Often, we make a mistake of imagining a perfect buyer persona that has nothing or very little in common with the people who actually talk and buy our products. Demographicsĭemographics is important when finding out who your real target audience is. In fact, for anyone taking care of reputation, the insights feature is a must. This is especially useful if there is a social media crisis unfolding. It lets you see at a glance if something needs your attention: if there is a spike in the number of mentions, in their reach (this means someone famous has mentioned your keyword), or a sudden change in sentiment. It's responsible for showing you any unusual activities in your mentions. The insights feature (can be called differently) is part of the analytics. Sentiment analysis is also very useful for customer service: it lets you filter all mentions by sentiment and reply to negative mentions first. It's a much more reliable way to find out what your target audience really thinks about you, as unlike questionnaires responders and members of focus groups, social media users are not prone to social desirability bias. With sentiment analysis, you can see what you're doing right and wrong in terms of product launches, marketing campaigns, and features. Sentiment analysis breaks down all your mentions into positive, negative, and neutral to show you the overall brand (or personal) reputation, and how it changes over time. Sentiment analysis is one of the most useful features a social listening tool can have. For most social media marketing goals, you don't need to search through other websites, but you need all 'social' platforms to analyze the level of conversation around your brand, people's attitude to your brand, as well as to perform competitor analysis, which is an incredibly useful analysis for any marketer, and to carry out constant and outstanding customer service. If you plan to use the tool to its fullest potential, choose one that covers major social media platforms, news, blogs, and forums. This is definitely something to look at when choosing a tool.

CoverageĪs noted in the introduction, social listening tools have different levels of coverage. Boolean search is the only way to handle this problem. The biggest problem the users of social listening face is getting flooded with the online buzz and irrelevant information. Using Boolean search requires some reading and some practice, but it's pretty easy anyway and requires no special programming skills.

Instead of focusing on single mentions, analytics shows the overall growth, attitude, demographics, etc. Social listening tools have different levels of analytics, but all of them serve the purpose of showing you your online presence objectively and at a glance. Later, after the tool has gathered a substantial number of mentions, these mentions are analyzed to show you the big data results. There, you can go through mentions, reply to them, filter them by different attributes, and otherwise work with what your online presence turns out to be. Social listening tools find mentions in real time (some also return historical mentions) and collect them in a mentions' feed. Some even cover print, TV, and radio, but these cost a fortune and are an overkill for most businesses. Best tools cover everything: social media networks, blogs, forums, news sites, comment sections, and web sites. The depth and diversity of the coverage depend on the tool.

Social listening tools crawl the Internet for mentions of your brand, product, name, or any other keyword. This will leave you with enough options to choose from, as the social listening market is alive and booming, but you'll know what to focus on among the ads and vague benefits the marketers are throwing at you, and your search will become easier.īut first, we'll start with the basics - just in case. To make it as easy as possible, I’ll tell you what to look for in a social listening tool. If you feel worried, I can reassure you: choosing a social listening tool won’t be the daunting task you imagine it to be. So you’ve finally read enough marketing articles to realize that yes, yes, you need a social listening tool.

Social listening tools 2020