Make Social Listening Smarter with These Cloud Services

Many people are talking about your brand online. Are you aware of it?

Some other important questions you may not be asking: Is there a tool in place to monitor and track that? Once you get that information, how are translating it to grow your business?

Social listening is a key part of an effective business, which should be a main focus for your company. You can gain actionable insights about your existing and prospective customers, products, competitors and much more by being aware of your social channels.

Social listening has taken many names across the industry, including media monitoring and it can help you become more aware of the reach of your brand. This requires you to search all over the web and social media to know what is being spoken about your brand, as well as learning what new initiatives the competitors are planning that may be detrimental to your brand.

If you invest some time to discover new ways to reach customers, social listening will give you more than just brand mentions. It can help you push the envelope of your business development, product management and customer support.When used effectively, these cloud services help you become closer to your customers.

Here are five ways social listening can aid your overall customer service.

1) Watch Industry Websites

If This Then That (IFTTT) automates simple online tasks by using one of the most basic principles: If this happens, then do that.

IFTTT lets you set up rules (called recipes) for everything from getting the latest weather updates as a text message to automatically sending Instagram photos to Twitter (or any other platform). It has both fun and professional applications.

You create a recipe by choosing a trigger channel (the “if this happens” part) and an action channel (the “then do that” part).

To monitor what people are saying about your company, set up a recipe that scans RSS feeds of important industry websites, then sends you a daily email alert with the results—IF [website] mentions your company, THEN you will receive an email alert.

2) Monitor Your Brand Mentions

Mention is an internet listening tool that works in real time akin to Google Alerts. However, the magnitude of its delivery is greater than that of Google Alerts. Mention delivers results from millions of sources on web, including social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. It encompasses 42 languages, and any mention there will get you an alert.

Out of the mentions, you can filter the relevant ones by adding ‘all’ or ‘none’ keywords in the settings. By default, all the sources are turned on and you can even turn off few channels when checking the results. For example, you can turn off notifications from Twitter.

Mention is good with statistics and exports. It shows the number of mentions, along with the timeframe and sources for those mentions, including the country. Mentions can be saved for later use and analysis by exporting data and creating a downloadable file.

SumAll allows you to track activity across 50 platforms and compare and analyze the connections among all of them. From social updates, to emails, to sales, you can easily track your traffic across the Internet.

At the top of your dashboard, you can easily choose what information you’d like to see. You can filter views for each account, stream and timeframe that you want to compare. For example, you can compare performance on the third week of this month to the same week last month.

[bctt tweet=”Many people are talking about your brand online. Are you aware of it?” username=”agilecrm”]

SumAll also offers a publishing tool for Twitter and Facebook pages. The Twitter publishing options are thank-you tweets to your top three followers, weekly performance and monthly performance. You can choose one or all of the options.

The Facebook publishing option automates choosing and republishing the best posts from last year. (These are published every Thursday as a “Throwback Thursday” post). Don’t worry about the post being cringe-worthy; SumAll emails you the post for approval beforehand.

3) Monitor your Brand Reputation

Google Alerts is a handy tool to track brand mentions and other trending topics across the web. Just type in your company name or any keyword to monitor by an email alert.

Quora is a question-and-answer site where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users. It’s a free resource to track what people are saying about your product or other relevant topics.

4) Advanced Twitter Search

Twitter has been looked at as a social networking tool, but when used effectively, it can take the shape on a lead gen platform. There may be prospects looking for your brand on Twitter, and you have to communicate with them.

Twitter search is your gateway to unlocking potential, uncovering communities and tracking down news and opportunity across the channel. As Twitter is a social media platform where more than 7,000 tweets are sent every second, Twitter search is your tool for sifting through.

A search on Twitter for hashtags, users or companies may yield you good-to-average results. You will need to narrow the search and target specific groups of people who can be sales-ready leads, and eventually will become customers. Grab their attention by indulging in more interactions on the product and its competitors.

Advanced search operators allow you to add or remove necessary information to make the search results more useful and actionable.

A good strategy for making the most of advanced search is by using the Twitter listening tool, Twilert, which sends you an email alert or daily summary each time your search terms are mentioned on Twitter.

5) Search for Sentiment

Social Mention returns results based on the sentiment of social media buzz around your company. You can monitor multiple websites in one place, and even find out which keywords people use when talking about your company. Social Mention works in a similar way to Twitter’s Advanced Search, except you get the results from all over the social media space, in addition to Twitter.

Social Mention has a number of real-time search tools and a useful statistics sidebar. The statistics include sentiment, top keywords, top users, top hashtags, last mention and more.

To make monitoring even easier and less time-consuming, set up an RSS feed search or email alert by clicking the related icon on the right sidebar.