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Creating a Brand with Social Listening and What Tools To Use

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Social media marketing is an important part of reaching today’s modern era customers. Setting up social media accounts that prioritize providing good content can be challenging. In order for your brand to stick out, you need to learn what your customers are looking for and how to provide them with that content. This is referred to as social listening. Those who have social listening strategies worked into their social media marketing gain an edge over their competitors.

Social listening plays a key role in growing your business and increasing your company’s brand trust with its customers. The good news is that the cost to operate social media channels and create engaging content is often right at your fingertips. If you are looking for ways in which you can handle all the comments, likes, and messages on your platforms fear not because we have a strategy for you.

The below content contains ways in which you can learn about social listening as well as tools you can use to make the process easier.

What is Social listening?

Social listening is all about looking into your industry’s trends, comments, and content in order to gain insights into your brand experience. Social listening is critical for understanding how your customer feels about your brand which is commonly referred to as social media sentiment. Correctly using Social Listening is one of the most valuable ways to increase brand trust and create a loyal customer base. One good example of social listening is Netflix promoting a DIY sock that pauses the TV show. Netflix looked at what people were talking about on social media through comments, posts, and stories which lead to this creative invention.

Social Listening Tools.

Keeping up with the constant change in social trends can be difficult. Thankfully, there are many different tools and programs that can help brands keep up with trends.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a premium service that helps brands and companies monitor data and trends on all social media platforms you are active on. Sprout Social can also be useful for identifying social media goals that your brand can create based on the data. While Sprout Social is an excellent service and can help greatly with social media needs, they are more costly than some of the other social listening tools mentioned below.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a marketer’s dream program. Whether it be for creating inbound content, social media uploads, or advanced automation HubSpot knows what tools a marketer needs. HubSpot has features that allow you to keep track of all social media posts, interactions, and total social media leads. 

Learn more about social media campaigns here!

One of the big perks of HubSpot is the ability to easily work together with the sales team to use social media interactions as a step to making a sale. Furthermore, Hubspot is a free-to-use platform which makes it a must-have.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a service that allows users to view and interact with their social media followers in an easy and convenient way. The dashboard that Hootsuite is able to keep track of all social media interactions whether it be messages, comments, likes, or mentions without having to leave the service.

In addition, Hootsuite provides top-notch analytics and reports from all social media accounts in use. This, along with the convenient dashboard, makes Hootsuite a premium service that competes with the likes of sprout social. Therefore the cost of the service is noticeably different than free services.

Buffer

Buffer is one of the more friendly tools on this list. Buffer allows users to “buffer” social media posts on many accounts. The UI for the service is very clean and not as complicated as some other services. Buffer can also respond to comments across many platforms. There is a free version available to use, however, the service will be lacking some features. 

SEMrush

SEMrush is different from many of the other services mentioned above. SEMrush is well known for its keyword research and online ranking data. Furthermore, the ability to manage social media accounts makes SEMrush a valuable service to have. Want to manage all your social media accounts in one place? SEMrush has you covered. You can also use many of the SEO tools and keyword tools to help monitor your social media accounts.

Social listening can be a tricky process to run. Keeping up with so many accounts and followers is no easy task. Thanks to services like SEMrush, Buffer, HubSpot, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social, Marketers are able to keep up with demand. Now it’s time for you to take the wheel, are you ready?

Integrating Social Media & SEO Efforts For Enhanced Search Engine Results

The Power of Social Media Influencers: Why it works

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At this point in time, most businesses are well aware of the power of social media. According to Statista, roughly 79 percent of the American population has a social media profile, which accounts for almost 247 million people. However, simply having a social media presence isn’t enough. If you really want to take advantage of all that social media has to offer, you have to take advantage of the power of social media influencers. The use of social media influencers can help boost your brand’s reputation while also exposing your brand to an even bigger audience.

What Are Social Media Influencers?

Social media influencers are people on social media who can be considered “personalities” and who have massive amounts of followers who hang on to their every post. Many social influencers have such significant sway over their audience that they become mini-celebrities in a way. In fact, many celebrities are considered influencers because of their huge social media followings. Businesses are beginning to form relationships with these influencers as a way to gain access to these massive audiences. For example, when an Instagram model tags a designer brand in a picture of them wearing their clothing, the brand receives a huge boost in brand awareness amongst that influencer’s base.

The Benefits of Social Influencer Marketing

The following are some of the reasons why you should participate in social influencer marketing:

  • Improve brand awareness

    The moment an influencer mentions your brand or showcases one of your products, you’ll immediately have the eyes of their followers on you. As a result, you’ll increase your brand awareness significantly based on the influencers you’re working with.

  • Improve your brand credibility

    People consider influencers to be trustworthy figures. They’re personalities that are separate from corporations. As a result, they trust what influencers have to say. When influencers promote your brand, their audience assumes that your brand is credible.

  • Reach a relevant audience

    If your influencer is relevant to your industry, then working with them will provide you with access to a relevant audience. For example, a business that sells dog food could gain more exposure to a larger audience by teaming up with an influencer whose Instagram account focuses on the daily adventures of their pet dog. It’s likely that this influencer’s audience is the type of audience the dog food brand is targeting.

  • A different way to promote products

    There’s a fine line when it comes to advertising products and services to your audience. People often get annoyed when they’re trying to read through a blog or email and all they find are advertisements. However, when an influencer promotes a product, most users don’t view it as a corporate advertisement despite the fact influencers are required to be transparent about the relationships that they have with brands when promoting a product. They see it more as an endorsement of a product from someone that they trust.

  • Influencers contribute to your content marketing

    Influencers are natural content creators. It’s why they have such large followings, to begin with — they are capable of creating engaging content on a daily basis. Not only can they create content promoting your brand, but that content is likely to be shared, liked, and commented on by a significant amount of people. Essentially, influencer marketing benefits your content marketing efforts.

  • Improve your SEO

    Influencers can significantly boost your SEO efforts. When mentioning your brand on social media, they often link back to the relevant page or use your company hashtag. This can improve your SEO because Google factors in backlinks from authoritative sources when ranking pages. Additionally, the web traffic that a backlink from a social influencer brings to your site can boost your page rankings.

    Explore more with our Social Media Marketing White Pages

How Powerful Are Social Media Influencers?

Still not sure whether putting the effort into identifying influencers is worth the time and money? Consider the following social media influencer marketing stats that showcase just how powerful an influencer can be:

  • Around 49 percent of consumers make their purchasing decisions based on recommendations made by influencers that they follow.
  • About 40 percent of all Twitter users (and there are over 126 million of them) have made a purchasing decision as a result of a tweet.
  • Approximately 74 percent of consumers use social networks to help guide their purchasing decisions.
  • Around 40 percent of all consumers use ad-blocking apps online, meaning they can’t always be reached using paid advertising.

As you can see, influencer marketing is incredibly powerful — and it will only continue growing. Take advantage of the power of social media influencers by identifying the influencers that fit your brand. Reach out to them and begin to build a relationship that benefits you both.

Learn To Use Social Media To Find New Leads