How to Set-up your social listening tool

There are dozen of social listening tools but you need to find something that will work for you. Before we launched our own tool, we have been playing with several tools and have come up with our social media basic requirements to become effective marketers.

Basically these are the thing you will need from a basic Social Listening tool to become effective.

1. The Social Listening Tool should have a general keyword search which can deliver real time social insights. It should be able to non-stop monitor your monitored keywords.
2. The Listening tool should be able to provide timely reports and analytics with specific filters by source, sentiment, language, country, author, tag, title, snippet, time, date, url, emoticon,and more.
3. The Listening Tool should be able to provide a dashboard to show or display live updates on monitored keywords that should show sentiment, frequency and volume of monitored keywords.
4. The Tool should be robust enough to listen to the major sources of noise, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Youtube, Reddit, New Sites, Blogs, and the general Web.
5. The Social Listening Tool should be able monitor Brand reputation for your own brand and even your competitor’s.
6. The Tools should be able to monitor and explore personal reputation and give timely alerts.
7. The Listening Tool should be able to help monitor and protect Local Business Reputation best for hotels, restaurants, clinics, dealers and general business types that get online reviews.
8. Boolean Search is a must to make search queries more flexible to find the most relevant search results. Think of it as refining generic search results adding more detail and filters to get what you want.
9. Social selling is possible and generation of leads is critical to any business growth. Monitor and listen to what people are looking for, discover products and niches that may help you solve a problem and grow your business at the same time.
10. Social Customer care starts the moment you listen to your customers online, engaging and changing that negative sentiment into a positive one and gaining a long term brand loyal customer is the goal of any business.
11. Social Mentions are keywords or phrases and possibly even sentences. Protect your IP or your brand from copyright theft.
12. You should be able to generate the top list of your Influencers with reach and ranking to find the valuable influencers that matter to your brand.
13. Keyword cloud should be generated to find out what people are generally talking about when they talk about a specific topic. Find the words that describe your keyword and give it value.

How many keywords is enough for social listening?

It is always best to get as many keywords to your account. There are several variations that can be done with setting your campaign alerts.

Here is possible list that you can prioritize for keyword usage.

1. Brand Name
2. Brand Owners Name or Key Officers (CEO, CTO, COO, President, Managing Director etc)
3. Brand URL – monitor mentions or discover sites linking to your website or mentions that maybe converted to link backs to your site that can help boost SEO.
4.  Brand Social Media Accounts (Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Instagram, etc) Pays to be consitent with your name over social media so it will be easier to find.
5. Branded Hashtags (Owned and Competitors)
6. Brand Name + Adjective  (BrandX “Sale”, BrandY “Promos”, BrandZ “sucks”)

The list of possible combinations are endless, choose one that suits you needs, the benefit of doing keyword refinement with your search and set-up is that it will save you time and energy when news about you goes viral or volume spike up.

Here is a sample we did about listening to “what were people craving for” taken last december 2018 for the last 90 days.

Social Listening – What is it about?