Social Listening and Engagement: Put Them In Your Toolbox
What do houses, automobiles, toys, and lawn care all have in common? They used tools to create something sturdy and presentable. Without the use of proper tools, what is created becomes unstable and has the potential to collapse. The same principle applies to social media. Although content and strategy serve as the backbone for a given communications campaign, it is the tools used to monitor response and engagement that keeps a campaign thriving and provides insights to what works and what doesn’t. Social media tools can be used to both build up a reputation as well as fix damages caused by bad PR tactics or negative press. In essence, anyone tasked with managing a social media account should have a working knowledge of the different tools available to them at their disposal if they want to draw the most out of their communications campaigns and effectively analyze data pertaining to their content.
A quick search on Google that asks “why are social media tools important” reveals a common theme pertaining to their necessity for many yet similar reasons. The increased emphasis on social media marketing and customer service calls for tools that give brands a competitive advantage. In addition to many social media platforms integrating audience analytic tools within their dashboards, multiple external tools are becoming commonplace within the industry that provide even more in-depth analysis to the performance of a brand’s content. One of the most important elements of a brand’s social presence is how they communicate with their audience.
Community listening and engagement is an arduous process but only yields positive results. Creating a sense of oneness and that voices are heard is a very effective way to maintain a unique voice. Depending on the volume of comments a brand receives, it would take forever for one person to read through them all. Social media tools exist to analyze the general sentiment and can inform managers of how their community views their content. Overall, social media management tools serve to simplify the process of building, maintaining, and repairing channels that it would be near impossible if relying solely on human analytics.
I want to briefly introduce two powerful social media tools that have the capability of altering the trajectory of a social media campaign: Awario and Brandwatch.
These two tools are great utilities to measure both community and social engagement. First, Awario is a service that helps track mentions of a brand and its competitors across the web, discovers niche influencers, and assists with consumer engagement. Additionally, it provides analysis of consumer sentiment including mention growth, mention reach, and language associated with comments directed towards a brand. All of this is presented in a dashboard that clearly lays out the desired metrics. Brandwatch offers the ability to help brands discover meaningful conversations happening around them across both social media and digital media platforms.
Some of the use cases this tool helps with includes crisis communication, trend analysis, brand management, and competitor analysis. Information is also presented in an organized dashboard, similar to Awario. Overall, this tool, when put in the right hands, has limitless potential to bring about greater audience awareness. While Brandwatch seems to be primarily utilized more by high profile customers, Awario can also be utilized by smaller start-ups and medium-sized businesses. While the full scope of what these two tools offer are different in magnitude, they both serve their clients by doing a lot of the community listening and monitoring on behalf of a social media manager.
A social media manager attempting to encapsulate the entirety of comments and earned media generated online is both exhausting, tedious, and unnecessary. For brands with millions of followers across various platforms, it is not smart to spend man-power searching through comments when there exists tools that can do all of that for you. This is accomplished by searching keywords that appear in comments, as well as categorizing specific words to particular sentiments. This informs brands about what their followers are saying about them both positively and negatively.
On top of this, analytical measures can also track the number of comments and reach on both positive and negative mentions, presenting the full scope of media mention fallout. These tools act as a centralized platform to assist social media managers with maintaining their brand presence and gives insight into the mindset of consumers. This then becomes that starting point for conversations on subjects that require attention. Giving the impression that a brand is listening to their audience is a surefire way to maintain good relationships, and these tools should be seen as a necessity for anyone in charge of a brand’s social media channels. When not managed properly and with the help of appropriate tools, this can become a daunting task. Thankfully, these tools are here to save the day.
