How to become a good social listener?

Still a lot of companies care for social media as if it is a single way conversation. They just set up Facebook and Twitter accounts and then start post and tweets. But guess what? Just think about your followers, fans, friends and customers are discussion back about your post and tweets. Social media optimization is not only create a account and pumping out lots of post, comment and tweets in same time.

1. Recognize your potential audience. Just the once you be familiar with who your audience is, you require to know where they all are. An ordinary misperception is that everybody is execution on the similar social network. But that is not fair. For example, according to a research by Anderson Analytics, Generation Z (13- to 14-year-old) social network users are a little more active on MySpace than Facebook, only 9% use Twitter and none are active on LinkedIn. If you feel tried to listen to Gen Z on Twitter, you would not hear much. They are not there.

2. Create a effective listening strategy. Once you identify which social networks are significant to your potential audience, you must be identifying what words they are probable to use in conversations. Generate a list of keywords to pay attention for, including your brand, products, events, personnel and several topics relevant to your customers. You might also want to contain your competitors and business influencers as listening keywords.

3. Decide your technology. There are a lot of social media monitoring tools for equally desktop and mobile. Google Alerts is a free Google service that monitors keywords and send you aggregate notification. Social Mention, also free, allow you to monitor social media, blogs and blog comments and get e-mail alerts and “sentiment” analysis (an indication of whether the content is positive, negative or neutral to your product or brand). Ice Rocket helps you find out trends, best keyword phrases and mention in the blogosphere, and search your keywords across thousands of blogs—and it is absolutely free, too. Radian6 and HootSuite are a few others. Do your research and find out what works most excellent for you.

4. Assign a savvy social media guru to be your selected listener. These are an important job. Giant companies make teams of people to accomplish this responsibility. You will also want to generate a each day plan and accepted to-do list for monitoring. Preferably, you want to make sure that your alerts and real-time tools each hour so you catch opportunity that are quite brand new.

5. Build a response strategy. What are suitable responses for different types of comments? Create a list. Supremely, your selected listener is authorized to take action so you do not waste time with review and approval process. One thing to keep in mind— be human in your response. Firm and corporate don not cut it in social media. It is Facebook and Twitter, not the meeting room.

6. Be responsible. Be sure the execs identify what’s happening on social media. Present them a description, yes, but also give advice them on how the company might need to become accustomed. Things can curved out of control rapidly in social networks. Keep in mind the most recent brouhaha with Susan G. Komen for the treat and designed paternity? With social media, you require to be practical. You are not only annoying to improve your brand/products; you are defending it, as well.