Internet Marketing Digital_marketing_for_dummies | Page 215

Listening without paid tools
As we discuss earlier in the chapter, you can use Google Alerts as a free option for a
social listening tool. However, sometimes you may need more sophisticated tools but still
lack the budget to manage the cost. For example, your business might be a startup with a
small team that’s attracting a good deal of conversation on the social web. Or perhaps your
brand name isn’t specific enough to pull relevant mentions through the Google Alerts
algorithm. The good news is that two tools are available for you to use in lieu of a paid
social listening tool that can assist you much better than Google Alerts: Hootsuite and the
Google search engine.
Hootsuite ( https://hootsuite.com/ ) is a free social media management platform that
provides a dashboard for social media management. It integrates with most major social
media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The
dashboard allows you to set up “streams” of notifications such as mentions of specific
Twitter handles and Facebook accounts. You can monitor social media updates in which
you are tagged and set up streams around the specific keywords you select. Hootsuite gives
you a low-budget way to find mentions of keywords you might otherwise have missed.
In addition to using Hootsuite, also consider running your keywords through a regular
Google search. As you know, conversations about you aren’t just happening on big social
media sites. They also show up on places like Tumblr and Medium, as well as forums and
blogs. Put your keywords in quotation marks so that Google searches for only the entire
term, and voilà! You have a curated list of content that mentions your phrase. You don’t
have to scroll through the pages forever, but take a hard look at the first 10 to 20 links that
come up; these are most essential to your reputation management.
Utilizing the feedback loop
After you locate mentions of your brand on the social web, it’s best to respond inside your
social listening campaign, which you do by creating and implementing various feedback
loops. Generally speaking, a feedback loop is a procedure that helps businesses respond
and address customer issues on the social web. It often works behind the scenes of the
public-facing social media, but it’s an important step in making sure that your prospects
and customers feel valued and heard. Feedback loops (pictured in Figure 9-4) seek to
accomplish a communicated resolution to customer issues with a predetermined period of
time.