What is social listening? Simply, it's the process of monitoring your social media to see which channels are garnering the best results. There are many rules for what you "should" be doing on social media, but what works for one brand might not work for another given the personality of your consumer base, the type of product you're selling, etc. A good social listening tool should be able to help you out of the weeds - to help you sort the data at hand and give you meaningful insights into what's working and what's not.
Here are five tools we believe can help improve social listening and more.
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Sysomos - This tool gives you instant and unlimited access to all social conversations in one integrated interface called Heartbeat. From there you can see who's driving the discussion ranked by age, gender, location, etc. The tool also allows you to communicate with key influencers.
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Social Mention - Whereas some social monitoring sites are costly, this one is free. Social Mention provides a dialed-down scan of all of your brand's mentions "across the universe," scouring social accounts as well as blogs, news sites, videos and more, and ranks them in terms of strength, sentiment, passion, and reach. All you need to do is visit the site and type in your key terms.
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TweetReach - TweetReach measures how far your tweets travel, and can tell you which of your followers have the most influence. The tool analyzes data within the interface, giving you little tips along the way, such as "User x receives the most retweets at 4 pm," helping you target who to reach, how, and when.
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ViralHeat - This tool comes in subscription sizes tailored to all businesses, big or small. It integrates with Google Analytics to provide reports on demographics, influencers, and traffic activity. Like the other services, above, it analyzes the sentiment behind the mentions to show you what's doing well, or what's perhaps hurting your reputation.
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DataSift - DataSift gives you real-time analyses of how your social sites are performing, but it also contains an archive of the history of your mentions. It used to serve as Twitter's built-in data analyzer, but is now independent. Its data categorization tool, VEDO, can be trained to look for insights that matter to you.
How do you do social listening? Leave us your tips and tricks here.