13 Social Media Listening Secrets You Need to Know

Have you conducted a social media listening exercise in the last 12 months for your blog or business? Did you find anything fascinating? I am a problem solver by nature with a background in the natural sciences so I have a thing for experiments. This means that I like conducting research every week to find out if something is fact or fiction (myth-buster eat your heart out). Sometimes it's just to compare or contrast applications, tools or software that are similar in their functionality. You may find this pretty boring but for a business or blog doing research on your competition can give you a surprising edge or insight. The truth is that legally spying on your competition is not frowned upon but it is very welcomed and normal. In this post, you are going to learn what is social media listening, the tools used to get it done and the benefits of listening to your competition. What is Social Media Listening Anyway? In case you never heard the term before social media listening refers to the practice of listening in to conversations or activity on social media. You will need to get an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of this process to grasp how you can use it. It does not involve the use of specialist headphones or spying equipment from the CIA, FBI, MI5 or any such organisation. Thankfully, there are quite a number of solutions available on the market that can be used to complete this project. The good news is that the stuff that you will uncover can fall into the categories of serious all the way to hilarious. Even if you don't like doing research you may find this exercise intriguing since we are all curious by nature. First outlining the benefits are key to understanding why you should even consider this as part of your marketing plan. Benefits of Social Listening The benefits of social media listening can be broad and wide but worth the effort to get it done. Think of social listening as a way to have one ear to listen to everything that is happening across 1,000 channels. You can see it as a way of sifting information into two big baskets of valuable or useless. The reasons that it can be a very valuable exercise is that it allows you to do the following: * Keep an eye on key competitors from a single dashboard* Engage with potential clients just when they need your products or services* Have meaningful conversations with potential influencers* Find pain points that your service can solve with a few tweaks* Manage feedback in a central location as and when comments happen In other words, without these listening or monitoring tools, it would be difficult for your blog or business to get 360-degree visibility across several social platforms. Let's spend some time looking at what you need to start spying on your competitors legally. What Can You Listen to or Monitor? Before looking at a big list of tools available to conduct social listening let me first dive into what to look out for on social media. This may be obvious to you but just in case you did not know you will need to go with a few objectives in mind before getting started. Here is a big list of things to consider. * Keywords or keyphrases* Hashtags* Brand names* Produ...