Social Media Analytics and Listening Tools For Entrepreneurs

To all entrepreneurs with existing businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs by now you should have noticed that social media offers opportunities for success but can also turn into a wild bush fire that is all consuming.

Information moves fast and several complaint tweets from your customers poorly handled by your team can wreck havoc to your operations and affect your bottom line. The worst part is that the customers may not complain to you directly but will do so to the wider internet community. You will only become aware of the situation when major online news agencies publish a piece about your business and how the general public is threatening to boycott your products or services. At this moment it may be too late because your competitors are not sleeping and will jump to this opportunity. This situation forces you to gear up and test your fire fighting skills lest you lose out. It will take you and your team to work hard to ensure that it doesn’t come to this and if it does then you need to devise means to address it. How can you achieve this: in my opinion three words come to mind Listen, Engage and Respond.

There are several tools that can be used to achieve the three objectives. There are some that are enterprise level and others which can be used for small businesses. It is important to appreciate this since it brings to play the cost aspect and you need to select a tool that would be a perfect fit for your business. These tools will help you listen in on online conversations and track mentions that are directed to your business. This gives you an opportunity to respond to compliments and complaints and engage your customers and potential ones while growing the strength of your brand.

Hootsuite/ Tweetdeck/ Buffer

Hootsuite is an online social media management tool that offers a free version that can be upgraded to access premium features. You can link multiple social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and more which can be accessed under a single dashboard. It allows for team access and collaboration on management activities. It will enable you schedule tweets and messages to ensure that your customers stay engaged. It tracks mentions so you can listen in on conversation and provide social media analytics.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media aggregation tool that gathers user generated content online.  This makes it easy to track what people are saying about your business. It covers over 100 platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Digg and more. I must add that given the number of platforms it monitor’s makes this tool very essential in your listening activities.

Topsy/ Twazzup

These two tools offer social media analytics and they are specific to the Twitter platform. The tools will enable you to search links, tweets, photos, videos and influencers on Twitter. They also shows you what is trending on Twitter if you have been running a promotion for your business you can check user engagement using this tool.

Icerocket

Icerocket is also an online search tool that specializes in blogs, Twitter and Facebook. You can listen in on conversations going on in these social networks. Apart from this you can also see blog articles that you have been mentioned in. The online tool holds over 200 million blogs in their database. This will help you engage with those bloggers who can work as your online ambassadors.

What next after listening

As much as we would like to address complaints we should not ignore compliments. Compliments are easy to handle because a simple thank you would suffice. They also give you an opportunity to pitch an offer you are running etc. On the other hand complaints are not that easy to handle because your business has lost its footing in the eyes of the customer. To prevent it from falling flat on the face precaution needs to be exercised when dealing with this type of situation. You need to quickly do a background check on the individual in connection to your business. Check if they have recently lodged a complaint and how far that issue has been addressed by your team. The reason for this is you need to respond to this individual from an informed position. The biggest mistake most businesses do is to quickly respond from a position of ignorance. This will only make the customer more aggressive leaving you with egg on face from the exchange (we don’t want that!). Once you have gathered this information respond with specifics and facts let them know that the issue is being addressed. In case you are unable to get information about this particular customer politely seek them out (Email, Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc) and politely get the required information to assist.

A case to inspire you: The Shankman and Morton story

The story about Peter Shankman and Morton restaurant should be a good example. While at an airport, Shankman jokingly tweeted to Morton to deliver him a steak! Shankman had no expectations of getting what he asked for even though he was a long term patron at the restaurant. Surprisingly his joke became a reality when the restaurant sent one of its staffs with a full meal to the airport. Here is the tweet that started it:

And here is the response to that tweet:

They actually went ahead to meet Peter at the airport with of course the PORTERHOUSE he had requested.

I will leave you with another famous quotes: