Goal:
Setting up a social listening campaign that will identify, categorize and operationalize the way your company deals with social mentions in the most effective way.
Setting up a social listening campaign that will identify, categorize and operationalize the way your company deals with social mentions in the most effective way.
Ideal Outcome:
You will be able to know what people are saying about your brand on social media and act accordingly.
Why this is important:
Setting up a social listening campaign will help you offer better customer support, as well as make more informed business decisions, based on what clients, potential clients, and people in your industry are saying about your company.
Where this is done:
In Google Alerts or Hootsuite, depending on the financial resources you are ready to invest in this.
When this is done:
The sooner, the better.
Who does this:
You, your Social Media Manager or your Virtual Assistant.
Environment Setup
1. Get access to your company’s social media accounts. You will use these to
connect your monitoring tools and to reply to social mentions.
2. Decide which tool you want to use. For the purpose of this Article, we will exemplify
the social listening campaign set up using two tools: a free one (Google Alerts), and paid one (Hootsuite).
Here are some of the pros and cons for each of these tools:
Here are some of the pros and cons for each of these tools:
Google Alerts:
Pros:
■ It’s free;
■ Easy to set up;
■ Great for smaller businesses that are just starting out in digital
marketing.
Cons:
■ It won’t send you alerts for all social channels, just those that
whose messages are indexed in Google (e.g. T
witter.)
Click here to get the most uptodate version of this Article.
Pros:
■ Easy to set up
■ Can help you gain access to social mentions on a wide range of social media networks
■ Allows you to reply to these mentions directly from the app (no need to separately log into each of the social networks your brand is present on)
■ Allows you to assign specific issues to specific members of your team (e.g. assigning complaints to your Customer Service Specialist)
■ Allows you to schedule social media posts and get metrics.
Cons:
■ It’s a paid tool (although it does offer a free plan with limited functionality)
■ Might be limited for large businesses and enterprises
Setup Google Alerts
Put simply, Google Alerts uses the same crawlers as Google Search does to find the
search queries you set it up for. If you decide to set up a social listening campaign using Google Alerts, follow these steps:
1. Go to Google Alerts and enter a query into the search box. You can set up as
many alerts as you want—we recommend you get started with each of the
following for your business:
a. Brand Name + Industry/Category
b. Brand Name + Common complaint
c. Brand Name + Review
d. Brand Name
e. Founder/CEO name
f. Product Name
g. Competitor Names For each of the terms above, follow these next steps.
2. Once you have entered a search term, click on “Show options”
3. Adjust the options according to your preferences.
Note: If this is your first time setting up an alert for your business, we recommend
you don’t narrow your results too much. Instead, allow a few broad alerts to come
in and narrow based on the results to filter out irrelevant results.
a. How often: as it happens, at most once a day, or at most once a week. If you have a small team, you can choose a daily frequency. However, if someone on your team is in charge of social listening, you can go with the most frequent option.
b. Sources: automatic, news, blogs, video, and so on—we recommend you go with automatic.
c. Language: this will narrow results to a specific language.
d.Region: a relevant region for your business.
e.How many (results): only the best results, all results.
f.Deliver to: the email address you want to use for these alerts
4. Click on “Create Alert”. Repeat with all the selected types of queries described in
step 1.
5. Below the alert setup form, you will see the type of results you are likely to receive in your inbox according to the entered criteria. If they are not suitable for what you are looking for, use the special operators:
a. Quotations (“search term”) Use quotations around your phrases when you want Google Alerts to send you emails regarding mentions that contain a very exact term.
For example, “Dharmendra Asimi” will only reveal mentions that contain this exact term (and not just part of it or with other terms in the middle).
b. Minus operator (“search term” “ topic to be ignored”) This type of operator will ignore certain topics from your alerts to make them more relevant for you.
For example, I used “Dharmendra Asimi” “SEO” (to avoid alerts about Dharmendra, The SEO Marketer.)
C. OR operator (“search term” OR “search term” OR “search term”) If you want to create an alert for terms that are more or less synonymous or very close in nature, use the OR operator.
For example, “Aapta Solutions” OR “Dharmendra Asimi” will reveal mentions that contain either of these terms.
d. Plus operator (“search term” + “search term”) If you want to create an alert for results that must contain several specific terms, use the plus operator.
For example, “Aapta Solutions” +“best” will reveal positive reactions/mentions
to Aapta Solutions Services.
Now that we are completed with Google Alerts - We will discuss Hoot Suite in our next Article.