The Power Of Social Listening For Your Small Business

Very few marketing and advertising executives understand the true power of social listening, and the benefits it can bring to your company. In the past, social listening has been underutilized for a variety of reasons, beginning with the general underestimation of the value it can provide, a generally poor understanding of what's involved with social listening, and possibly even the fear of trying something new. These days, there are a number of tools available for small businesses, startups, and even large corporations which desire to engage in social listening, and there are number of good reasons why all these business entities should do so.

Lead generation

Given the fact that the goal for almost any business is to be profitable, that would make its number one priority the generation of leads and conversion of those leads. Market spend and budgeting is a key issue for startups and small businesses, and that means they need to get a better return on investment than larger corporations, because there's such an urgent need to achieve better results through less spending.

However, even with the wide variety of digital marketing strategies available, it's hard to reach an audience with your intended message on a small budget. This is where social media listening can be invaluable. While some marketers are convinced that the best use for social media is raising brand awareness or enhancing relationships with their clientele base, there are other ways the social media can be used to your advantage. By listening in on social media traffic, you can actually find a number of users who are very interested in your products and convert them into loyal customers.

Building links

Building links has always been one of the most important aspects of SEO, but there's also a tactic you can use which will enable you to find brand mentions without links and convert them into useful links for your business. To do this, you'll need a social monitoring tool which supports monitoring on the web and on the social media, and it should also have a Boolean search mode, because the query must be written in Boolean terms. After having selected a tool, all you have to do is create a simple query which will search for unlinked mentions of your company brand.These will be mentions that do include your brand name, but which don't have links to your website. As written in a Boolean query, the search would look something like this:(+ "your brand name") AND NOT link:"your site"FROM web, news-blogs.Once you've collected these unlinked mentions of your company in your feed, you'll be able to contact the website owners and request that they add links to these pages. You can also use social listening to find web content which is related to your field of expertise, and then reach out to the author with a personal quote, or some kind of valuable source which can be linked into the article.

Thief-proof content

Content theft is a fairly common occurrence in digital marketing, and it not only violates a copyright, but it can also do damage to your SEO efforts. As a worst-case scenario, someone might steal your content and achieve a higher ranking with it than your original article garnered – and you might never even know about it. This makes it important for you to have some kind of alert set up which is dedicated to monitoring for stolen content.

In order to do this, you'll need a tool which can handle monitoring on the web, and with it you have to create an alert which includes a few of the sentences from your postings. Choose news/blogs and web as the data sources to be used, and focus on those articles you've written which have performed the best, because they are likely to be the first ones which have content stolen from them.

Guest blogging

Most people are aware of the opportunities which guest posting and guest blogging can provide, because it's one of the best ways of driving an engaged audience to your blog. Since you're going to spend considerable time generating such amazing content, you might as well maximize your efforts by reaching the widest possible audience. That means you need to find platforms with engaged audiences where guest blogging can be of real value to you.While you may not be able to go after the biggest bloggers in the business, you can still find platforms which will offer you a large audience which is truly engaged, and which will legitimately consider any pitch you have to make. To find these kinds of platforms, you can use social monitoring tools to help you find the best available situations for guest blogging. The single most useful metric to observe in social monitoring is the 'reach' metric, which provides an indication of how many people read a social media post or visited a webpage. When you find a platform with a strong reach metric, that should be one of the platforms you consider.

Product development

People who are aspiring entrepreneurs, or product developers attempting to come up with marketing ideas, will find no greater source for enlightenment and inspiration than the social media. People share their opinions with friends and acquaintances all the time on the social media, and all you have to do is find those opinions which relate to your own idea, and analyze what they're all about.One course of action might be to think of all those phrases people on the social media might use when they're trying to express a desire or a need for something. Then consider all the existing products in your personal market, and create some kind of alert which combines the phrases you thought of originally with keywords that relate to your product. Gather up all these mentions, and identify users' pain points as well as their needs. Having this kind of information will convert your vague notion for product development into a full-blown vision for a new product which will appeal to vast numbers of people.