Social Listening: How to Utilize It In Your Marketing Strategy

If you're a social media marketer and you haven't leveraged social listening for your strategy, you're missing out! Social listening is the action of keeping tabs on what users and your competitors are talking about online and becoming part of the conversation when it's appropriate. It has many benefits, allowing us to find new leads, become a thought leader, identify influencers and more. There are numerous tools out there that will help you implement it into your strategy, so read on to get started!

Social Listening: How to Utilize It In Your Marketing Strategy

If you're a social media marketer and you haven't leveraged social listening for your strategy, you're missing out! Social listening is the action of keeping tabs on what users and your competitors are talking about online and becoming part of the conversation when it's appropriate. It has many benefits, allowing us to find new leads, become a thought leader, identify influencers and more. There are numerous tools out there that will help you implement it into your strategy, so read on to get started!

  • What Is It & Why Should You Use it?

    To kick things off, let's take a look at what exactly social listening is and why it's a great idea for any business owner or social media marketer to implement it.

  • Different Ways You Can Use It

    There are tons of creative ways to use social listening. From seeing what people are saying about your brand to responding to potential customers, learn more about how it can improve your business.

  • Location-Based Listening

    If you have a brick and mortar location or offer a service in a specific area, social listening is a great way to find and engage with potential and existing local customers. This article explores why this is a powerful tactic and how you can harness it to your advantage.

  • Find User Generated Content

    User generated content (or UGC) should be harnessed in just about every social media marketing strategy. It's a cheap & engaging content creation method. Use social listening to find users posting pictures of your product that you can use. Consider searching for hashtags and your brand name to find them. This article highlights some creative ways companies have used UGC on social media.

  • Use Social Listening to Inform Your Content Strategy

    When you are monitoring and engaging with potential and existing customers, what are they talking about? What are their pain points? What are they interested in? When you start to see patterns about what your customers want, you can use this to inform your content strategy and provide value for your audience.

  • Generate Leads

    If there could only be one reason to use social listening, this is it. Social listening is a powerful way to generate leads for your business. Between responding to those experiencing problems you can solve, taking customer service complaints, and honing in on the language of your audience, you can develop a powerful lead generation tool.

  • Keywords to Track

    Now that you're convinced you need to be listening in on social media, what exactly should you be looking for? When it comes time to pick keywords to be monitoring, here are some helpful ideas about what to consider.

  • Attracting New Customers

    An important aspect of being a marketer is gaining visibility and trust from new, potential customers. Researching what your target demographic's are posting about can inform what type of content you're posting yourself. Check out these techniques to help get your head around what your customers are thinking.

  • Find Influencers

    Influencer marketing is growing increasingly popular and for good reason. Social listening is an amazing way to discover authorities in your industry who you can reach out to or align yourself with. This guide is an in-depth and practical look on how you can use SL to find influencers.

Tools to Use

Now that you know why and how you can implement social listening into your overall social marketing strategy, here are some useful tools to do it!

  • TweetDeck

    TweetDeck is an awesome choice from keeping your finger on Twitter's pulse. You can very easily set up keywords and phrases to keep an eye on, which you can easily reply to from the deck.

  • Hootsuite

    For responding to customers on social media, Hootsuite is a great option. The app let's you keep tabs on what your customers are saying about you (good and bad) that will allow you to respond quickly. Hootsuite complies all of your social media accounts into one place, so it couldn't be easier.

  • Mention

    While you need to pay to use Mention, those who are serious about social listening should really consider it. It's jam-packed with features, allowing you to get a much better picture of the demographic makeup of your audience, analyze your competition, find influencers, and so much more. Take a look at their site and see what they have to offer.

  • 20 More Tools to Use

    Beyond the handful listed here, you can take a look at even more tools used and loved by other marketers and business owners.