5 Ways to Use Social Listening to Enhance Your Digital Marketing Strategy

It is incredibly important to see where your business is being discussed, and in what context. This is why social listening matters! Maybe a news article picked up on some charitable actions your company has done, or a blogger had a bad experience and decided to write about it.

Brand monitoring and social listening are tasks that can and should be automated. No need to search Google or Twitter every day to learn who is talking about you online. There are tools that do the tracking for you and notify you whenever there’s anything you need to take action on.

Let’s take a look at a few:

Engage with Customers on Social Media (And Sell More)

The bigger the brand, the more social media mentions it will generate on a daily basis. On the other hand, any brand’s growth can be judged by the growth of social media mentions that include it.

It can be hard to find social media mentions that are more buried across the web, especially with priority given to certain corners. SharpSpring comes with a powerful social media listening platform that digs up your brand mentions from literally everywhere and prioritizes them, so you can keep up, no matter how obscure the source.

SharpSpring supports Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and allows unlimited profiles and unlimited users.

You can also set up custom notifications to be alerted of important mentions.

Empower Your PR Strategy with Social Listening

Social media networks have become an effective tool for journalists to find interesting stories and reliable sources for their articles.

There are two great ways to monitor those requests for sources to put your brand out there.

• Monitor tweeted questions (people asking questions on Twitter containing your core keyword)
• Monitor specific hashtags journalists are using to find interesting sources:
  • #journorequest
  • #PRrequest
  • #asktwitter

It is easy to keep an eye on these hashtags using a separate column inside a free app called Tweetdeck.

To find relevant questions people are asking on Twitter, create another column on Tweetdeck to monitor the following search:

[keyword ?]

Make sure there is a space before the question mark.

Answering those questions on a regular basis will help you on many levels apart from generating PR opportunities. You may be able to find more connections, customers and even partners (influencers) to help grow your business.

Here are my two columns:

Monitor and Acquire New Links

One of the ways to get even more out of your reputation management routine is to use it to generate more backlinks that bring page authority, traffic and higher rankings:

• Monitor your competitors’ links and figure out how it got them.
• Monitor your own brand’s unlinked mentions and reach out to try and claim that link.
• (Again) Monitor niche journalists and bloggers who are looking for sources and interesting stories.

BrandMentions is a reputation management tool helping you to turn those brand mentions into backlinks.

They have recently revamped their whole toolset and come up with a new fresh look and more in-depth insight into the online context.

If link building is incorporated into your SEO campaign, Brand Mentions will be immeasurably beneficial. Some of the most organic and authoritative links that will strengthen your backlink portfolio can be found through Brand Mentions.

Brand Mentions has one of the best user interfaces, and the site owner actively takes suggestions from users to constantly improve the user experience. You can set up alerts, select date parameters, and filter what type of mentions you are looking for. Use this tool for reputation management, link building, and keeping up to date with your competitors. If you get creative, you can probably find even more uses for this tool.

Monitoring your incoming traffic is another great way to spot new backlinks to be able to join that conversation (to thank, get to know your promoters, etc.) Finteza is a great way to get alerted of traffic spikes and quickly find your new traffic source:

Find Local Prospects

If you are a local business or a global brand looking to target a specific location, social media monitoring is your friend.

Social listening can help you keep an eye on local events, local (seasonal) trends, local journalists, etc.

Take your time defining your location settings and local hashtags to monitor:

There can be a variety of local hashtags, so you’ll do a lot of searching before deciding which ones seem to have the most relevant results for you to set up tracking:

• Local brands: These could be local venues, parks, entertainment centres, etc — anything that has social media presence and gives you an opportunity to connect to your target customer.
• Local influencers: Search Instagram for your location and find those users that seem to have some following. Add these people to your social listening platform to monitor their updates and connect.
• Major location hashtags: Use # sign before the name of your target city and search on Twitter. This is a good start. Next experiment with the state name, county, or even neighbouring cities (especially if yours is not that big).
• Events: Festivals, seminars, meetups, conferences, concerts… Most of these will have their own unique hashtags participants use to connect, read updates, or discuss the upcoming event.

It makes sense to use CRM and lead generation tools to organize those prospects effectively.

Enhance Your Market Research

Social media listening is a never-ending source of market research data allowing you to analyze niche trends, buying behaviours, and browsing journeys.

Awario comes with a market research and analytics feature allowing you to collect and make sense of the data you are monitoring.

According to Awario, 71% of their users admit that valuable market insights acquired from social media improved the results of their marketing efforts. And that data is free! All you need is to collect and make sense of the data.

Conclusion

Social listening is a multi-purpose cross-channel marketing tool helping you to grow your business on many levels. Make sure to include multiple teams (customer support, sales, PR and link building, even your product development team) in your social media listening process for best results. Alternatively, speak to us about helping you optimise your social media efforts.

About the author Ann Smarty is the brand NINJA at Internet Marketing Ninjas and the founder of numerous startups including MyBlogGuest, MyBlogU, ViralContentBee, and TwChat. Her content marketing ideas have been featured in The New York Times, Mashable, Entrepreneur, Search Engine Land and many more.