Speaker 1: What are the top six social listening tools which you can use for your brand today? Well, in this video, you guys are going to find out. I'm Ben and welcome to Social Genie. We're a digital marketing agency, which specializes in helping people like you grow their brand or business through the power of digital marketing. Now, if you're new around here and you do want more tips, tricks, and hacks to grow your brand and business, feel free to subscribe to the channel by hitting that subscribe button and turning that notification bell on. And with that being said, let's dive in. Okay, so let me just set the table. What is social listening? Well, social listening is a great way to keep tabs on what your customers and prospects have to say about your business, product, service, content, support, and much, much more. Social listening encompasses all elements of what your customer is saying about your brand online. So this could be social media mentions, it could be forums, it could be reviews, it could be articles. All these are different mentions of your brand and they can be both of positive sentiment or negative sentiment. And the idea with social listening is you can listen for these different outcomes and then social monitoring actually involves reacting to specific comments or specific reviews in real time before they can go viral and actually permanently damage your brand, which can happen in some cases. Interestingly, with social listening, you can even monitor competitors and industries. So let's say a competitor has just launched a new product or a new feature and they're getting some incredibly good feedback and some incredibly good reviews. That might be something you need to be aware of, especially if you've got a product development team, because then you can inform them to create something similar for your product. But this can also happen conversely. Let's say one of your competitor's products suddenly went down or it had some major issue, or there was a real negative issue which happened with your competitor's product or service. That could potentially be an opportunity for you to actually increase your advertising budget and take advantage of that opportunity. Now, this is all the power of social listening tools. Now, before I dive into the top six tools, let's just go over a quick strategy and the prerequisites for what you need for a social listening strategy. Okay. So the first tip is to deeply understand your audience and have empathy towards them. Now, the simplest way I found of doing this is to actually create buyer personas for your business. So this is an ideal customer avatar, which you can use to actually really deeply understand the customer, where they actually get their content currently, what are their likes, dislikes, pain points, et cetera. Now, the second tip is to think about what keywords would people be associating with your brand. Of course, this could be the brand name, the product name, the feature name. It could also be specific details about your industry. These are all potential keywords, which you can use later in a social media listening tool. And my final tip is to develop a strategy to react to a lot of these social media insights. Now, this could be something as simple as responding to each review or negative comment within at least 24 hours, or it could be something deeper, which you can gain from the insights of tracking a lot of sentiments across the internet. So let's say your product has a swath of negative reviews regarding a certain product feature, or you need the power to then speak to your product development team and say to them, guys, we need to fix this feature ASAP. So this is all part of what you could use as a social listening strategy. Okay. So now let's dive into my top six social listening tools. The first one we're going to dive into is called Buffer. Now this is a free publishing tool for individuals to get started with social media and Buffer is generally used for scheduling content across all your social media platforms in one place. However, the beautiful thing about Buffer is you can also respond to comments from the different social media platforms all in one place, which does make it a lot easier. However, I wouldn't call this product a pure play social listening tool, but it does have some elements of social listening. Now my second social listening tool is called Brandwatch. Now this one is really a pure play social listening tool. So as you can see here, Brandwatch tracks the market sentiment and the analysis for your particular brand. So you can see what words are associated with your brand. So for example, we can see here, eco cup environment, stop jobs. And this creates a type of word cloud, which the larger words are the most popular ones, the most mentions, and the smaller words are the least mentions regarding your particular product or service. And that can be fantastic to use because you can quickly look at that and say, okay, there's a big negative words just popped up regarding our brand or business. We need to react fast and fix that ASAP. Now the beautiful thing about this platform is you can also use a multi-year analysis to track trends over time. This is quite useful. I also recommend Google Trends. That can be a very useful application. It's a free application you can go on, and that can be very useful to track your brand mentions, especially if you've got a very large brand. Okay, social listening tool number three is Falcon.io. None of these companies are sponsors, by the way, these are just companies which I've discovered online. So Falcon.io social media listening tools allows users to monitor brands across a hundred million online sources, allowing them to see who's talking about them and when pick out emerging trends and bring real meaning to those conversations. Now, the interesting thing about Falcon is it uses artificial intelligence to detect peaks and troughs in your social media data. Now this helps to identify unusual levels of activity because that's what you're looking for. You're not looking for the general noise. You're looking for these big signals that pop up. They can be positive and negative. And really the negative ones are the ones that you need to react to fast in order to protect your brand. Now team members can also be automatically notified about negative comments and then they can react accordingly. So that is a major benefit of this platform. Now the cost of this platform is a little bit more expensive than the other platforms. So you're looking at around $100 per month. Now number four on my list is Sprout Social. Now this is an all encompassing social media management platform. So if I dive into the different product features, you've got engagement, publishing, scheduling, analytics, employee advocacy, and of course listening, which is the part we're going to dive into in this video. So you can uncover business critical insights with social listing. Now I'll just walk you through their tool and how it works. So you can integrate with all your different social media channels and platforms. So Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, even Reddit, YouTube, and of course the general internet, then you can find intelligence by looking at related hashtags and keywords. So for example, here you've got related keywords, coffee followed by run long contact weekend, and you can look at related hashtags to your business, et cetera. So that can help you find out which hashtags are trending with regards to your business or which hashtags are just trending in general in your industry. Now, the interesting thing with this platform is you can also engage with influencers and thought leaders in your industry, and you can set up these keywords with related phrases and combine them together for real detailed insights. Now the general dashboard is quite interesting. It has what's called share of voice. So you can see 62% of the volume, coffee cabbing, 24% said this, 14% said this. You can see the total engagements, the average engagements per message, offers, impressions, and positive sentiment. So 55% they are there, and you can see if that goes negative, which is important to track. Sprout Social is a great platform to use overall. In terms of the cost of the platform, you're looking at around $89 per month if you want to integrate this platform. Okay. Onto platform number five, and that is called Mention. So Mention is free for individuals with up to three social accounts, limited to 1000 mentions per month. Now this can be a great place to get started if you just want to get a feel for what social listening tools are like. Now the platform allows you to listen to multiple conversations across all different platforms on the internet, and then organizes them into what they're called smart folders. Now you can also filter key conversations to help you understand the trends a little bit deeper. And the beautiful thing about this platform is you can schedule automated reports to get straight in your inbox. So you can see, okay, this is the sentiment. This is what's trending. This is what isn't. Okay. And finally, platform number six is called Brand24. Now Brand24 starts at $49 per month for individuals tracking a single brand. Now this tool is a pure play social listening tool. So it's not just a scheduling tool and they've just added on social listening. This is built from the ground up. Now, the interesting thing with this platform is there's a mentions feed where you can quickly find out what people are saying about your brand in real time. And there's also a discussion volume chart, which helps you identify sudden changes in activity levels. And they also have customized alerts, such as only receiving notifications on negative brand mentions from blogs with more than 300,000 monthly visits. Now this is quite useful also. Okay. So that's my top six social listening tools. And if you're sitting there now and you're thinking, Ben, that sounds really interesting, but I need help with my brand or business to grow our marketing through the power of these social listening tools, or even just a general digital marketing strategy, or if that sounds like you, feel free to reach out to us in the description below, I'll leave a link with our email and website. Email us and we can get in touch and set up a consultation to put you guys together a step-by-step plan to grow your brand or business with that being said, if you guys found value in this video, feel free to give it a big thumbs up helps out tremendously with the channel. If you haven't subscribed yet, feel free to join the family by hitting that subscribe button, turning that notification bell on with that being said, thank you guys for watching. I hope you all have an incredible day and I'll see you in our next video. Keep growing.