125: Why Consider Social Listening Strategy & Some Tool Tips For You

If you're merely sharing on social media and not clueing into social listening, then it's likely your brand isn't powered up on social channels. There are way too many users on each social media channel and it's impossible to listen in on all the conversations without some help. As John Gregory Olson and Jayme Soulati suggest in this episode of The Heart of Marketing, it's also important to know your objectives when you use social media. It's also important to better understand your customer so you can offer the right goods and services your customer is demanding right there on Twitter. Every brand is suffering from negative customer sentiment; well, we only hear about the negative stories that impact a brand, right? The airline industry is one such vertical market truly suffering from poor customer service, irate customers and mission statements that fail to reach the frontline. If you enact social listening with tools, your brand can get ahead of the negativity with some basics. In this episode, we review a few tools to help you select social listening tools that are right for your objectives and budget. Take a look at this PC Magazine article with a plethora of options. Then, look into Sprout Social, one of the paid favorites, followed by Hootsuite, Clicky and Buffer. The tools available are numerous, too numerous to count. Ultimately, it's going to depend on the size of your brand or agency, the number of clients/companies you're listening for, the budget you have to spend on these expenses, and the demands by the client in a reporting mechanism.