What is social media listening and should you be doing it? 

Social media listening isn’t something new but, it is something that we think you’ll hear a lot more about next year. It’s also something that as a business owner you should have in your arsenal – especially if you’re just about to debut a new website design for your company.

At its core, social media listening scans social media to observe what people are saying about your brand. It would be impossible to monitor manually but, with the addition of a social media listening tool, you can be kept in the loop when your brand or products are mentioned socially and across the wider web.This of course puts a wealth of consumer insight and feeling at your disposal, both good and bad. You can use the data to gauge what people are thinking and saying about your firm, as well as staying on alert for potential problems before they become wider issues.Getting started with social media listeningYou can get social media listening set up for your brand and ready to go even while your new business web site design is a work in progress. There are lots of options available but if you’re new to this aspect of reputation management, you might want to start with one of these established solutions. TweetDeck TweetDeck comes to you from Twitter itself so no surprises where the main focus of this social media listening tool comes from. If your new website design is for a new venture you will likely find TweetDeck incredibly useful as it’s intended to help you manage multiple Twitter accounts simultaneously.You can set the Deck up to show you tweets from anyone you follow, be alerted to direct messages and also show tweets containing your pre-selected keywords (such as your company name or a brand name). Mention Mention is a social media and web reading tool – so it can take your brand monitoring outside of Facebook and Instagram when you’re ready to spread your wings.Mention is a little more sophisticated in that it not only alerts you when your brand is mentioned, it also gives you an influencer discovery tool and allows you to build custom reports and export data. Agorapulse Agorapulse is a small to medium sized solution so it’s perfect if you’re running a growing business. It will not only help you to keep tabs on what is being said about your company on social media, it will also automate some of your post scheduling tasks, saving you time into the bargain. Agorapulse works across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube so it’s a versatile tool for most.