We spend a lot of time on social media. Whether it’s scrolling through news feeds, posting pictures, liking comments, or sharing our experiences, some of us spend hours on these platforms. That’s one of a few reasons why businesses are shifting their focus towards improving customer service on social media.

Creating a profile and posting content on social media platforms is not enough these days. You have to actively find customers and provide services to them. For this, one of the best strategies is social listening.

Today, we will discuss 7 ways to stay on top of social media mentions.

7 Ways To Use Social Listening For Your Business

It all boils down to a few things, including:

• Setting up and tracking conversations about your brand online.
• Finding messages directed to you.
• And responding accordingly to each message.

Let’s see how you can achieve these things in more detail:

Find The Social Network(s) You Want To Listen In On

Before you dive into social listening, consider the social media platforms you are on? Do they align with your brand? Does your target audience hang out on them?

For social listening, choose the channels your customers are most active on. For example, the younger audience tends to hang out on Facebook and Instagram. LinkedIn is great for B2B and older audiences.

Focus on quality. First, establish good social listening on a couple of platforms. Then, extend yourself. This will help you understand the best way to use it for your business.

Choose The Social Listening Tool You Want To Use

If a person tags you on social media, you’ll be notified. However, if they don’t tag you, you won’t have a direct way of knowing if they did it. Only their followers can see these posts, not your team.

Sure, you can manually search these conversations, but it would take a lot of time. This is where social media listening tools come in.

They do all the heavy lifting for you by tracking, monitoring, and notifying you when conversations are happening.

A few popular options are:

1. Google Alerts: Using this tool, you can monitor the web for brand mentions, keywords, and phrases. This simple tool is good for you if you are just getting started with social listening.

2. Hootsuite: It’s another popular option in the social game. It lets you monitor keywords and phrases across all major social networks, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Google+.
3. Mention: It helps you keep track of brand mentions on social networks, blogs, websites and forums and all in one easy-to-use inbox-like user interface.
4. Falcon: This tool does more than social listening. It can help you with engagement, publishing, managing analytics and customer data.

Set Up Alerts And Notifications For Real-Time Updates

This is a great way to find conversations online. When you receive real-time updates, you can participate in conversations relating to your brand.

Pay attention to the ones that have your brand name because they are so important. For example, if we talk about our business, the most important alert would be Blue Waves Digital. Of course, we would also pay attention to the misspellings of our company’s name that are being discussed online.

Other alerts can be for brand slogans, your CEO’s name, industry keywords, and campaign names or keywords. Also, pay attention to alerts of your competitors’ names.

Once you are set up to track conversations online, get involved in them. Now, there are some conversations you should just like. On the flip side, others need more engagement from you like customer service and customer complaints. So choose which one to participate in wisely.

Respond To Customer Requests

A major portion of consumers uses a company’s social media channel for customer service. But not all companies respond to these customers on social media.

So first, make a habit of responding as quickly as possible. Then take practical measures to address them.

On a side note, Twitter is an important platform for social listening. Check out if it’s important for you or not.

Handle Customer Complaints

Many customers turn to social media after a bad experience. And like customer requests, many of those customers don’t get a response from companies.

That’s a surefire way to turn away customers. Instead, address the complaint as quickly as possible and apologize.

Yes, apologize. Even though it sounds weird, it works. Customers who complain are more willing to forgive a company that offers an apology than being offered compensation.

Acknowledge Positive Feedback

When someone criticizes you, you either resolve their issue or apologize. Similarly, acknowledge and appreciate the positive feedback. Whether it’s someone sharing your blog post or recommending your services, the simple act of just saying “thank you” goes a long way.

You can found examples where users have purchased a product based on a recommendation from someone they are following. So if you make a habit of promoting happy customers online, your business will grow faster.

Be Proactive In Social Listening

How about paying attention to brand mentions proactively? If you solve a customer’s problem before they know about it, it will retain a lot of customers for you.

Let’s say you sell an SEO tool. If you are updating it in a couple of days, being proactive can mean sharing this information with your audience.

So how much attention do you pay to social listening? Let me know in the comments!