Are you listening to your customers’ reviews? Do you know when they’re tweeting about you or posting on Google Review? Kori Ashton shares 4 tools for social listening. Be certain to have a response plan in place to connect with anyone (good or bad) online in all platforms.
Full Transcript
Hey y’all, I’m Kori Ashton and it is another Monday Marketing Minute. Today I want to help us look at how to craft the narrative as people are talking about our business or our services.
You want to think about this, because all the wackadoos and all the wonderfuls, whatever they might be, are out there talking about you. So you certainly want to be able to respond in an appropriate manner, in an appropriate time. You certainly don’t want a negative review to sit out there unresponded to for weeks or months at a time because people will see that conversation and it will deter them from working with you, or from buying from you.
So we certainly want to have tools in place to have our social listening ears on and be sure that we can craft the narrative ourselves. Let’s go take a look at some tools.
So whether they’re saying wonderful, amazing things about you or whether they’re saying some not so amazing things about you, you absolutely need to be able to respond in kinda almost a real time. But unless you’re just living at your computer, or you have every notification annoying the heck out of your Apple Watch or out of your phone for the day, how the heck do you keep track of so many people talking about your services and your businesses? Well, there’s actually software out there that will help you do what’s called social listening.
BirdEye Social Listening Tool
So there are resources like BirdEye, and I’ll put the link to all these that I’m giving you in the description box below.
Some of these I’ve used, others I’ve not. Some of ’em have free trials, others don’t. So I just want you to kind of do your own research, but I want to mention a few of these to you so that you can take your time, dig through, and see if they could be of use for you.
So BirdEye allows you to kind of gather your own reviews. It gives you a platform or portal for your customers and your readers to come through and click and actually put in their own words and then they can either send it out to social media, if it’s all positive, or it can kind of do a capture and send it to you if it’s a negative review.
Socialbakers & Sprout Social- Social Listening Tools
So a really cool kind of filtering system there. Socialbakers as well as Sprout Social, both of these are really great tools when it comes to just literally setting up a monitoring system, and kind of being alerted when somebody’s talking about your product or your brand.
And you absolutely, again, just want to be able to have something like this out there, giving you notifications.
Hootsuite Social Listening Tools
For those of you who might be using Hootsuite, they actually have something inside that allows you to set up these notifications as well, to be certain that you’re getting alerts when somebody’s mentioning your name, your product.
And of course, the absolute best way to handle this is craft the narrative yourself and put them on your website. Reach out directly to your customers, to your consumers. Ask them, ask your clients, will you write a quick testimonial, will you give me a quick review? And let me put it on my website.
Be certain and not call them testimonials but call them reviews instead
And I’m going to challenge you to do this, be certain not to call them testimonials because nobody really goes to Google to search for WebTegrity testimonials. They’re looking for reviews on your business, your brand, your product. So be certain that you’ve named your page or titled your page Reviews, so that Google understands let’s get this to the forefront when somebody’s doing a Google search.
Set up Triggers
Listen y’all, it is the start of the week, it is your Monday, so now is the time to set up these triggers, these alerts, so that you’re able to monitor this moving forward. What you don’t want to do is let a bad review lapse on your social media, or let a tweet go out that just kind of unfortunately says some negative things about you without a response.
Created Canned Responses
And you certainly want to be able to already have some canned responses in place. So I’m going to challenge you to do this one last step. Take time right now, while you’re not flustered or frustrated with somebody’s negativity, and write a really good response that you can just kind of copy and paste or have the ability to pull from in that heated moment when you read something about a negative whackadoo having a problem with your business or your service. You don’t want to take it personally. You want to realize that they’re frustrated, and maybe it was just a misinterpretation or a misunderstanding.
Maybe it was just a frustrated customer that you really tried to help and could not resolve. Either way, you need to be able to respond to them in a very professional manner, because we’re all reading your reviews, we’re all watching how you respond. And we want to do business with you, and we also understand that there’s going to be some out there that you just can’t please. But it will be a response that makes all the difference.
I hope you’re having a great Monday. I’ll see you later in the week for WordPress Wednesday. Be sure to subscribe because every week I’m creating content just like this to help you improve your online marketing.
And do me a favor, will you leave a nice comment below? Thanks y’all, bye bye!
Are They Listening?
Hey guys one last thing, won’t it be interesting to see if any of these four companies that I mentioned actually have their own social listening ears on? It’d be very interesting, a cool case study to see who comments first and who wins out of actually listening for their brand, so let’s call them out again. Hootsuite, and their social listening tools; Sprout Social, and their social listening tools; BirdEye and their client review tools; and Socialbakers, right?
So let’s see who wins, and comments first on this video or tweets to me. I’d be very interested to see.
I hope y’all are having a great one, see you next time!
