We grew up chanting, “Sticks and stones
may break my bones, but words will
never hurt me.” However, when it comes
to brand vitality, this is far from true. In
fact, most companies would take a stick
and stone attack over publicly disparaging
remarks.
WHO IS TALKING?
Every time a competitor says how much
better their products are, an industry
voice mentions your company or a past
consumer talks about their purchasing
experience with your company, your
company is being promoted. Word of
mouth is the most impressionable form of
advertising and these presentations will
mean a lot to those listening. Whether a
reader is sharing an interesting blurb from
your blog or a frustrated employee is
railing on your company for poor quality
standards, you are directly affected.
SOCIAL LISTENING
Can you hear me now?
Good.
It’s time to start listening in on the very
public conversations being held about
your company, employees, customer
service and products on various platforms
across the web. You can gain invaluable
consumer insight for branding
improvements and form a stronger online
presence when you respond
appropriately. Studies have found that
most consumers have more positive
feelings towards brands who respond
professionally to publicly displayed
complaints.
Of course, searching on your own will
take countless hours and you will likely
miss many important conversations.
Instead, you can utilize listening tools that
monitor social media, blogs and websites
for specific keywords.
OKTOPOST
Focused on your brand posting,
Oktopost enables lead generation and
social conversations on various social
platforms. Oktopost allows you to
monitor the conversations you have
started or are holding with other
businesses and industry peers online.
This tool makes it easy to track how
leads are brought in by specific
campaigns and schedule new
campaigns. You cannot find or track
brand conversations you did not
initiate.
CYFE
Designed to be your all-in-one Big
Brother monitoring dashboard,
Cyfe allows you to check out real-time
data across various platforms,
including Constant Contact, AdSense,
Salesforce, Amazon, Facebook,
WordPress, Twitter and more. Instead
of spending time logging into to
various dashboards to keep tabs on
your stats, Cyfe will provide a bird’s
eye view, including external and
securely-pulled internal data. This will
allow you to manage your websites,
departments and social accounts on a
cloud-based account that requires no
downloads, installs or programming.
SOCIAL MENTION
Ready to see what others are saying?
Social Mention allows you an in-depth
view through the looking glass to see
what’s being said in real time. Not
only can you check specific brand
mentions on a variety of platforms,
but you can even get a feel
for how things are being said. Yes, this
tool will actually rate the sentiment,
strength, passion and reach of how
your brand is being talked about by
others. It breaks analytics down into
number of unique users, frequency of
mentions and allows you to view
specific posts. You will be able to
search specifically for the keywords
relevant to your brand, product or
services, allowing you to target your
focus on specific events, marketing
campaigns, products or other aspects
of your business.
HOOTSUITE
This listening tool allows you to
manage your accounts across multiple
social networks and schedule future
posts. Manage your Twitter, Facebook,
WordPress, Google+ and LinkedIn
accounts all at one place. While you
may not be able to
access every feature of the individual
platforms, you will be able to do most
things through Hootsuite and
streamline your process with access to
all of your accounts in one place. One
great feature about this free listening
tool is how it facilitates team profile
management. Hootsuite allows you to
delegate tasks, send private messages
and view weekly analytics reports to
help keep everyone on board.
Now that you know how to listen, are you
brave enough to do it? Not everyone
wants to know what is being said about
them behind their virtual backs, but—for
those that do want to pull back the
curtain— social media management tools
can only help strengthen your approach
and improve your productivity.
So, grab a bag of popcorn and tune in to
the good, the bad and the ugly.
Then, take a deep breath and respond
(without any hint of hostility or
vengeance), keeping in mind that timely
responses are seen in a much better light
by onlookers.
No comments:
Post a Comment