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Social listening has been a major marketing strategy in the recent years, but primarily for larger brands. It’s not that smaller businesses didn’t need it — the price point just didn’t make much sense for what they’d receive.
But today, things have changed. Tools have not only become more affordable, but the number of active social media users has grown tremendously, almost at a faster rate than people getting new mobile phones. The kind of data that is available now is massive and overwhelming.
There are a lot of reasons behind the growth. Facebook and Twitter are getting into the original TV and broadcasting battle. Publishers and media companies have focused heavily on social sharing from their websites. More businesses are getting hip to social media marketing. And, the young are getting older, able now to not only own phones, but also access social media sites.
With this new influx of usage, measuring social activity has become an art as much as a science. People are using social media so much so that they probably don’t realize they’re using it to voice an opinion, share news with friends, read reviews on new places, etc.
As a small business owner, you need to see what these conversations are about. Not only do you need to see your brand mentions, but online conversations are a gold mine of new data that could provide valuable insight for future strategies.
Here is a list of some top social media listening tools you can sign up for, all varied in pricing and features.
Google Alerts
We all love free stuff, right? One of Google’s most beloved and yet underappreciated tools is Alerts, which sends you an email of automated search results for whatever keyword you’re looking for. You can set up alerts for up to 1,000 terms and have the results emailed to you daily, weekly or whenever a new results occurs.
But you get what you pay for. Google Alerts only does searches on sites that get crawled by Google. So, there may not be as many Facebook results, hardly any LinkedIn, Pinterest or Instagram results and a spackling of Twitter results. There’s also no sort of data visualization or collection either.
BuzzSumo
This tool is all-around a reliable, inexpensive, feature-packed option for business of all sizes. Starting at only $79/mo for up to 5,000 mentions, you can set up alerts not only for mentions of your brand name, but also your competitors’ and other search terms. If you’re a soap maker, maybe you’d want to set up alerts for your brand name, a local competitor, local markets accepting new vendors, any mentions of favorite scents and more.
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