How To Use Social Listening To Leverage Customer Conversations

Read the latest blog from Robert Clegg about Social Listening. Social media never sleeps, nor do the conversations happening around your brand. How can you make social listening a key part of your social media strategy? Robert Clegg shares his insight.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of listening to and analyzing conversations happening online about specific topics and keywords.In fact, social listening isn’t just a social media tool, it’s also:

• A content marketing tool
• A lead generation tool
• A market research tool for businesses
• An influencer discovery tool
• A customer service tool
• A competitive analysis and monitoring tool

Ways to Jumpstart Your Social Listening Game

So, what does the day-to-day of social listening look like? Robert Clegg suggests he following three ways.

Keywords: First of all, part of our strategy (and yours) should focus on finding relevant keywords and keyword phrases people use when searching for your brand. This also includes searches for your product or services.

Engage: Lastly, Rob Clegg suggest that you have to plan to intelligently respond to the conversations you uncover online. You will likely uncover all kinds of conversations around your brand or keywords. Complaints, compliments, recommendations, reviews … make sure you have an engagement strategy to address each one.

Tools to Uphold Your Social Listening Objectives

• Google Alerts is a powerful tool provided by Google that allows you to track anything you’d like, your company’s name, competitors’ mentions, or trending topics. Once you’ve decided on a keyword to track, you can set up email alerts and even use advanced operators in the search box for better results.
• Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media tool that lets you monitor social media mentions in real time, allowing you to respond to customers right away.
• Quora is essentially a question and answer (Q&A) website where you can track what people are asking and saying about any particular topic. For example, you can ask questions like “What’s trending in the industry?” and see what most people are saying, or choose to sit by the sidelines and track what they’re saying about specific things with updates to your Quora feed.

At the end of the day, people are out there talking about your business. It’s your job to find those conversations and guide them in a fruitful direction. How are you using social listening at your company?

Additional reading:

Robert Clegg is fascinated with marketing. He loves experimenting with different social media strategies, watching how audiences prefer to engage and helping brands to devise the best strategies to reach their audiences. Get essential tips you need for your small and growing businesses on the Robert Clegg website here. Check out Robert Clegg‘s essential checklist to help you get the most out of Social Media here. You can also read the latest Robert Clegg news here.

Growing your business

Here is the new blog of Robert Clegg. Robert Clegg shares some practical tips to help you grow your customer base.

Get to know your customers

Understand your customer’s needs and develop products and services that meet those needs. You can gain insight into your customers by personalising your services and encouraging them to provide you with feedback.

Offer great customer service

Ensure your customer service is exceptional and go the extra mile when you can. Your customers will not only remember great service they will also be more likely to refer other people to you.

Nurture existing customers and look for new opportunities

Have strategies in place to nurture existing customers, such as staying in contact with them via an e-newsletter or letting them know about promotional events ahead of time.At the same time, look for opportunities to get more work and build your customer base. Make sure you find the right balance between nurturing customers and finding new ones.

Use social media

Social media is a powerful tool to promote your business to potential customers and gain valuable insight through ‘social listening’. Through social listening you can find out what customers are saying about you, gain insight into their behaviour, identify keywords and trends that appeal to your target market and so improve your customer service. Social media can help you to build your business profile and attract new customers.

Attend networking events

Invest time to build your networks – it’s not what you know but who you know. Networking allows you to build relationships with other people and encourage them to refer customers to you through word of mouth.

Give back to your community

Building brand awareness in your local community is a great way to attract new business. Consider sponsorship or participating in a community event to raise your business profile. Learn more about Robert Clegg‘s online marketing strategies here.

Measure what works and refine your approach as you go

You should monitor where your customers are coming from in order to measure whether your marketing activities are successful or not. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Refine your approach if something is not working and focus more time on the activities that achieve the best results.

About Robert Clegg

Robert Clegg is a professor where he teaches Direct and Online Marketing. More about Robert Clegg on his about.me page here. Alternatively, you can also follow Robert Clegg‘s Quora page here to gain and share knowledge about business and marketing.

Why TikTok Will Never Die

Welcome to Robert Clegg’s blog. Robert Clegg is a marketing professional with a decade of experience on both the client and agency side of marketing. In today’s blog, Robert shares how companies and brands can create viral marketing content on platforms like TikTok. Let’s get started!

TikTok is the newest trend in social media with more than 1.5 billion downloads on the App Store and Google Play and more than 500 million active monthly users. The platform consists of 15- and 60-second user-recorded videos that allow for in-app editing and integration with the other major social players. If your business is ready to try TikTok, here are types of content to get you started.

Creating Content on TikTok

Even if your brand isn’t well-known, you can still effectively use TikTok for marketing. The two ingredients that generally lead to TikTok content going viral are pets and children. Remember, TikTok isn’t the place for squeaky-clean first impressions and fake smiles. It’s a place for authentic entertainment, humor, and fun.

Curate and Share Content on TikTok

While TikTok’s nature is fun, playful, and casual, it takes some real thought and creativity to produce content that delivers on that premise. Brands especially need to plan their content to get the best return on their efforts. Nike has taken an interesting approach to TikTok. Search the hashtag #nike to see the real marketing magic. Read Robert Clegg‘s Guide to the Social Media here.

Develop Influencer-Created Content on TikTok

Like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, your brand can use influencer marketing to expand your reach. Influencers on TikTok have varying numbers of followers, and therefore, varying degrees of influence. Generally, the more followers an influencer has, the more expensive they are to work with. However, the ROI has the potential to be tremendous. As a brand, you can approach relevant TikTok influencers and propose a working relationship with them but it’s important to be strategic about whom you partner with. If your brand sells beauty accessories, working with a video game influencer isn’t the best fit. Find influencers who work within your niche and whose personalities align with your brand’s values.

TikTok is here and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. So get familiar with the app and have some fun! If you already have a TikTok account, what type of content do you share on the platform? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

About Robert Clegg

Robert Clegg holds a BS, Marketing and a Director where he manages the company’s Digital Strategy and Analytics Team. Learn more about Robert Clegg here. Alternatively, you can follow Robert Clegg on Twitter here for more business and social media marketing strategy here.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

  • Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
  • Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

  • Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
  • What topics do you think you’ll write about?
  • Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
  • If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

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