How to Create a Free Social Media Listening Strategy

Your brand's success depends on your social media reputation. A strong social media reputation can bring many benefits to your business. You can increase brand awareness and learn valuable information about your customers to improve your products or services.

Some internet users take initiative to present themselves online in a way that is appealing to specific audiences. However, others embrace the open sharing of information and don't limit what they share. 

Social media and search engines play an important role in building a brand’s online reputation. Many users are constantly refining and changing their privacy settings, using VPNs, customizing who can view certain updates, and removing any unwanted information that they find online.

In this article, we will discuss the importance of social media reputation management and how to set up a free social listening strategy on the platforms that matter most to your brand.

What is social media reputation management?

Social media reputation management is the process of managing and monitoring user-generated content on social media. These types of social listening can be used to impact the perception of your business or brand. It includes online reputation management, reputation repair, and review response.

To be able to respond to conversations, you need to be able to hear them. Social media monitoring should be set up immediately. 

Social listening strategy

A social listening strategy goes beyond social monitoring to better understand brand-centric conversations on social media. Social listening is a proactive, tactical technique. Additionally, social listening provides the insight and analysis required to create a social marketing strategy.

There are six ways brands use social listening to achieve their business goals:

• Obtaining feedback on your products/services
• Identifying brand advocates or influencers
• Improving customer care
• Spying on the competition
• Figuring out which social channel your customers use the most
• Attracting leads

Twitter social listening

Benefits

• Most active business owners on a social media platform
• Best trending sections
• Instant notification for followed keywords

Cons

• Most fake profiles
• Limited character count
• Most trolls

Twitter will always notify you if someone tags you in tweets, comments under your posts, or replies to your tweet. Although that feature is wonderful, it doesn't give you a complete picture of all mentions.

This is because not all tweets that mention your company include account tags. You won't be able to find all tweets about your brand unless you search for them yourself.

Some brands only use your Twitter account to address any issues, crises, or complaints. Twitter can do more than just respond to issues and crises. It can also build human connections which is a valuable marketing activity for any brand.

Allow Twitter Notifications

First, ensure that you have set up your Twitter account to receive notifications when you are mentioned. If you have the Twitter app installed, you can get notifications via email, the web, or your phone. To enable this feature, log in to your account and navigate to the notification settings.

Notifications will only be sent to you if someone @mentions your name. You won't get notifications from the native Twitter app for untagged mentions, or if someone mentions you in a #hastag. There are options to track both these Twitter "mentions".

Follow Mentions on Twitter

Now it's time for you to search for mentions. Let's now take a look at the best way to find mentions on Twitter. You can start by searching Twitter for "Company name". All public tweets that include your company name will be displayed. If you wish to view the most recent tweets, click on the Latest tab.

You can use Twitter search to get a general overview of the people who are tweeting about your company. It will show you both tweets that mention your company without @username and those that include it. You can use Twitter’s Advanced Search to get more precise results. This allows you to create custom searches that are based on specific terms, dates, people, and places. Twitter allows you to save up to 25 searches. This makes it much easier to retrieve information, especially when searching for niche brands.

LinkedIn Social Listening 

Benefits

• Most relevant
• Most CEO/Business owners
• Relevant conversations about business growth

Cons

• Constant irrelevant sales attempts (Spam connections)
• Difficult to get noticed
• Longer time investment to optimize your profile

Businesses can monitor LinkedIn to gain real-time insight into their target audience, products, and services. They then use the results to improve their marketing strategies.

LinkedIn is a great place to have conversations about your industry, your brand, and topics that interest you. LinkedIn can be used to plan the timing and inspire new content.

Social listening on LinkedIn can be used in a variety of ways. These include: Identifying buyers that are actively looking for products and services. Discovering companies that are actively involved in projects and initiatives. Learn what content resonates well with your customers.

Follow LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn groups make it easy for content marketers to not have to know what topics they are looking for. Your audience will do all the talking. You can monitor conversations to see which ones are most popular among group members.

To join a LinkedIn group, click on Request To Join. Request to Join may be reviewed by group managers. They may also request additional information to ensure you meet their membership criteria. The group is responsible for approving your membership. Once you have been accepted into the group, you will be notified so that you can begin contributing.

Follow Hashtags on LinkedIn

LinkedIn, like other social media platforms, sends notifications about your profile activity. Manual tracking is the act of checking LinkedIn for mentions about your brand.

This approach is time-consuming, and may not give you real-time insights. You will also have a backlog if you do not log in to your account for several days. It may be difficult to find relevant mentions.

Facebook social listening

Benefits

• Largest user group
• Facebook groups
• Video is gaining traction

Cons

• User profiles are for personal use non-business related
• Organic posting has no reach
• No trending option

This type of monitoring social media can be very beneficial to your business in many ways.

The most popular use cases for Facebook Group Monitoring:

• Harmful activity detection
• Management of crisis and communities
• For better customer service, real-time notifications
• Get insights into the opinions of your customers about your brand

You can also use the top posts from your Facebook group to point you in the right direction when trying to get leads. Social listening, for example, will tell you what keywords are hot right now. It will also help you target your audience when they search for keywords.

Follow Facebook Groups

Facebook monitoring covers posts and pages. Facebook Group posts are also covered.

Your team can monitor Facebook groups for keywords associated with certain topics. Be alerted if there is a spike in negative sentiment. Find new marketing possibilities.

Insights allow you to monitor conversations on specific Facebook pages and Instagram accounts. To analyze mentions about specific topics and find out how people are talking, track comments and hashtags.

Monitor Facebook Hashtags

Facebook has a native system to notify Pages. Go to your Page, and click on the settings menu at the upper right. You will find Notifications in the left sidebar.

You can view all kinds of options in the notifications menu. There are four options for notification delivery. There are four options for notification delivery: via Facebook, via Email Messages, and via Text messages.

You can also select which types of interaction or engagement you want to disable notifications for.

• Page mentions
• Review of the day
• Comment on your posts with new comments
• If you have other team members who are able to edit your comments
• You have added new subscribers to your events
• You can get new followers to your page
• Likes to a new post
• A page with new likes
• If you are a member of a team rather than an administrator, you can edit your posts
• You can get new shares for your posts

Each of these can be turned on or off separately. You might disable post edits if you are the sole social media manager of a page with a lot of activity. This will let you know that you are editing a post. You can also disable likes because you cannot respond to likes. However, you can still respond by keeping new comments, reviews, mentions, and followers.

Monitoring Your Social Reputation

It is easy to do social listening if you set up notifications on each platform. Social listening is about joining the conversation.

These are four ways you can join the conversation and give your audience the attention they want.

• Make it personal. Two things should be done in your responses: 1) Use the name of the person and 2) Provide a genuine, personal response that enriches the conversation. "Thank you" doesn't quite cut it.
• Give (true) appreciation. Do yourself a favor by using the ideas and opinions of others. Tell them how you felt to increase loyalty and trust.
• Be real. Meaning, respond immediately or as quickly as possible. A brand's average response time to a user via social media is 10 hours, while an average user will wait only 4 hours.
• Offer incentives. A majority of customers who mention your brand are searching for discounts or deals. You can offer something in exchange for a review or a nice comment.

People are talking about your business all the time. You have to identify those conversations and lead them in the right direction. Are you doing everything needed for social listening in your company?

You can gain valuable insight into the experiences of your customers and get a better understanding of their needs. Although it can be difficult to read negative reviews about your business, it is the only way to learn how you can improve your service and provide better products for your customers.

Do you want to increase your online reputation and ratings? Contact NewReputation to get outstanding social media reputation management services that meet your budget and needs.