competitor’s products.
Alerts comparison
It’s great when a social media listening tool can provide detailed statistics on your brand performance and marketing campaign’s success. However, data analysis becomes even more valuable when equipped with cross-brand analytical tools. This way, you can deeply analyze your and your competitor’s brands and compare them by various metrics, from mentions, author gender and age, sources, and much more.
By comparing your data with your rivals‘, you can gain insights into how to position your brand on the market, make your offering stand out, or enhance your marketing campaigns to attract even more followers.
Sentiment analysis
Brands need to know what their customers and followers think about their products. For this, social listening tools provide their users with sentiment analysis features. They analyze customer attitudes to your brand, product and marketing campaigns and wrap this diverse feedback into simple and visual statistics.
Sentiment analysis can help you improve your brand positioning, quickly address negative mentions, heighten your followers’ interest and increase engagement in conversations, and analyze what you and your competitors are doing right and wrong in your and their marketing campaigns.
Share of voice
Share of voice is a compound measure that shows how much of your brand’s market share is compared to your competitors. You can measure it by comparing various metrics such as sentiment, mentions, hashtags, organic keywords, reach, and others. Professional social media listening tools can compare several brands and view the results in visual diagrams and graphs.
Whitelist
Sometimes you need to monitor only certain profiles or websites instead of gathering data from the entire web. For this, social media listening tools provide a Whitelist monitoring mode. It restricts the search to whitelisted web pages or social media profiles, focusing your attention on them. The feature allows tracking only your brand activities, critical social media influencers, brand ambassadors or competitors online.
Related: Leveraging Technology for a Better Consumer Experience
Reporting
Imagine that you’re running a marketing campaign, but the results aren’t as obvious as they could be yet–the leads get generated slowly, or maybe everything just works smoothly, though you’ve just resolved a looming crisis.
How do you show your company’s head managers that you and your marketing team put a lot of effort into supporting your brand image and results are just pending? For this, most social media listening tools provide detailed reports with statistics and everything that’s going on with the brand.
With social media monitoring reports, you can show how much your brand has developed by comparing key metrics, e.g., how much awareness has grown or how customers’ sentiment has changed over time.
Social selling opportunities
Social media listening tools help marketers discover how to create relevant content for their social media, who are their potential buyers, and how to work with their followers. All these create the conditions for effective social selling.
By closely monitoring what’s happening with your brand on social networking sites, you’ll be able to keep up with the latest trends and stay on the same page with your audience, offering them precisely what they need and want. Apart from gathering valuable stats, some social monitoring tools allow users to quickly find and generate leads.
API integration
Marketers and business owners usually use several digital tools in an integrated environment. The social listening tool you choose should easily connect with any tools you’re currently using for your business development, whether a custom-built CRM or a ready-made solution.
Many social listening tools offer their clients integration with other digital systems via API. This way, you don’t have to use social listening tools’ to access and use their functionality.
Before you go
There is a wide variety of social media listening tools and platforms that offer diverse marketing services. Before opting for any of them, you need to consider all your marketing goals and objectives and understand what you will use this solution for. By doing so, you’ll make the most profit from the application, and it’ll be an effective instrument in your business development kit and a worthwhile spend in your company’s budget.
