How We Listen To Our Social Media Market

How We Listen To Our Social Media Market

Before we ever learned how to speak years ago, we first listened to what we hear around us. Just like in social media, we listen to our market first before we engage in the community. Social media listening serves many functions.

Listening enables you to discover real-time and relevant consumer conversations such as those who are talking about your brand, what are they saying about you, where is your brand being talked about, why is your brand being talked about and when are they talking about you. It’s not only about your business but also to topics related to you and your industry.  If you know all these, you’ll have the strategy to engage your stakeholders. How do we listen to them in social media?

Here are a variety of tools out there.

•    Blog searches (Technorati, Google Blog search, Twingly, BlogPulse)

•    Social network search (Facebook, Twitter)

•    Search-based insights (Google Analytics, Google Trends)

•    Aggregator (SocialMention, Google Reader, Google Alerts)



There are many premium tools too like Radian 6, Collective Intellect, Heartbeat, and Trackur. We practice listening and yes, we love those tools. But how can you keep up with so many channels to listen to?   One solution is having a social media listening dashboard. Let’s say these dashboards can come in three forms.

1.    RSS Aggregator

With Really Simple Syndication (RSS), the feeds from different channels can be compiled into your Google Reader, your aggregator. For example, get the RSS feeds from Google News, Google Blog Search, Twitter, and Forums. Add them to your Reader and all you have to do now is simply open it every day. All in one place!

2.    Social Mention

Social Mention also has an RSS that can be added to Google Reader but it may conflict with existing ones because Social Mention also tracks tweets and blogs. It also includes the sentiments of those who are mentioning your search term.

3.    Dashboard Maker

Premium tools already provide you with a comprehensive monitoring dashboard but if you prefer free dashboards, you can try Netvibes. It can also compile more than the RSS like Web and Image search, and all other features.

Using dashboard saves resources especially time. It’s like filtering them all to a funnel. There is a lot of information out there that we listen every day so it’s up to us to make it efficiently hearable. When we hear them, we address their needs and engage with our social media market.