Online conversations happen with or without you and your interaction. Question is are you okay with that or would you rather participate and make a contribution?

Online marketing plans go beyond creating a website and creating your presence on a couple social networking sites, it involves research and part of that research is to do a little listening. Why? Because social listening helps you connect the dots between your website, social media and SEO.

Another part of the research strategy is knowing where your audience is hanging out. Social listening can help with that as well. With social listening tools, you can monitor the conversations that are taking place on the global internet, social media, social mentions and even local search.

Here is a partial list of tools that will help get you started:

  • Google Alerts – Customized topics with results sent via email.
  • Guzzle.it -Feeds that will give you news you care about.
  • List.ly – What the world is talking about in list form; Generated by people.
  • Twitter Lists – You can arrange the list of keywords, hashtags or user names
  • Social Mention – provides a real time search of social networks

In addition, Facebook’s Graph Search feature allows you to monitor specific Hashtags.

Are there social listening tools not on this list that should be?

What are your thoughts about using social listening tools as part of your social media strategy?

For more information or help with this, feel free to reach out to us to learn more!