Your guests, visitors, and customers are talking about you on social media. Listening to the conversations may seem rude, but it’s not. Even more to the point, they expect that you are. Doing so will help you shape your social media strategy and create relevant engagement in the future.

 

According to Hootsuite, one of the outcomes of the pandemic was renewed interest in social listening. With additional time, social media managers seized the opportunity to respond in real-time to questions, join conversations with customers, and glean insights about their customers’ changing preferences – information key to avoiding PR missteps and surprisingly welcomed by customers.

 

Social media managers have access to tremendous tools to facilitate social listening. For instance, establishing an account with Hootsuite includes the ability to create streams for brand mentions, competitor brand mentions, and keywords/hashtags that are important to your industry. Paid tools use technology to mine text. They identify and retrieve relevant text strings; use algorithms to categorize, summarize, and organize the analysis; look for patterns; determine sentiment analysis; and visually present their findings with easy-to-digest dashboards.

 

It’s also possible – without investing in a tool – to identify and assess what your customers and potentially others are saying about your company, products, and services as well as comments about people who are connected to your company.

 

Mention will let you filter and analyze posts from multiple sources. They offer a free version with options to upgrade.

 

TweetDeck offers real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement tools on Twitter. After creating your account, you can see your home screen, mentions, notifications, and messages.

 

Twilert is another option to track conversations on Twitter. The tool provides advanced search tools, search history, and allows users to create scheduled alerts.

 

While still on the Twitter track, Twitter itself offers advanced search capabilities, and will compile a list of recent tweets that contain keywords and phrases of the user’s choosing.

 

Finally, and again for those who want to do their own analysis, Google Alerts supports a user’s ability to monitor internet conversations for interesting and relevant content.

 

The importance of active listening is well known when we’re talking to each other. Turns out, it’s equally important in the social sphere.