What is social listening? Why is it important to analyze and use online conversations to grow brand reputation? What are the main tools to use?
From Facebook to Twitter, linkedIn, social media are real digital environments in which millions of people talk about brands, products, and services. Comments, likes, retweets, and any other indicator of user sentiment can become an extremely useful resource for a company.
Analyzing and interpreting online conversations allow, in fact, to study strategies to increase the engagement and trust of the public
The social listening is a tool with enormous potential, but we must be able to know and use the most efficient way possible. Here are some tips on how to monitor your web reputation on social media and which tools to use.
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What is social listening and what is its importance for improving online brand reputation?
The social listening is a set of activities that aim to find and track conversations on the web around specific keywords, phrases and events that affect their brand, competitors or industry benchmark.
What is the use of web listening? Listening to conversations is an important practice for understanding behavior patterns and market trends because they can offer you a significant competitive advantage.
In this sense, social listening has a high strategic potential to monitor and possibly make improvements to your online brand reputation.
Over time, social listening has been recognized as a fundamental element in customer service: users, in fact, are more likely to ask questions, leave opinions and reviews or make complaints on social networks such as Facebook or Twitter rather than via the phone. But why is social listening so relevant in a social media strategy?
With this activity your brand will be able to identify new business opportunities: the monitoring of keywords and phrases online will allow, in fact, to be able to speak in the same language as the consumer, which increasingly presents the need to have answers to his needs through a way of communicating familiar to him.
Thanks to social listening, therefore, the visibility of your brand will increase, user trust will grow and, consequently, the creation of qualified leads.
How do you do web reputation on social networks?
The monitoring of the brand reputation on social networks involves a series of main phases:
- definition of objectives;
- tracking of hashtags, keywords and phrases;
- identification of influencers;
- Analysis of social mentions and sentiment.
Through a social listening activity, it is possible to come into possession of an enormous amount of data. To have a more useful and complete reading of these insights, as in the case of a content marketing strategy, even for an effective social listening strategy you will need to define specific objectives in advance.
The question to ask will therefore be the following: what are the reasons for deciding to start web listening activities? Among the most frequent objectives are the improvement of customer service and the management of products and services online thanks to real-time feedback.
The tracking of hashtags, keywords, and phrases is very useful when you decide to set up a new campaign: thanks to this practice, in fact, it will be possible to identify the most effective elements to improve the content.
By defining these components, you can track down potential problems consumers are experiencing. For example, if you monitor the phrase “[brand name] + does not work” you will be able to immediately find the source of the problem and understand what the users’ needs are, to improve the functionality of the service/product.
The views of influencers have an ever-increasing impact on consumers. For this reason, in a social listening activity it is important to identify brand ambassadors who are able to convey the company’s values and inspire trust in users.
To better understand the web reputation on the social networks of your brand, it is important to carry out a data collection activity and in particular to:
- social mention;
- comments;
- like;
- reach;
- impression;
- shares;
- Sentiment.
The goal is to understand what users think about your services or products and what level of engagement they generate.
Brand reputation on social networks, which tools to use?
There are many useful tools on the market for carrying out social listening activities. Among these, the main tools used are:
- Social Mention , a sort of search engine that returns one or more pages of content generated on the web in the last 30 days based on the keyword or phrase entered;
- Google Alerts , which allows you to scan the network for the keyword you want and send you an email to notify you if relevant results are found;
- Datalytics , which offers a self-service dashboard for social listening, real-time marketing and web reputation;
- ShareCount , where you can enter a URL in the search box to find out how many likes and shares it has received on LinkedIn, Pinterest and Facebook;
- Talkwalker , which allows, by specifying a keyword, to have data on conversations that take place on the web, such as the number of mentions or people reached;
- Blogmeter , with which you can have an overview of the main KPIs, a comparative analysis, of the influencers and sentiment, a classification of the posts and the most active sources on the topic under analysis;
- Digimind , a software that allows you to identify the most significant conversations around your brand, while measuring the performance of the contents;
- Reputation Manager , a system with which to manage and analyze the social and online reputation of the brand, as well as monitor conversations to intercept opinions and influencers on specific issues;
- Hoot suite, useful both for managing social pages and for monitoring data regarding the platforms used.
The creation of a brand’s image and online marketing also and above all passes through user conversations. The social listening, then, becomes an essential tool to analyze, track and improve brand reputation on the web, through the ‘ listening to what consumerscommunicate online and analysis of activities implemented.
