Lots of people may be talking about you. But the social noise has become so great that in order to ‘listen’ and sieve out mentions of your brand, you need the help of some tools and a smart strategy.
NB: This is an article from Staah
Let’s explore.
What Is Social Media Listening?
According to a HubSpot survey, almost 4 million posts are added across all major social platforms in one minute! 96% of people that discuss brands online don’t follow those brands’ profiles, so it’s highly probable that you’re missing relevant posts.
If you’re not engaged in social media listening, you’re ignoring your guests – and that’s just bad business.
Social media listening is a term given to tracking conversations on social media that relate to your brand, products and the industry you operate within.
Why You Need It?
- To keep track of your brand health and improve customer experience. Products such as STAAH’s ReviewMinder help you stay on top of what people are saying about you and your service, and manage it from there as required.
- Keep a bird’s eye view of things. Sometimes you’re so close to your service, you miss signs. A trend analysis as available through social media listening tools gives you the sentiment over a sustained period.
- Create content that your audience wants. By listening to what interests people, you can curate your own content to what they would like, thus getting better engagement.
- A great way to find user generated content to use on your own channels.
- You can keep abreast to what your competitors are doing, industry trends and other local operators are talking about. This helps you align your communications with theirs.
- Generate ideas for your next marketing campaign.
- Find industry influencers who can help spread the word about you.
- To identify where you target audience hangs out and make sure those channels are part of your strategy.
How to Listen?
First, find the right keywords to stay on top of (check out our suggestions for groups below to curate this list. Examples of keywords and key phrases you should be staying on top of are:
- Your competitors’ brand names, product names and handles
- Industry buzzwords
- Your slogans and your competitors’ slogans
- Public people in your company and competitors’ companies
- Your hashtags and your competitors’ hashtags
- Hashtags related to your industry
- Common misspellings and abbreviations for all of these.
Next, find the right set of tools to help you monitor all this data. Some common tools used by brand include Hootsuite, Klout, Simply Measured, Buzzsumo, Tweetreach, Tweetdeck, Likealyzer, Talkwalker, Google Alerts, Google’s Keyword Tool and Reddit Keyword Monitor, among many other tools. What you choose comes down to your budget and use – each tool has its pros and cons, but all of them help you achieve the end objective of staying on top of social conversations. STAAH’s ReviewMinder is ideal to monitor customer reviews across sites such as TripAdvisor, Google+, Expedia etc. For any hotelier, these reviews are a gold mine.
Once you’ve finalised your tools, set-up your dashboard to monitor and use the insights regularly to make data based decisions.
What Should You Be Listening Too?
- Brand and products. What are people saying about you, your services and any facilities you may have within your property such as a spa or restaurant.
- What are people talking about the location where your property is located? You can join conversation, provide valuable local insights and work it into your promotional strategy.
- What are the trends? What do people want out of their travels? Learn from the social media and bring it into your own brand.
- Industry and competition. What are the others saying and doing? This will help you stay ahead of the pack by learning about trends.
- Your niche. For instance are you targeting backpackers? Or luxury audience?
