Social media is a big cocktail party, but you don’t have to participate all the time. You can just watch and learn. One thing that separates good marketers from average ones is the social listening skill. Social media listening is the process of identifying, monitoring and assessing what is being said about a topic, company, individual, product or brand. Here are some benefits of social listening
- Keep an eye on the industry trends
- Identify key pain points in your niche
- Learn from others
- Find key influencers in your niche market
- Find leads and sales opportunities
- Check what type of social content is performing well [or not]
Example – I work with several startups based in Dallas. So I have created a Twitter list of various founders and startups. I watch and listen to what is being said using Hootsuite streams. This helps me stay up to date on what is going on in Dallas startups world. 🙂
If you want to use Twitter lists for your social listening, you can start here. Also here are some more free tools that you can use to practice social listening
Free Social Media Listening Tools
- Google Alerts – A basic way to discover when a website is posting about a topic
- Topsy – Topsy helps you search and analyze the social web
- Social Mention – Social Mention collects aggregated data across multiple social platforms
- Icerocket – Icerocket specializes in blog searches.
- TalkWalker – Use Talkwalker Alerts to set up a search query for your keyword or phrase
Now over to you. Does your business “practice” social media listening?