Creating a Brand with Social Listening and What Tools To Use
Social media marketing is an important part of reaching today’s modern era customers. Setting up social media accounts that prioritize providing good content can be challenging. In order for your brand to stick out, you need to learn what your customers are looking for and how to provide them with that content. This is referred to as social listening. Those who have social listening strategies worked into their social media marketing gain an edge over their competitors.
Social listening plays a key role in growing your business and increasing your company’s brand trust with its customers. The good news is that the cost to operate social media channels and create engaging content is often right at your fingertips. If you are looking for ways in which you can handle all the comments, likes, and messages on your platforms fear not because we have a strategy for you.
The below content contains ways in which you can learn about social listening as well as tools you can use to make the process easier.
What is Social listening?
Social listening is all about looking into your industry’s trends, comments, and content in order to gain insights into your brand experience. Social listening is critical for understanding how your customer feels about your brand which is commonly referred to as social media sentiment. Correctly using Social Listening is one of the most valuable ways to increase brand trust and create a loyal customer base. One good example of social listening is Netflix promoting a DIY sock that pauses the TV show. Netflix looked at what people were talking about on social media through comments, posts, and stories which lead to this creative invention.
Social Listening Tools.
Keeping up with the constant change in social trends can be difficult. Thankfully, there are many different tools and programs that can help brands keep up with trends.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a premium service that helps brands and companies monitor data and trends on all social media platforms you are active on. Sprout Social can also be useful for identifying social media goals that your brand can create based on the data. While Sprout Social is an excellent service and can help greatly with social media needs, they are more costly than some of the other social listening tools mentioned below.
HubSpot
HubSpot is a marketer’s dream program. Whether it be for creating inbound content, social media uploads, or advanced automation HubSpot knows what tools a marketer needs. HubSpot has features that allow you to keep track of all social media posts, interactions, and total social media leads.
One of the big perks of HubSpot is the ability to easily work together with the sales team to use social media interactions as a step to making a sale. Furthermore, Hubspot is a free-to-use platform which makes it a must-have.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a service that allows users to view and interact with their social media followers in an easy and convenient way. The dashboard that Hootsuite is able to keep track of all social media interactions whether it be messages, comments, likes, or mentions without having to leave the service.
In addition, Hootsuite provides top-notch analytics and reports from all social media accounts in use. This, along with the convenient dashboard, makes Hootsuite a premium service that competes with the likes of sprout social. Therefore the cost of the service is noticeably different than free services.
Buffer
Buffer is one of the more friendly tools on this list. Buffer allows users to “buffer” social media posts on many accounts. The UI for the service is very clean and not as complicated as some other services. Buffer can also respond to comments across many platforms. There is a free version available to use, however, the service will be lacking some features.
SEMrush
SEMrush is different from many of the other services mentioned above. SEMrush is well known for its keyword research and online ranking data. Furthermore, the ability to manage social media accounts makes SEMrush a valuable service to have. Want to manage all your social media accounts in one place? SEMrush has you covered. You can also use many of the SEO tools and keyword tools to help monitor your social media accounts.
Social listening can be a tricky process to run. Keeping up with so many accounts and followers is no easy task. Thanks to services like SEMrush, Buffer, HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social, Marketers are able to keep up with demand. Now it’s time for you to take the wheel, are you ready?
The landscape of the Internet is ever changing and Nicole has the energy and aptitude to keep Stevens & Tate Marketing out in front of the pack. She leads an enthusiastic team in strategic planning, development, search engine marketing, online promotions and advertising for the web.
