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Virtually every company should have some form of social media. That’s been the standard for a while now. Sure you can have affiliates post about you and your product, but users aren’t gonna trust a brand they can’t personally interact with. And it’s not enough to just post on your account and leave the algorithms to work their magic, because it will never work out in your favor. You have to be active and engaged with your online community to reap the benefits of word of mouth and social influence. To truly harness the power of social media, you need measurements in place for social listening.
Social listening is when you track every mention of your brand on social media as either positive or negative, keep tabs on news related to your industry, and trends your brand could take part in. And while it’s necessary to do for your own company you should also be keeping an eye on and taking notes from your competitors and adjusting your strategy by what’s working and what’s not. Social listening is a key to having top-notch customer service, proactively responding to customer queries before they become complaints. But it can be extremely difficult to keep track of every interaction across every social platform your company is on, which is where social listening tools come into the picture. They can be costly up front and might seem superfluous, but we promise you you’ll be thanking us when you start seeing the upticks in positive brand talk on social media.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is arguably the most popular social listening tool. It came out 15 years ago and has a hearty track record of helping brands take advantage over over a decade of social media insights and strategy recommendations. With industry and competitive analysis tools, you are able to compare your brand sentiment analysis and see where your competitors have an edge on you and vice versa. Customizable dashboards and automatic reports make sure you’re able to see the full impact of your brand’s online presence in real time.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the most extensive social strategy and brand monitoring tools available today. Its simple interface lets you seamlessly scroll through reports built out from data insights from your brand’s engagement and identifies users you need to tend to by pulling out all of the brand mentions requiring responses and sorting them so you can stay on top of your outreach without losing track of users along the way. Brandwatch is a powerful social listening tool that provides real-time social media monitoring across multiple platforms. It offers advanced analytics and data visualization capabilities that help brands make informed decisions. Brandwatch also allows brands to identify trends and influencers and track their competitors’ social media presence.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a fully comprehensive social media management platform covering everything from social listening to content planning. The software tracks user engagement and sentiment across all of your social media channels and pools the data in one place, pulling out all the patterns and insights to generate actionable steps your marketing team can take based on what your audience thinks about your current strategy. Some other notable features are keyword tracking to stay up to date on relevant industry and product related news. It also lets you compare your brand’s social evaluation against your competitors to see how much of the conversation you’re dominating vs them and how your audience views you both.
Social listening is make or break when it comes to your social media strategy. Using tools like these will give insights into your customers’ opinions, trends, and help you respond to customer feedback in real-time. While these are some of the most popular social listening tools, and for good reason, there are hundreds of software tools to track engagement and monitor your brand’s online impact. Each with their own unique features, make sure to do your research so you can find one that fits your brand’s goals. Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, these tools will let you monitor your online presence so you can make the best strategy decisions moving forward.
