In part one of this series I discussed how community managers need to always be converting the conversations they have with their company’s fans or followers.
In part two, I’ll quickly discuss how to find these conversations when users don’t directly mention your brand name or when they aren’t initiated on your company’s social profiles
Lesson 2: Social Listening
Social listening involves utilizing tools to help monitor and discover mentions of your brand or conversations that are relevant to your industry while they’re taking place online.
Some of these tools are paid for, some are free, and some functions of social listening are even built natively into the social network if you know where to find them.
Regardless, as more these tools become available and savvy marketers increase their monitoring efforts, the importance of social listening for your brand will become increasingly important.
After all, the early bird gets the worm.
Below are just two examples of using social listening that you can incorporate today.
Examples:
Using Pinterest Source Search
Whether or not your website content is Pinterest enabled (i.e. has pin it buttons, widgets, etc.) if your site very graphic heavy there’s a good chance a users are pinning your web content to their boards without you even knowing it.
Detailed above, I explain how to use Pinterest source search to find users who have already pinned your website content but may not know you have an official presence on the network.
These are exactly the users who have the highest possibility to convert into a new engaged community member.
Using Twitter Advanced Search
Aside from Twitter’s basic search function you can use Twitter advanced search to surface real-time or recent tweets that may offer an opportunity for outreach. More importantly, you can use search filters to narrow down the results such as sentiment. Think about it, you’ll be able to find people who may be negatively talking about your competition — enter your brand to save the day.
Takeaway:
Social listening is becoming a major factor in digital marketing and as more consumers take their conversations online, being aware and utilizing these native monitoring tools will allow you find (and more importantly help) those prospects all while building a community that converts.
How do you actively social listen? Let me know in the comments below!
Image: http://www.123rf.com/photo_31364187_business-team-builds-a-new-company-with-puzzle.html?term=communities Copyright : alphaspirit
Jacob Curtis
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