Your company, your name, your brand are on the internet. That is where you want them to be.
And you know that people are talking about your brand in the social media. You catch an inkling of the conversations or what is being said now and then, but you would like to have a much better way of more completely grasping how your brand is being received.
There are social media listening tools, many of them free, that can help you get feedback about your company, find people who are advocates of your products and connect with them further, check what your competitors are doing and who they are, and put all of that together to be able to further engage your customers…all through social media listening tools.
Social media tools are many and varied, and you will find lots of opinions about them as you do your web research. Social media listening tools are really social media tracking tools that collect information about our company, your brand, as it is being mentioned in social media. Google Alerts, for instance, can be simply set up (at no cost) to give you a little ping every time your company name is mentioned. That can give you a real time look at how much notice is out there about your company or specific product or brand.
The best social media tool is the one that does the job for you at a price you want to pay. The more powerful and glitzy sites offer you dashboards and graphics than can cost several hundred dollars a month, but give you great depth and allow you to drill down in specificity to get data answers to your queries.
Do not think for a second that social media listening tools are useful in a casual sense These are social media tools for business that can illuminate the effectiveness or dismal performance of a marketing campaign. The fact that so many of these social media listening tools are real time gives you almost instantaneous feedback as you launch something. You can then check your brand’s or product’s staying power at later time intervals.
Social media listening tools are also social media marketing tools that allow you to, in an old advertising adage, run something up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes. A dry run or test case of a product can provide feedback and create a buzz before launch.
Do you have to pay attention to social media? Ignore them at your peril. Use social media listening tools to keep your ear to the ground.