Your target audience talks about you. And even if they don’t, they probably have conversations on social media that are worth knowing about. In marketing, bubble thinking is not political–it means not being able to see beyond what’s happening on your own social media pages.
If you fall into that trap, the consequences could be dire. In fact, you just might end up ignoring important comments, missing negative feedback that goes viral, or fall behind in the industry-related communications your audience engages in on a regular basis. That’s why social listening has become such an integral part of digital marketing today.
But if you’re a frequent reader of our blog, you already know that. We’ve published articles specifically about the importance of social listening, and promise that this post won’t be yet another treatise on why you need to engage on it. Instead, we’ll make it a little more actionable: we’ll explain how HubSpot can enhance your social listening efforts.
Social Listening, Explained
Do we really need to explain the concept of social listening? In many ways, its core meaning lies in its name. And yet, it’s important to understand what exactly that means.
Social listening, also known as social media monitoring, describes the process of “tracking conversations around specific phrases, words or brands, and then leveraging them to discover opportunities or create content for those audiences.” Rather than simply ‘listening’ to your mentions, replies, and comments, you also track phrases related to your brand and industry that could be used in conversations around the web.
As a result, you get a fuller picture of what your audience thinks about you, and what they talk about. You can engage in more meaningful conversations, while being able to interact with both satisfied and unhappy customers.
Today, only 24% of brands engage in social listening. That’s both discouraging and an opportunity: if you can be effective, you’re likely tapping into a communications channel that most of your competitors know nothing about.
The Benefits of Automated Social Listening
Of course, it might be beneficial to understand just why so few brands use such an important concept. The answer: a lack of time and opportunity. If you don’t know where to start, or have to manually monitor every potentially interesting conversation (and the random noise that comes with it), you won’t have much time for other marketing activities.
That’s where automation enters the equation. Put simply, you need to find platform that allows you to engage in social listening without spending a majority of your marketing time on it. In other words, you need automation. Enter HubSpot’s Social Inbox.
Using HubSpot to Enhance Your Listening Success
What if we told you that as a HubSpot user, you can set up a system in which you receive regular notifications each time someone mentions a phrase or word you have deemed relevant on social media? That you can customize these notification based on the time you most want to receive them, and also use a dashboard to make sense of all the data?
That, in essence, is HubSpot’s Social Inbox in a nutshell.
Situated within your Social navigation, the inbox helps you keep track of responses to your published posts, replies, and more. But it also does more. In fact, under the Monitoring tab, you can set up an easy and automated way to track every conversation you might find to be relevant.
The set up is simple: select the keywords you want to monitor, and the networks on which you want to monitor them. Then, enter an email of a HubSpot user who should receive a notification when the keywords get mentioned, as well as the frequency at which this email should be sent.
Depending on the volume you expect, you can set your notifications to send immediately (each time the keyword is mentioned), or once/twice per day. If you are monitoring large-scale conversations that don’t necessarily have anything to do with your brand, the latter option is especially helpful to avoid flooding your inbox.
To aspects of the feature are especially beneficial to expand your social listening efforts:
1. Select a Contact List
Within HubSpot’s platform, you can determine exactly whose tweets you want to monitor. To use social listening as a lead generating tool, you might prefer an unlimited reach that monitors conversations from around the web.
But if you’re looking for specific keywords related to converting existing leads, try selecting a specific contact lists, which will restrict your monitoring efforts to that list. Similarly, you can exclude lists and accounts from your monitoring efforts to narrow your strategy.
2. Reply Within HubSpot
If time is a major fact of concern, you don’t want to have to leave HubSpot just to respond to an interesting or important Tweet. Fortunately, because the platform connects directly with your social media account, you don’t have to. Instead, you can respond right from within the platform, even linking to helpful web content and blog posts as needed.
The benefits of social listening are undeniable. But at the same time, you have to set it up right to make sure it doesn’t take a majority of your marketing resources and time. In that way, HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool is the best of both worlds, allowing even small businesses with limited marketing operations to take advantage of the concept.
Of course, you might need help with the set up. Or you may simply not know just how beneficial HubSpot can be for your marketing efforts in general.
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