Speaker 1: more and more businesses are jumping on the social listening bandwagon and liking it. In fact, 82% of businesses that do social listening say it's now a key part of their business planning. So if you want to get better at social listening to grow your business, or if you want to build a social listening strategy from scratch, listen up. Get it? Social listening? Listen up. Okay, so what is social listening? Now there are a million definitions out there and some are long and convoluted. But if you know me and my channel, I like to keep things simple. So here it is. Social listening is monitoring online conversations so you can make smarter business decisions. Now some people say social listening is just for social media, and others say it can also include conversations anywhere online. I prefer the anywhere online definition because if someone is saying something about me and it just happens to not be on social media, I still want to know about it. Okay, so what are we listening for? It's what people are saying about your products and services or your key employees or your brand overall or your competitors or your industry or all of it. It really depends on what's most important to you and we're going to dig more deeply into this really soon. So if you do social listening right, what do you get out of it? It turns out a lot. First, you can protect your brand reputation, especially if you find out some negative buzz out there that shouldn't be. You want to have a say in that conversation and hopefully turn things around. By extension, you'll improve customer service because you'll really be on top of people's comments and questions. And even when people don't have a customer service need, you'll still be engaging with people a whole lot more quickly and help really turn them into fans. This is the, I guess, turn it into fans gesture. You can also discover ways to improve your product or service. For example, let's say you have product X and through social listening, you hear a lot of people complaining about product X. That may be a signal to fix product X. Or maybe your product X is totally fine, but you hear that people are raving about your competitors product Y. So that could be a signal to see what is all the fuss about and transform your product X into a shiny new product Z. By the way, I can keep on going with this, but I started really late in the alphabet at X and I've run out of letters. You can also discover a gap to fill in your industry. People may be asking for something or talking about something that neither you nor your competitors are doing yet. And you could be the first to offer it because you were a good social listener. Social listening is also a great way to learn about your audience. And there are so many things you can find out. For example, whereabouts do they live? So you can geo target them better in ad campaigns or find out what they actually need. So you can offer the right products and services or find out what motivates them. So you can promote your products and services in the right way. Or what words do they use in the industry? So you can use those keywords and describe things in the same way people would think about them. Now it's easy to fall into the trap. And this is a trap I've fallen into of thinking that we already know our customers. What do we need social listening for? There's this famous, famous example of social listening with Ben and Jerry's. Now for the longest time, Ben and Jerry's naturally assumed that people are more likely to want ice cream when it's hot outside. Hot weather, cold treat makes sense. But through social listening, Ben and Jerry's picked up on something kind of odd. There was a noticeable uptick in social mentions in bad weather, especially on rainy days. That's because on rainy days, a lot of people want to get all cozy on their couch or in bed and watch TV or Netflix. And ice cream goes really well with that. And that was the inspiration for Ben and Jerry's ice cream flavor, Netflix and chilled. And by the way, I am a total Netflix and chilled gal. I used to scarf down a full pint of Ben and Jerry's every Saturday night until I gained 20 pounds. So I've cut back to every other week. Anyway, you can also discover new topics your audience is interested in and then fold that into your content. Boom, you're more relevant. You can also see keyword volumes and spikes so you can pick up on trends. You can also see your share of voice. We'll talk more about this soon. But share voice helps you see how much brand awareness you have compared to your competitors. So if your competitor has a much bigger share of voice, you can see what they're doing and then do your own version of that or something better. You can also find user generated content also called UGC. When people post cool stuff about you or your company, social listening will help you find it even if you're not tagged. And if you want to share that content on your own social media, you can ask permission to do so. You can also identify your biggest fans and influencers. You may already have an idea of who these people are, but social listening will solidify this for you so you can really make a point to thank them. You can also find top talent for your company. And really, as you use social listening to make smarter business decisions, your business should grow and you just may need a larger team. Now let's look at social listening tools. You have some free options, kind of, and paid options. So let's sift through all of this. Let's start with the free options. And if you're a regular to this channel, you know I love free. But when it comes to social listening, free will only get you so far. And if you're going to try the free route, I'd recommend a combination of Google Trends and Google Alerts to get someone plugged in. For instance, with Google Trends, you can see a few things. Like right here, we're seeing the top rising search queries on the web in the U.S. And here, what a surprise, chat GPT spelled two different ways is in the top rising search queries. So if any topics you see you can somehow fold into your content in a way that makes sense, give it a go. It is totally worth the try. And don't think it can't be done. For instance, Joshua Wiseman, who's a chef, came up with a chat GPT battle video that so far has 2.7 million views. You can also look for topic and search trends within your own industry. Like within the topic of LinkedIn Marketing, which is a topic I'm interested in, the top related search queries are for LinkedIn Learning, LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, and what a surprise, chat GPT. And you might ask, Brooke, why don't you take your own advice and do a video on chat GPT? I just might. It's just that I have this love-hate relationship with chat GPT. And right now I don't have the emotional bandwidth. Now for Google Alerts, you can add keywords that can be related to your company, your competitors, or your industry. And then you get email alerts when they pop up on the web. Now Google Alerts just looks at what's mentioned on websites and not on social media. And you won't be able to aggregate all this information into charts or graphs very easily to make decisions, but at least it can give you a taste of what's going on. Now I will say that if your business is still small and not a lot of people are talking about you quite yet, and you don't have the budget beyond free for listening tools right now, Google Trends and Google Alerts are good places to start. Okay, so now let's talk about the paid options. Prices for social listening tools are all over the place. And keep in mind that nearly all these tools also have a range of plans. So what I'm showing here are the general starting prices for decent listening tool capabilities. And I researched 20 different apps. Some of the apps are so pricey that not only do they do social listening, but they also do your laundry and cook your dinner. Or one would expect. Now let me show you one of the less expensive social listening apps that gets really good reviews. And that's Mentionlytics. Then I'm showing their basic starter plan. Now Mentionlytics is not a sponsor. They don't know I exist, but they have decent stuff to play with here. And I want to show you. And I really want you to see how these social listening tools work. So you can see the wide range of information that you can get, which really highlights the point that we need a strategy going in. And we'll be talking about strategy soon. Okay, so let's do a quick tour here. And this is the main dashboard. And on the left, you can set up what you want to listen for. For brand monitoring, I've set it up to look at outside media. In other words, websites and social media mentions that are happening outside of my own website or social media. And I'm looking to see who's talking about me and my company. And I've also set it up to look at my own media, like my own website, YouTube channel, and other social media. Now just below, I can check out what's going on with my competitors. And I've added BrandSwan. Now BrandSwan is a creative agency, and our services complement each other way more than compete. But since BrandSwan said it'd be okay for me to use them in this demo, I'm using them. But for drama's sake, let's pretend that BrandSwan and I are fierce competitors. More on that soon. Beyond competitors, I can see what's going on in the industry. Here I've added LinkedIn Marketing because LinkedIn Marketing is a huge part of what I do. So I can see what sort of subtopics within LinkedIn Marketing are getting a lot of buzz. Now we'll get back to LinkedIn Marketing and BrandSwan, the fierce competitor. But for now, let's just focus on my own brand. And you'll see that I have just my own boxes checked here. Now up here, you can look at different things like total mentions, and you can see the graphs to the right reflect that. Now if I click on social reach, the graphs change. And the same happens when I click on social engagement. You can even get granular and click on any of the points in the graphs to see every engagement and which exact posts they came from. And here you'll see that pretty much all of my social engagement comes from conversations sparked from my YouTube videos. Now sentiment analysis is interesting, but you have to be careful. Here it looks like only 49.5% of what's said about me and my brand is positive. 8.6% is negative, and the rest is neutral. Normally, if I were presented with such information, I would flip out. But fortunately, I've learned to remind myself that this is an AI program, and AI can't pick up on context or subtleties very well. So you have to take it with a grain of salt. Here's why. Let's click on negative here and let's look at the posts in question. Every post I'm seeing here has to do with people having trouble on their social media and asking me for advice. So they're not mad at me, they're mad at social media, and usually specifically mad at Facebook, which I totally get. You also have to be careful with AI, because they can't pick up on subtleties or irony or nuances of meaning. Like if something is described as wicked, that could either mean evil or awesome, depends on the context. But AI would automatically put it as a negative sentiment. Now do I sometimes have negative comments directed at me? Yes, I do. It usually has to do with the speed at which I talk. Recently, I got a comment about my neck wrinkles. Thank you. And by the way, if you're feeling positive sentiment towards this video so far, despite my neck wrinkles, it would mean the world to me if you hit the like button, because that really does tell YouTube to deliver this video to more people. Thank you. Now let's move on to word clouds, which are way more than just a fun graphic. Now with word clouds, the bigger the word, the more often it's mentioned. Now this word cloud shows everything mentioned about me on my own media, as well as outside media. But let's just say I just want to see outside media. I can change the filters, and you see the word cloud changes. And then if there's a word that piques your interest, you can click on that word and find out what mentions are tied to it. Like for example, what's with the word agenda, because I don't talk about agendas. So I click on it, and it turns out there's publicity for a webinar I'm doing this month. And now I know that I need to personally thank Michelle Knath, who's coordinating this webinar, for getting the word out. So thank you, Michelle. And there's a lot more below on this overview page on Mentionlytics, but I don't want to make this a Mentionlytics tutorial, so much as let me give you an overview of the most important possibilities. So the next thing I want to show you is share a voice, where we look at how much is said about me compared to my fierce competitor, BrandSwan. So when we get to the share a voice page, we'll scroll here, and it sure looks like I have a greater share of voice, but we really have to analyze this more. That's because a huge percentage of what's said about me is on specifically my YouTube channel, whether it's the videos I'm putting out, or people's comments, or my comments to people's comments. It's a lot of eggs in one basket. So if I change the filter and take my YouTube channel out of the equation, and then look at the whole rest of the whole internet, the percentages definitely change. It's closer to 50-50, but I believe there are two things that put BrandSwan ahead of me. First of all, I'm on the basic plan of Mentionlytics, so I have a limit of 10 social media accounts that I can actually attach to it for specific monitoring beyond what's out there on the general web. And I have more of my own accounts attached to Mentionlytics than BrandSwan's, so naturally it's going to look like I have more mentions. And second, and more important, it looks like BrandSwan just does a better job of branding themselves in terms of the feel of the brand. But I'm basing this not on share of voice, but on the word cloud on the overview page. We want to look at everything. So here's my word cloud, and here's BrandSwan's. Mine feels very business-like and more topic-oriented. BrandSwan's feels more human. And while I know I'm very human and my clients see me as human, BrandSwan does a better job of branding that way, and I can learn from them. Okay, another feature I like is Top Mentioners. It'd be really nice to know who is saying a lot about you so you can properly thank them and do other things to build a relationship. Or maybe there's someone actively hating on you, and it might be helpful for you to know about that too. Now obviously here my top mentioners are myself, but as I scroll down, I do see other names. You can also go into each instance and see what they said. I have found quite a few things that I did not know were out there. Now before we get into the social listening strategy, the last feature I want to show you is Top Keywords. Now for me, I want to look at top keywords within LinkedIn Marketing because that'll help me shape my content. Here are the top keywords, but they're kind of meaningless on their own. Business, hashtag, LinkedIn, video, social. These words are too broad and don't help me make focused content decisions. So what I'm going to do is click up here so we can see two adjacent words at a time, and check this out. Now this is all making a lot of sense, and you can also see a pattern here. There's lead generation, generate leads, generation 2023. Clearly a huge thing that's on people's minds is how to generate leads. And yes, when I do talk about LinkedIn Marketing, I talk about growing your business, but the words generate leads or lead generation should be a little bit more my vocabulary. Okay, so now that you see there are so many different things we can look at with social listening, we need a plan. First, set a goal. You want to write a list of questions that you want the answers to, whether the questions about your own brand, or your competitors, or your industry. And this is going to help make sure that you're focusing on getting the answers on the right things, not drowning in all the data. And questions might be, what are your current customers saying for customer service opportunities? Who are your brand's fans? Are people talking about you at all? Or do you need to beef up your brand awareness? It's okay if you need to, we all start from zero. How do you stack up against the competition? Are there any gaps in your competitor's social media strategy that you can fill? What are hot topics in your industry to help you create better content? And the list goes on. The key is to write a list. Now based on the questions you want answers to, figure out what keywords you'll need to monitor to tease out this information. And obviously as you're doing social listening, you're going to discover other keywords so you can obviously tweak your strategy as needed as you go on. You'll also want to know how far back you want to take the data. Do you want to look back a month, a quarter, a year? Keep in mind that if you're a larger company, you're probably getting tons of mentions every single day. So most of your decisions could be made within mentions within a shorter time frame. You also want to establish benchmarks if you want to compare yourself to your competitors. So as you're just getting started with social listening, make a note specifically of how your competitors are doing in those areas you want to focus on. And then use those numbers to measure yourself against as you continue with social listening. You also want to have a strategy for responding to comments, reviews, and other online feedback. Obviously when you first set up social listening, you might see comments from six months ago and it might be a little too late to respond unless you like awkward situations. I don't like them. But obviously you can act on new feedback as it comes in. In general for negative comments and reviews, you want to publicly respond within 24 hours and then try to take the rest of the conversation offline. That's the general rule. And for positive comments and reviews, you want to thank them and show your support within 24 hours because these folks should be acknowledged too. Finally, you want to have a schedule for checking your social listening tool and how much time you'll spend analyzing the data. And you'll want to block out the time in the calendar. I don't know about you, but I need to put things in the calendar for things to happen. So how often should you log in for your social listening app? Let's say you're a really small brand. Almost no one is talking about you yet. On occasion you get a Facebook comment and you already get that notification that you don't really need to use your social listening tool yet for the customer service aspect of it, but you still want to check out your industry and your competitors. In that case, it's not quite as time-sensitive and maybe once a month would be helpful for you to plug in. And keep in mind that seasons change, trends come and go, so once a month should be often enough for you to pick up on any changes. But if you're a larger brand with lots of activity, chances are you're going to want to plug in every day and spend 10 to 20 minutes every day responding to comments and keeping on top of other data that you're collecting. This may seem like a lot, but if you boil your social listening down into watch, analyze, and act, then you're on the right track. Now social listening is just one part of your marketing strategy. You also need to create an easy enough system so you can post consistently on your social media while staying sane, even if you're super busy. So check out my video here in the top right corner where I show you my favorite, favorite consistency hacks that I use. Thank you so much and see you in the next video.