Social media is an enormously powerful tool for managing customer relationships, broadcasting positive brand stories and introducing new products. But while the benefits of this free, fast and intuitive marketing channel are virtually limitless, it also has some potentially serious risks.

But there’s good news; with proper planning you can avoid the most common mistakes that lead to a social media crisis.

What Causes Social Media Crises?

Common Mistakes — Just about anything can spark social media outrage and bring out the trolls, but the most common slip-ups include:

• Spelling and grammar mistakes made by professional organizations
• Accidentally liking an inappropriate post
• Tweeting a personal message from a professional account
• Unintentionally making an offensive statement

Serious Problems — Employee sabotage and hacking are much more serious offenses. While businesses can, and do, shift responsibility for the malicious post, they’re often criticised for allowing their login credentials to be compromised.

Catastrophic Events — Intentionally racist, sexist, or malicious comments made by companies or individuals ignite the worst type of social media crisis. These statements can significantly impact a brand’s revenue and reputation, and recovery could take years.

Look no further than Roseanne Barr for a trending example of how powerful one tweet can be.

In the days following her comment, Barr’s television contract was canceled, her reputation was heavily damaged, and she lost an estimated $3 million in revenue.

So, how can you avoid a social media crisis? Here are 6 steps you can take.

1. Have a Crisis Communication Plan

The most important steps toward preventing a social media disaster are understanding what crisis management means for your business and creating an action plan to address your risk factors.

While you can’t predict every crisis, you can train your social media team to prepare for, and effectively manage, potential problems.

Since social media is your front line of communication during a crisis, your plan should include specific guidelines to protect your brand. Most importantly, always have a second set of eyes on every post before it’s published. Companies should also train more individuals in crisis communications and social media management than you think you’ll need.

2. Monitor your Social Media for Trouble!

Identifying problems as soon as they arise is critical to crisis prevention. Unfortunately, you may never know about the biggest issues facing your company because 96% of angry customers don’t complain to brands directly. Many of these upset customers prefer posting about their poor experience on their own timeline. These “dark” complaints could go unnoticed, causing negative impact, without proper tools and training.

Social listening tools allow you to monitor keywords and indirect brand mentions as well as direct mentions. This gives your company a much more holistic view of what your customers are saying across all social platforms.

Keyhole’s Intelligent Notifications feature is an excellent example of how brands can set up alerts to detect direct and indirect (‘dark’) posts with negative sentiment.

Keyhole AI detects any tracked posts with negative sentiment made about your brand, and you automatically receive an Intelligent notification in your inbox, which allows you to react to the post before the negative sentiment escalates.

For instance, United Airlines would have seen this tweet and its volume, the first mention of the United Flight 3411 incident, with Keyhole.

This would have given the airline an ample runway to handle the crisis before it escalated.

3. Always Engage with Your Audience

Social profiles are frequently viewed as sales tools instead of powerful customer service platforms for building brand loyalty and customer care. By solely pitching products rather than having meaningful conversations with your followers, you could miss opportunities to address customer experience problems early on.

According to Maritz Research, 49% of customers expect companies to respond to Twitter complaints, yet only 29% of those who complained received a reply.

Additionally, customers who complain expect a response within 4 hours, while the average brand response time exceeds 10 hours.

It’s crucial to respond quickly and professionally when negative comments about your company are discovered. Ignoring criticism, even when it isn’t posted directly to your page, sends a message to your followers that you don’t care enough about them to respond.

4. Respond to Criticism Professionally

Knowing how to properly handle criticism in a public forum is essential to protecting your reputation. A single rude response to a genuine complaint will do far more damage to your image than the original comment could.

Deleting comments and blocking users may seem like the quickest way to fix a problem, but doing so could cause your customer to become more outspoken. Instead, make an effort to understand what caused the situation and show a willingness to make things right.

Consumers typically complain on social media when their problem has not been properly resolved. You may be able to prevent your customers from complaining in public by providing a seamless resolution process on your website or over the phone.

Angry customers want to express their frustration quickly, so they usually avoid email. Adding a simple feedback button to your site may prevent them from firing off a raging tweet for all to see. Just make sure it’s easy to find and effortless to use. You could even offer visitors incentives for leaving feedback if it they’ve been poking around your site for a while.

5. Choose the Right Person to Manage Your Accounts

Assigning your brand’s social media strategy to an intern or an inexperienced employee may save you money, but it could also be a recipe for disaster.

A great social media manager has a level head, is capable of handling a crisis, and is well-organized and detail-oriented. Finding someone with public relations experience adds another layer of insurance against mistakes.

Prefer to outsource the work? There are many companies specializing in managing social media accounts for businesses. This option may be the most impactful if you have room in your budget.

6. Draft an Employee Social Media Policy

Most people might think their private social profiles are safe for ranting about work stress, but negative posts can have serious consequences if customers or coworkers see them. Distribute guidelines about how to reference your brand online, but don’t scare your team away from posting. Happy employees are some of the best recruiting tools you can ask for!

Closing thoughts

The benefits of using social media intelligently will always outweigh the risks. Remember to monitor for problems, listen to your followers, react quickly and compassionately, and plan ahead, that way you’ll be able to maximize the benefits of this channel while avoiding potential crises.

Website getting traffic but still not getting conversions?

If you think your content’s fine, then perhaps you need to take a look at your keyword strategy?

Yes, you sometimes need to go all the way back to make sure you’re drawing in quality leads from the right channels.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve got the most brilliant and engaging pieces of content in the world. If you targeted the wrong keywords, none of your PPC, SEO, or content marketing strategies will consistently produce profitable results.

The good news is, keyword research doesn’t necessarily have to be extremely difficult. With the right tools and tactics, you can definitely discover lucrative keyword opportunities without breaking a sweat.

In this post, we’ll show you the best ways to do keyword research so you can bag winning keyword suggestions every single time.

Let’s get started.

1. Turn Seed Keywords Into Long-Tail Keywords

Regardless of niche, keyword research always starts with a seed keyword that’s too broad and competitive to be feasible.

That’s why you need tools like Ubersuggest to expand your seed keyword into hundreds of long-tail keyword ideas. These are keywords that are at least 3 terms long and target a narrower audience.

To use Ubersuggest, simply enter your seed keyword and click “Look Up.” Don’t forget to adjust the localization of your keyword to generate suggestions that are relevant to your place of business.

Within seconds, Ubersuggest will generate hundreds of long-tail keywords as well as present the metrics that can determine their profitability.

To keep things short, here is a brief explanation of each of the three metrics you’ll encounter in Ubersuggest results:

Search Volume
The first metric measures the average monthly searches. This can be directly used to gauge a keyword’s popularity and demand.

CPC
Short for cost per click, the CPC metric denotes the average amount that advertisers are willing to pay for PPC advertisement actions. A high CPC often signals that a particular keyword can be monetized and converts well.

Competition
Lastly, Ubersuggest measures the competitiveness level of keywords on a scale of 0.0 to 1.0. For faster results, it’s recommended that you target keywords with a competitiveness score of around 0.4 or less.

At this point, you should be able to come up with a fresh lineup of long-tail keywords (whether for PPC or SEO) based on the initial results.

But don’t get overexcited — there’s still much work to be done to make sure your keywords lead to conversions.

2. Pluck Out Commercial or Transactional Keywords

A rule of thumb when doing keyword research is to find the balance between search volume and competitiveness.

Of course, you don’t want to target keywords with barely any demand at all. You shouldn’t go with the flow and pick up a keyword that everyone else uses, either.

What you want are long-tail keywords that pertain to a user’s desire to take action.

You can do this by injecting commercial or transactional terms into your Ubersuggest keyword suggestions. Just enter terms like “buy,” “price,” “service,” “shop,” or whatever term makes sense for your seed keyword in the “Filter Results” field.

After applying your filters, Ubersuggest will then refine and drastically reduce the number of keyword suggestions. This makes it much easier for you to spot profitable keyword opportunities:

3. Track Trending Keywords on Social Media

If you’re trying to build traffic through social media, then you’ll need a slightly different approach when doing keyword research.

The main issue is that social media networks use internal search engines that don’t use the same keywords as web platforms like Google. As such, you need to use a keyword tracking tool that’s specifically tailored to social media networks.

Keyhole is, without a doubt, an excellent tool for this job. It allows you to find and monitor trending keywords as well as hashtags on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram — two of the biggest social media networks in terms of user engagement.

Just like Ubersuggest, you can start using Keyhole by entering a seed keyword. This time, however, you need to specify if you want to track a hashtag, keyword, URL, social media account, or brand mention.

To fine-tune your keyword tracker, click “Advanced” to reveal the filters you can use to refine results. For example, if you want to ignore posts from a direct competitor, click on “Ignore posts” and fill in the rest of the details.

Let’s say you want to track the keywords “WordPress,” “web design,” and “blogging.”

After the initial data is produced, you should be able to see pertinent information, such as the number of posts with your keywords, their collective reach, and even the overall sentiment of users.

Before you save your tracker, don’t forget to specify how you want to receive alerts. This will enable you to be always in tune with social media users when it comes to your target keywords.

Remember that tracking keywords on social media can improve conversions in two ways.

Apart from letting you gauge the demand for a keyword, it will also give you opportunities to initiate and close conversions yourself whenever your brand or product gets mentioned. For this, simply, track your brand name or social media handles via Keyhole.

4. Get Suggestions from the Keyword Cloud

Once your Keyhole tracker is up and running, it’s time to snag yourself some keyword ideas.

From the main dashboard, navigate to “My Trackers” and select the tracker you want to work with.

This will pull up real-time data based on the tracking options you’ve set earlier.

Now, to locate new keyword opportunities, scroll down to the “Related Topics” section to view the hashtag and keyword clouds. Here, you can visually observe the popularity of keywords that are related to your seed keyword:

How can social media keywords boost your conversions?

Good question.

Remember that most if not all online users only transact with brands they trust.

By participating in conversations and offering your expertise to social media users, you slowly build your brand’s authority in your niche. Of course, researching hashtags will also allow you to extend the social reach of your content whenever you share something.

To learn more how to leverage social media networks to win your audience’s trust, you can refer to more guides here.

Conclusion

Keyword research is a fundamental piece of online marketing that marketers love to overlook.

Hopefully, the guide above put keyword research in a new light. It’s not necessarily the most difficult aspect of online marketing, but it can have the biggest impact when it comes to the visibility of overall profitability of your website.

Do you have other suggestions on how marketers should perform keyword research? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!

Of the 7.5 billion people in the world, 3.03 billion of them are active social media users.

Your customers are, obviously, among these users and they have conversations on social platforms every day. This creates an opportunity for you to listen to what they are saying and learn more about them.

And that’s basically what social listening is — monitoring what customers are saying on social.

But it wouldn’t make sense to just listen to what people are saying about you or your industry. If you’re a good listener, you are learning, and if you’re a good student, you apply what you know.

Koka Sexton of Slack once shared his journey with social media, where he explained how he sees social media as not just a platform to interact with people, but to build a pipeline of relevant customers to grow businesses.

I came across this idea of social networks. (…) At that point, the idea of leveraging social networks as a sales person was basically unheard of. My focus was optimizing that behavior. (…) I had the goal of building my pipeline and not building a brand or building a fan base.

It’s not enough to listen or even watch your fan base grow, you need to use what you’re listening to to grow your business.

What you need is a toolbox of the social listening strategies that can help you benefit from monitoring social interactions. How do you make the most of the conversations that happen about your brand and industry on social media?

Here are five social listening strategies to grow your business faster in 2018.

1. Send bottom-of-the-funnel customers to gated free trials, product pages or waiting lists

Like top-of-the-funnel buyers, bottom-of-the-funnel consumers are also always lurking around conversations about your industry, brand, or specific product.

These people have heard about your brand before.

And they’re ready to buy. They just need a few questions answered.

So they ask questions like “Is there a version that will include xyz feature coming soon?” OR “Can your product do this specific thing?” If you’re keeping tabs on conversations in your industry, you’ll be able to pull these prospects into the fold.

In 2017, top car brand Audi had a tweet where a prospective Audi buyer (Godwin) asked if they had any new upgrades on a couple of their cars.

Audi responded saying the feature is coming in 2018, and sent the buyer a link where he could sign up with them to get updated once it’s out.

Once the buyer clicks the link, Audi sends him to a well-designed landing page where he’s being welcomed as a lead. The car brand gets his info and gets the chance to alert him once his desired feature is out in the market.

This is one of the best social listening strategies I’ve seen anywhere.

And there’s one beautiful but quite hidden advantage here: 67% of Americans say they get at least some of their news on social media.

This means while Audi is responding to Godwin with a signup form to fill, there are probably other potential buyers around who have the same question Godwin asked and would sign up to get updates from Audi as well — via the same page Audi sent to Godwin.

This way, Audi is using social listening as a tactic to generate more leads for their new car upgrade coming in 2018.

Another example: Aaron Lee, Regional Manager at Agorapulse, recently tweeted that he was looking for a good web host for a new site. New web host provider, ChemiCloud, took the stage and introduced Aaron to their new hosting platform.

Image of Chemicloud Hosting tweeting to Aaron

It’s a powerful social listening strategy to monitor these industry interactions and earn the opportunity to convert bottom-of-the-funnel prospects into actual paying buyers.

And if, like Audi, you don’t already have the feature or exact product a potential buyer is asking for, have a well-designed page ready to convert the person into a lead — so you have the opportunity to draw them back to your business when it’s time.

2. Refer top-of-the-funnel customers to ungated content (or any other value)

In social conversations in your industry, top-of-the-funnel (TOFU) customers are also always lurking around.

There’s always someone hearing about your brand or product for the first time or just seeing conversations about your brand or industry. Unlike the customers represented in my #1 strategy above, these people aren’t ready to buy anything; they only want to learn more about the matter being discussed — your product, brand or industry.

You can refer these customers to a piece of content, a handy tool, or any value that answers their questions and get them ready to buy.

Should you gate content (or any value at all) for TOFU customers?

Audi, in the example above, sent ready-to-buy prospects right from social interactions to a gated page; should you do the same for top-of-the-funnel customers? Not quite.

Picture this for a moment: you go to Twitter and find a promoted tweet that interests you. The tweet is from a brand you’ve never seen or heard of before, promoting a product you don’t entirely understand. So you’re curious. You want to learn more about about what’s being promoted. You reply the tweet asking “How do I get started?”

To which the brand replies, “Go to [this url] to learn how to get started.”

Would you click or not? You probably would. After all, you’re the one looking for answers.

But on getting to the page, you find a form asking for your personal information. Would you give your information just to learn more about a product? You probably won’t. Especially when you’re just trying to see how to get started with a product.

If you were ready to get started, that’s a different case, you’d sign up. But gating a page that’ll teach you how to get started? Not ideal.

Landing page leader Instapage puts it this way:

“During the awareness stage, most prospects know very little about your brand and have yet to trust you. Removing the gate from content in this stage can improve your brand’s visibility and enhance your credibility with prospects. As prospects move down the marketing funnel and are more interested in your business, they will be more likely to be willing to fill out a form in order to gain access to content like ebooks and webinars.”

So it’s best to make your tool, content or any other value ungated for TOFU people who just want to “learn more”.

You’ll also notice in the example above that Audi included a link in their tweet for top-of-the-funnel buyers to get more information about their available product (car).

Image of Audi Tweeting their new A8 and linking to a signup

The link takes TOFU prospects to a page that provides them with useful and intriguing information about the car. They learn about the different features of the car, like its new automated driving feature and interaction intelligence.

Remember, these are top-of-the-funnel customers from Audi’s social listening efforts. The car brand could have just tweeted and let it end there. But no, they squeezed more juice from their social listening and moved interested buyers further in their purchase journeys.

3. Turn negative feedback into opportunities

Here comes the horrible bit of social listening.

If you weren’t paying attention to what’s being said about your brand on social media, you’d be safe — like a turtle with its head in the sand. But if you’re listening, you would have to come across people who are not so pleased with your brand or product — AKA unhappy customers.

The study I cited earlier says 67% of Americans get news from social media. You can imagine how many people are watching when unhappy customers say things like these:

Image of Keyhole’s Sentiment page
Want to listen to your brand social interactions this way? Try Keyhole.

But what you do after getting bad reviews is what matters the most.

Social media expert Kim Garst advises that…

While you don’t have direct control over the reviews people leave, there are two ways you can indirectly improve them:(1) Listen to negative feedback and use it to improve your business, and (2) Encourage satisfied customers or clients to leave reviews. This will dilute the impact of any negative reviews you receive.

Much of the damage from negative feedbacks is salvageable. And, working with complaints can be an opportunity to prove you really care about customers. Since these conversations happen on social media, everyone gets to see how you handle critics — especially when you handle them timely.

Author of the bestselling book The New Community Rules: Marketing on the Social Web, Tamar Weinberg, mirrors the same idea about handling critics with finesse and timeliness:

For social customer experience, it’s important to speak to users where they are and when they need you. It’s not just about Facebook and Twitter complaints. It’s about complaints that arise anywhere, including your own website.

However, it can be overwhelming to take note of every single piece of negative feedback, but the trick is to find the public embarrassments your company can do something about and handle the situation with finesse and style that impresses onlookers.

For example, JetBlue got a tweet from a customer who was complaining about being on a flight that had a bad headphone jack and a malfunctioning TV.

JetBlue responded with what clearly looks like more than just an apology; they offered to compensate the customer with a $15 credit for the inconvenience (once she can confirm she’s the actual customer who had the experience).

Image of JetBlue’s reply

Again, the beautiful thing about this is that everybody is watching. CrazyEgg cofounder Hiten Shah puts it this way — “We all should remember the social in social media. Otherwise it would just be media. Social media on the whole is all about people.”

Enough said about negative feedback. What do you do with the positive news?

4. Retweet or repost positive feedback

When monitoring your social analytics, you’ll come across encouraging and energizing feedback about your brand or product. What do you do with that kind of tangible evidence? Just be glad you got a good note? No, repost them (or retweet if it’s Twitter). That’s one of the most effective social listening strategies you can utilize.

Retweeting or reposting your customers’ positive feedback is a great strategy because it reminds your followers of the awesomeness of what you’re selling, and it will likely interest new leads who happen to hear others raving about you. And customer content, like reviews and positive feedback, yields as much as a 133% higher conversion rate.

Money saving app Piggybank does a great job at this. They repost the positive reviews they get from Twitter right on their Instagram page.

And since consumers resonate more easily with reviews from fellow consumers than from ads sent out by brands, Piggybank’s happy customers see fit to testify to the customer review Piggybank posted…

And there are also bottom-of-the-funnel customers asking how to get started; here’s one:

That said, you can’t possibly repost every single positive feedback — especially if you’re a huge business where your comments pile up in the hundreds and thousands.

But use the great ones. Using this as one of your core social listening strategies can put you on the good side of your customers and lead new folks into your funnel.

5. Use a social monitoring tool (with the right features)

After all’s said and done, one thing that can make or break your social listening strategy is your social listening or monitoring tool. It’s the single tool that your entire social listening strategy will be built on. Heck, there’s hardly any campaign you’ll run today successful without using some marketing technology.

A great social monitoring tool will:

• Analyze the most engaging posts about your brand so you can leverage them.
• Alert you when an influencer talks about you so you can leverage that too.
• Tell you once a keyword or topic you’re tracking is being talked about on social.
• Will have all these functionalities in one platform.

There are several tools out there. We recommend Keyhole. Are we biased because that’s our tool? Well, don’t take our word for it.

Renowned marketing guru Neil Patel says: “You don’t want to be the one that comes in late to the party after everyone’s already left and moved on to the next big thing. You’ll want to contribute when the topic is still hot so you can be a thought leader on the subject. You can easily accomplish that with a tool called Keyhole. This tool isn’t free, but it does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly. Can you guess how to get started? That’s right, sign up for (a free trial) account.”

Conclusion

Conversations will always go on in your industry, and when they do, you want to join in and take advantage of the chatter.

Whether people are holding conversations directly about your brand, your industry, or your competitors, information is passing between people at high speed. You simply have to keep listening and monitoring.

The social listening strategies above reap your company lots and lots of benefits. Be proactive and take advantage of the tools out there to be a good listener. Take notice and look lively. Your business will be one of the best because you did.

Brand mentions on social media can drive significant results for your business.

58% of consumers follow brands through social media. Imagine your brand getting mentioned by tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people. Or getting lots of replies from potential buyers to your social media posts. It’s possible.

People go to social media to talk about things that they find exciting, sad, or useful. You can have them talk about your brand if you know how to make that happen.

Here are five ways to explode your brand mentions on social media:

1. “Create a scene” during an industry event

Industry events are already popular, drawing large, attentive audiences. You can do something remarkable in the context of an event to expose your brand to a lot of relevant prospects.

Think of the industry event like a cube of sugar thrown onto the ground. Within minutes, the cube is covered with ants.

It’s the same with industry events. Although the exposure you get from them is short lived, you’re bound to have an impact on a few key players when you create a scene during the course of the event.

For example, Social Media Week is one powerful event in the digital marketing space, especially in the social media niche. TopRank created a list of 50 social media marketing influencers and featured Twitter Marketing Pro Madalyn Sklar in it — alongside 49 other influencers.

Sklar then shared the post on Twitter using the official Social Media Week hashtag, #SMMW18:

Image of Sklar appearing on Social Media Week

Her tweets would normally get one or two likes, retweets, or replies in 24 hours. But this one was quite different. Sklar got 23 likes, 3 tweets and 4 replies (or brand mentions) in three hours.

These aren’t very big numbers, but it’s a significant increase in relative average engagement.

TopRank had other featured influencers share the post on social media using #SMMW18. Social media guru and founder of Up My Influence Josh Elledge didn’t just tweet the post with the #SMMW18 hashtag, he pinned the tweet so it gets more exposure.

Imagine the buzz created when 50 industry influencers are tweeting about them using the hashtag while Social Media Week is going on.

It’s a good example of creating something remarkable around popular industry events. A list of 50 social media influencers publishing while Social Media Week is going on is a powerful strategy to build brand mentions for TopRank.

However, before capitalizing on any event hashtag, you want to be sure the event is big enough and its hashtag is popular enough to drive your much needed social media brand mentions. This is where social monitoring tools come in.

For example, using the Keyhole (disclosure: I’m working with this brand) social monitoring tool, you can see key data about Social Media Week’s hashtag and then judge whether the event hashtag is worth creating something big about, or not.

Want to see the popularity of an industry event’s hahstag? Try Keyhole.

From this tracker, you’ll find that between February 23 and February 26, posts about #SMMW18 have reached over 6 million people on Twitter and Instagram.

Once you’ve seen the quality of the engagement an industry event has and it meets your needs for exposure, you can go ahead and create something exceptional using the event’s hashtag.

It’s a powerful way to drive brand mentions.

Another strategy to drive social media mentions using influencers. It’s a strategy most brands are using these days, but how do you ensure you’re doing it the right way? The key is to avoid using all types of influencers.

2. Avoid using too many influencers

For every $1 spent on influencer marketing, you get a $6.5 return. That’s quite a huge profit.

But, you don’t need all the possible influencers out there. While this may sound counter-intuitive, it can help increase your ROI and cut unnecessary costs.

Maybe you’ve seen stories and case studies of how influencers have helped your competitors (or any brand at all) grow, and then you feel you should get your hands on all the influencers you can think of. The more the influencers, the more your reach, right?

Well, not exactly.

You want to be sure you’re spending your advertising budget on influencers who actually have your target customers as followers. Social media marketing veteran Neal Schaffer mirrors the same idea…

To begin, use listening tools and do keyword searches to learn who in your industry is talking about topics or products relevant to your business.

In a bid to use all the influencers you can get your hands on, you may end up using some who don’t have your target audience as followers.

Instead of spreading yourself thin in that way, cut back and work with just the influencers who can expose your brand to an audience hungry for your content or product. You will increase your ROI when you focus only on influencers who are followed by your target customer.

A baby-clothing brand, for instance, is better off using baby or mommy influencers, not a popular Instagram travel star or a pop singer.

A good example is how mommy blogger Laura (@bump.today) featured three baby-related brands in one post:

Goldfish, lili.lane and Little Blessing Co. are all brands selling baby products. Goldfish sells baby food, the shorts on the baby are from lili.lane and the top is from Little Blessing Co.

These brands are going to be seen by Laura’s followers who are mostly moms — the target customers of the brands mentioned.

Now, how do you find specific influencers who your target customers mostly follow? Truth is you can simply do a google search like [industry term] + [influencers] and you’ll find a lot of options.

But a better way is to hook up with influencers who already talk about your brand on social media. Or, consider working with influencers who talk about your industry — even if they’ve never said anything about you.

Again, you’ll need a good social media monitoring tool. Using Keyhole, for instance, I can find influencers already talking about a brand like Gucci by tracking their hashtag — #Gucci. I just need to go to the influencers tab and I’ll find them there:

Image of Keyhole’s list of users using the hashtag Gucci

Want to find relevant influencers for your business? Try Keyhole.

The tool shows me Twitter and Instagram users with thousands and millions of followers who are talking about Gucci. I could also sort for influencers with the highest engagement rates by clicking the AVG ENG tab:

So before doing a wild search on Google for relevant influencers to promote your brand, you could save time by employing the powerful search capabilities of a social monitoring tool.

Use it to see which influencers are already praising your product.

These people have more experience with your product, and if they’re so popular that they ignore influencer marketing deals, you’ll be able to get in touch with them fast.

3. Know where target customers post from

There are now more social networks out there than ever before — obviously. Therefore, it’s vital that you know which platforms your target customers use the most.

You can, of course, be “everywhere” if you want, but you would be better off focusing your advertising efforts on relevant social platforms that will drive more brand mentions and ROI than others.

So how do you find out where your target customers hang out the most? Again, you need a social monitoring tool to find this out.

Take Ralph Lauren, for instance. Most of the fashion brand’s customers and retailers use the #RalphLauren hashtag to post the products they buy from them.

If Ralph Lauren were your competitor, you could track which sites and which parts of the world mention their hashtag the most — using Keyhole:

Image of Top Sites and Location on Keyhole dashboard

The results show most of the hashtags come from Twitter, which means most of the brand’s customers would be found on Twitter. Instagram is next on the chart, then eBay and so on.

This way, you can focus on driving more brand conversations from Instagram since that’s where most of your target customers are.

4. Discover which days your target consumers are most active

Social media never sleeps, right? True.

When Americans are sleeping, Asians and folks from other continents are wide awake tweeting and posting on social platforms.

In a recent Forbes article, Hootsuite’s Founder Ryan Holmes says:

[There is] a growing realization among businesses that social media is the single most effective way to reach audiences, with teens with teens (i.e. tomorrow’s consumers) now spending up to nine hours a day on social platforms.

However, while social media platforms are always active, there are days your audience is more active than most other days.

If your target customers appear to be hyperactive (in a good way) on certain days, it could mean those are the days they’re not bombarded with their jobs, family, or school (if they’re students).

You want to take advantage of these days and engage them.

Statistics show that posting on social media on specific days improves results. Hubspot, for instance, found that tweeting on Wednesdays gets more engagement than other days.

However, not every research or study is exactly right for your business. You should check when your target customers are most active. You can do that with any good social monitoring tool. When they’re most active is the best time for you to post.

If you’re tracking your own social media account (or a competitor’s) using Keyhole’s Account Tracker, you will be given optimal posting times for that account based on engagement, taking out all the guesswork.

For example, you can use Keyhole to find what days of the week that retail brand ASOS gets engagement the most on Twitter:


Want to see your competitor’s best engagement days on social? Try Keyhole.

If ASOS was your competitor, you can see the days their customers are engaging with their tweets the most, and days they got little to no likes, retweets or replies.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with the Hubspot’s statistics I cited, but your business may be getting most of its engagement on other days of the week. You need to track and compare to the most effective with your outreach.

5. Exploit User Generated Content (UGC)

If you’re not familiar with the term, UGC is: content (reviews) on social media generated by customers about your product.

90% of shoppers say user-generated content (UGC) on the Internet influences their decisions to make a purchase. And here’s how the rate of that influence has grown in recent years — according to data from Reevoo:

People trust other people recommending products to them more than advertising that comes directly from the brand.

HubSpot’s CEO Brian Halligan advises businesses to think about how to create a earned media (AKA User Generated Content) strategy…

My encouragement to service providers would be to…think about “How do we create a modern, earned media strategy?” Because that’s what really works in social media – it’s more content creation on the earned media side.

And rightly so. Whose recommendation are you more likely to trust — the brand’s or the consumer’s? Chances are high you’ll go for the latter.

A customer saying something about you on social media can spark conversations that promote your business.

And then, surprise of surprises, you find yourself receiving orders from the friends of a customer who just tweeted or posted about your product on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat.

But how do you get consumers to become advocates for your brand and say nice things about your business on social? There are several ways to go about this, a few of which include:

• Contests: Ask customers to share your product with a specific hashtag, and they get the chance to win a prize.
• Offer discounts: Encourage consumers to share your products with their friends and win discounts.
• Fun hashtags: Consumers, especially millennials, naturally want to share new products they buy or love with their friends. Give them a happy-sounding hashtag to do this.

However, to make the most of UGC, you should consider sharing them on your timeline. That is, after customers post something about your brand, don’t just be happy you’re spoken well of, retweet or repost the UGC. This will improve your reach and will likely get you more brand mentions.

Wrap up

Brand mentions can drive huge results for your business. Afterall, more mentions naturally mean more popularity. And more popularity leads to better brand awareness and ultimately sales. Use the strategies above and you can drive social interactions about your brand or product like never before.

Featured Image by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

More than listening to what customers are saying about your brand or industry in the social sphere, this one question is important:

What do you do with what your customers and prospects say on social media?

Hearing what customers say on social media is one thing, but understanding how to use their conversations to your brand’s advantage is another.

500 million tweets are sent every day. That’s ~6,000 tweets per second.

Image of Twitter statistics

And that’s just Twitter.

A prospect could tweet something as simple as I need a black shoe right now and get the attention of seventy of her followers engaging with the post.

What would happen, if you as a shoe brand (for instance) chime into that conversation with a link to your black shoe — including a discount coupon?

Here are five social listening best practices that can make a huge difference in your business:

1. Pick a successful competitor to imitate

When you learn from people who are already doing well, you’re in essence skipping the mistakes they made before getting to where they are today. You can avoid most of mistakes they made.

On learning from competitors, PR expert Gini Dietrich says…

Analyze your competitors’ marketing—see which efforts work well, and understand why stakeholders like them: What is their primary messaging? Why does or doesn’t it work? How do people respond to the company’s overtures online? Is word of mouth positive or negative? Why?

Businesses perform better at social listening when they ethically learn from competitors who are already doing it right.

Piecing together their strategy is like scoring a free cheatsheet. Visit their platforms to see how they’re doing their social media — responding to feedback, joining industry conversations, and so on .

Fashion company Topshop, for example, is a good brand to learn social listening from. And of course, there are several other brands out there that are awesome at this.

While many other fashion brands only only take advantage of world-renowned events like Valentine’s Day and Christmas, Topshop takes advantage of other smaller festivals or events — especially in entertainment and fashion space.

When conversations about #EEBAFTAs (the hashtag for British Academy Film Awards) were trending on Twitter, Topshop joined in.

Remember, this is an event many other fashion brands don’t value as much as they do more popular events. Well, Topshop decided to participate in the conversation on Twitter and their engagement rate soared higher; one of their tweets (the tweet image above) with the hashtag became the most popular on their timeline.

Want to see your competitor’s best performing posts like this on social? Try Keyhole.

So, when looking for brands to learn your social listening strategy from, companies like Topshop are good examples to learn from. They look at other industry-related events that most of their competitors aren’t looking at and take advantage of them.

There are hundreds or even thousands of other brands you can learn from. Do your research on brands doing social listening well in your industry and see how you can learn from them.

But what if you step into a lively conversation and get a slap in the face? You need to know when to enter an ongoing conversation on social media.

2. Determine when to engage an ongoing conversation

Social media is built on conversations, and consumers want to be talked to, not sold to.

social media marketing guru Carlos Gil put it more succinctly…

Talk to your audience, make conversation, build relationships. Consumers are people and they don’t want to be sold to, they want to be engaged so engage them.

But it’s not just getting into conversations with prospects that’s important, you also need to know when and when not to engage them.

Ever gotten into a conversation and then realized you shouldn’t have? Or maybe your timing was just off?

When to enter an ongoing conversation is crucial.

It determines whether or not you’ll be getting any benefits from your social listening efforts or not. It determines whether you’ll get bashed or praised for joining a conversation. Avoid regret. Pick and choose your times to engage.

A few examples of typical conversations and how to engage them

2a. Customer service queries

Customer service related queries require your immediate response.

Customers get angry all the time for different reasons, and you want to ensure they don’t stay angry. Or they need to ask questions before buying from you.

In any case, you want to respond to customer service requests fast.

Netflix is known for its superior online customer service. That is due in large part to a corporate culture that empowers employees to act quickly — Rebekah Radice, Founder at RadiantLA

78% of consumers have bailed on a transaction or not made an intended purchase because of a poor service experience.

2b. An ongoing conversation about a government policy

Trying to take advantage of a social media conversation about a government policy that hurts people is an example of a potentially bad time to enter a social media conversation (depending on your stance).

For instance, following a ban from the US president last year, people from Muslim-majority countries were banned from entering the US. Taxi companies weren’t happy about this, and so they all went down the JFK airport and stopped pickups from working.

Amidst this commotion, Uber saw it fit to join the conversation and advertise their service, in theory helping stranded passengers. The turn out was bad. #DeleteUber became a thing on the Internet with many users posting how they weren’t happy without Uber’s position on the ban:

Tweet of #DeleteUber
Image Source

And right now, people tweet multiple times per hour clamouring for the car driving service to be deleted:

Image of another #DeleteUber Tweet

If you’re not going to sympathize with people who find a particular policy disturbing, it’s best to stay away from conversations like this.

2c. When to keep quiet or simply apologize

Sometimes it’s best to remain silent — when saying anything at all will make a situation bad on all sides. Depending on the vitriol being spread, you may just want to pretend you didn’t hear a thing.

A smart rule of thumb is to only get involved in conversations when you know you won’t get burned or miss out on significant benefits.

For example, these conversation scenarios are clear enough to know whether or not to chime in:

• An angry customer is egging people on and you feel you might be baited into a fight – Do not chime it.
• You feel tempted to speak ill of a competitor’s product. – Do not chime in.
• You feel tempted to market your Spring bouquets on Christmas Day (making you look like an extraterrestial)- Do not chime in.
• You will literally miss the party if you don’t get into a conversation on time — like tweeting about Valentine’s Day on February 15 – Chime in!
• You won’t get burned for marketing your Valentine’s products on Valentine’s Day – Chime in!

These are just a few examples. Think up a few you want to avoid or join.

But it’s still not always this straightforward, right?

Sometimes it can get really dicey and you won’t be sure whether or how to respond to feedback in the sometimes volatile social arena. Everybody’s watching, remember?

And bad news travels fast.

For example, one Clayburn Griffin mentioned Cap ‘n Crunch on Twitter, saying…

It was quite an insult thrown at the cereal brand, but they kept quiet. While Cap ‘n Crunch were probably still nursing their bruise, their competitor (KFC) saw a potential win for their own marketing. So they replied the tweeter, calling Cap ‘n Crunch a has been.

What would you do in this situation? It rarely ever happens that competitors throw public insults at each other — so you have almost no case studies to learn from.

Well, Cap ‘n Crunch left Clayburn (the consumer) alone — customers are always right, right? — and gave KFC an outstanding clapback…

Cap ‘n Crunch probably wasn’t sure what the outcome of their clapback would be. But they took the risk anyway. As it turned out, it worked for them. Cap ‘n Crunch’s tweet clearly got more love than KFC’s.

Should you do the same if you were in this situation?

Speaking about the reason for their clapback, Andrew Cunningham from Huge (which managed digital for Cap ‘n Crunch) said: “KFC came at us pretty hard, and at that point we had full license to zing them back.”

Sometimes it isn’t rocket science to know when to enter a conversation. Sometimes it is. A smart rule of thumb, however, would be to only respond to conversations that clearly CAN BE handled. And apologize when occasion demands.

Another good social listening practice is to have your social media team collaborate with relevant departments in your organization to provide accurate information.

3. Have relevant departments go all in

Social media is clearly not a secondary channel for marketing anymore, it’s the main channel today.

And if that’s the case, then it’s worth having all relevant departments in your organization collaborating on it.

When an issue is brought up by a customer that your social media team doesn’t have enough expertise to handle, have them link up with the relevant departments that can provide apt feedback or information.

78% of customers say competent service reps play a huge role in a happy customer experience.

Image of customer reps playing a huge role

Service reps can’t be competent if they aren’t fed the right information by relevant departments. So departments in your organization need to collaborate with your social listening efforts.

Customers hate it when they reach out to your customer service via social media and don’t get a satisfactory response. Or when you tell them to send an email to get an issued solved. Nothing beats you giving them the right response right from social media where they contacted you.

I have for 10 years—long before Facebook was even on the map—called myself a “relationship marketing specialist.” And I love that term because to me it transcends the medium. It’s all about people doing business with people. — Mari Smith, Top Facebook Marketing Expert.

And remember, it’s social media — everybody’s watching.

This doesn’t mean your programmers, finance people, and other staff need to abandon their roles all the time to respond to customer complaints on social. But they can play a huge role in assisting your social media managers with the relevant information they need.

An open communication line between the social media team and relevant departments can work wonders here.

That said, your entire social listening effort, however, is nothing without a good social monitoring tool.

4. Carefully consider your choice for a social media listening tool

Social media listening tools help you analyze what’s been said about your brand and industry on social media.

There are many social media monitoring tools out there, which makes choosing the right one a challenge sometimes. But you need to find the right one for your business anyway.

An inefficient social listening tool will make your social marketing efforts unnecessarily hard and frustrating.

If, for example, your tool can’t help you sort out the different sentiments in your social mentions, it’s going to be really hard to start scrolling through the many mentions you get to get the one(s) you’re looking for.

Image of Keyhole’s sentiment on posts with Tracker ASOS
Want to monitor your social media mentions like this? Try Keyhole.

Social conversation monitors have different capabilities. Some provide basic functions while others offer more advanced features. You want to pick the one that offers the functions that matter to your business.

5. In the end, how much is social listening doing for you?

You need to track metrics that matter. Otherwise, it’d be all for nothing. And there are lots of things to track, but you need to spot the ones that really matter to your business.

A few things to track:

• Sentiment: How many mentions about your brand are favourable or otherwise.
• Popularity: How many mentions are you getting per day, week or month?
• Influencers: Who are the influencers talking about you, how many are they and what are they saying?
• Most engaging topics: Which topics get the most likes, replies and reposts? Knowing this will help you understand where to focus your social listening efforts.

Conclusion

What you do with what you’re hearing about your brand is critical in this age where it feels like social media is controlling the world. Use the strategies in this piece to make the most of what’s being said about you and your industry.