These listening techniques can:
- Help monitor positive and negative sentiments about your brand.
- Give you a head start on your ability to rectify a situation before it hits fever pitch.
- See where people interested in your brand hang out.
Here are the four tips to start the listening process!
Do you want to enter the “social media sphere” but don’t have a clue where to start? The best way to move forward is by listening to the web. What that means is using keywords associated with your business and free web based tools to get started monitoring your brand online. The four-step technique below can give you access to potential online chatter about you.
If you don’t use an rss (really simple syndication/rich site summary) reader, there are services out there such as Google reader. You will need the ability to subscribe to feeds. Here are a few you can get familiar with.
There are several sites that allow you to search the “real time” web for information based on location, keywords, gender etc. These sites will give you an rss feed to subscribe to and you enter it into your rss reader. These sites include:
Now is the time you do a little testing, using the sites listed in the second step, you can look up keywords or phrases pertaining to your business. We recommend that you start off with your business name and nearest location. Doing a little survey on your competition wouldn’t hurt either. When you determine which keywords you want to monitor, you take your search results and create a subscription with the rss feed.
Once your subscriptions are set up you can return to your feeds to see what turns up. Some keywords will generate a lot of information, others will not. Over time you can tweak your words and phrases to the ones that yield the most valuable results.
Through keyword monitoring “listening”, you can determine where your audience may be at for certain products or pinpoint where general interest resides for your brand. This can eliminate some, not all of the trial and error of getting a social media campaign running. You can also use this technique to monitor customer service issues and answer questions about your product and services.Check out these social media stats
If you have any questions about this article please contact us here at [email protected] or call 719.633.5000. We would love to chat about assisting you in building your business online.
