Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 212

Source: https://www.facebook.com/savealot/posts_to_page/
FIGURE 9-2: Save-A-Lot lets a customer know that he’s been heard.
Social listening goes far beyond customer service. Also, listening to the social web
informs all other aspects of your social success cycle:
Social influencing: Social listening impacts social influencing by letting you know
what sort of content you should share that your audience finds most valuable.
Partnerships: By paying attention to who on the social web is sharing influential
information in your industry, your social listening can inform you about potential
partnerships and journalists who might give your brand earned media mentions.
Social selling: Social listening plays an important part in social selling, which is when
a brand uses social media to generate leads and sales. The brand will answer prospect
questions and offer insight until the prospect is ready to make a buying decision.
Therefore, social listening can inform social selling by telling you what people are
likely to respond to, what they desire, and what they are asking for on the social web so
that your products and services can best meet the prospects’ needs.
Choosing a social listening tool
Many social listening tools are available for conducting your social listening campaigns.
These tools require various levels of financial commitment and feature options that can
help you initiate an effective social listening program. Luckily, whether you work solo or
have a large team of social listeners, lots of help is available to help you meet your social
listening goals.
If you don’t have the bandwidth or budget to dive into more advanced social listening
tools, you can use Google Alerts ( https://www.google.com/alerts ) as part of your social
listening strategy. Google Alerts is a free option for social media marketers on a
shoestring budget. As you might be aware, Google constantly crawls the web looking for
new content. The Google Alerts feature lets you set up email alerts whenever the search
engine finds mentions of preselected keywords, such as company names, product names,
or names of the public-facing members of your organization. It’s a viable option if yours