With time and evolving styles of SEO and marketing tools, social media marketing also gets new flavours added to it. Social listening is just one such flavour and latest sensation, which you must know about and explore as the enthusiast in SEO and digital marketing. To understand what is social listening all about, and how you can make the most out of it to add some spice to your general SEO social media marketing strategies, keep on reading.
Introduction to social listening
Tools developed and made famous by names like Brand24, Awario, and Mention, and many such sites are present, which primarily helps in tracking the mention of a brand name, or company SEO name, or keyword, or product name etc. They follow a name or word based on specialrepetitions, importance, and which seems much in discussion. Similarly, there are spiders of the search engines too, which keeps on crawling such names, just based on their intensity of mentions and repetitions in various social media platforms. All such data are stored in a dashboard, which can be accessed in real time.
This tool which monitors and listens to what is being repeated and mentioned in the social media platforms is the social listening.
Role of social listening at a glance
For the following, social listening has a role to play to enhance the experience and study of these:
• Increasing brand awareness and presence
• Improvement in customer services
• Managing the stopping crises in social media platforms
• Doing better market research
• Reputation building online
However social listening has not that much a prominent role in SEO, as it has in social media marketing. The tool won’t play a direct role inranking factor, because social media itself does not play a role in direct ranking factors. Hence it will be an indirect factor in ranking, just as the social media platform serve. No social media platform directly emphasises Google ranking, and that is why social listening also has no direct role in ranking which is especially prominent in SEO. But to enhance the utility of social media marketing, and specifically aid in better branding, market research, online reputation management and enhancement etc., this is a much big database.
Sentiment Analysis just like Google
Sentiment analysis is a crucial working criterion of Social Listening. Anything which creates a buzz in any way is ranked by Google through the method of sentiment analysis. A sudden problem going viral, a complaint onsocial media about a company or product, a craze for something rising all of a sudden, are some of the things instantly sensed by Google and used as a factor to rank the relevant sites.
This same thing is done by social listening too. Here also sentiments are analysed to look at:
• Mentioning of brands on social media
• Sentimental analysis of the data
• Understanding which part of the data can act as the ranking factor
Using the tools hence helps in keeping a close watch on the sentimental working of the brand name, or product name etc. on various social media platforms.All forums, blogs, news and places which help in ranking in some way are picked by Google, and also by the social listening tools.
Mentions can be turned into links
The best part of using social listening tools is to capture the mention of your company, brand, product, or keyword name on places on the web to turn the mention more meaningful. Social listening tools not only spots and plucks the mention of the keywords on social media platforms. They also detect the words on blogs, web pages, and all the places on the web. That is why you can use the tools to identify and find out the blogs and sites the keywords are in, and the contact the site owner or blog owner to add a link to the mention of the word to make it more meaningful. This way, social listening tools contribute to SEO.
Use the industry influencers to promote your product or business
The job of the social media monitoring tools is not just the detection and picking of keywords in various places on the web with their locations. There is more to it. The tools also pick up the names of industry influencing people and personalities, who often have a massive fan following for their activities online, and who have mentioned your product a few times. If there are some such people, who said the keyword, then you may contact them.
On reaching them, you may ask them if you may get professional help from them to promote your product by word of mouth or some way.
Another way is to directly mention that influencer in your writings, social posts and blogs. If they are well aware they will soon return the favour on noticing their name mentioned by you. This is a mutual link exchange method which is much appreciated by such people who have made a name online through such means themselves.
Get more traffic to your website
When you merge SEO directly with social media marketing, as it happens when you get website traffic through social media marketing, then you get a good boost in rankings in the eyes of Google too. It’s all about getting good website traffic which matters. And for this, the use of social media monitoring or listening tools works great. With the help of social media monitoring tools, you may find all those places where the name of your service, product, or brand etc. has been mentioned. And there on those pages, you may reply all those commentators with a link to your website. This is an excellent way to get some attention and website traffic from people who talked about you or mentioned you in some context.
Finally
The monitoring and listening tools give you a good insight into the world of social media and tell you exactly what is happening. It helps you look there where your vision usually won’t reach. And therefore, these tools open the gateway to more in-depth research and strategic social media marketing.
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