Your customers, employees, and competitors are among the millions talking online everyday. Are they talking about your small business?
The rise in popularity of social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube give people more online avenues than ever to express themselves to the world. Once their comments are on the internet they are pretty much there forever. They can quickly be picked up by RSS feeds that redeposit them all around the internet.
Even if the original comment is deleted, chances are high that it has already started to make it’s way through the internet. It’s like ripping open a pillow filled with down feathers on a really windy day. Good luck getting all those feathers back into the pillow!
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way for you to find out if your small business is being talked about online? If they are talking about you, don’t you want to know what people are saying?
You Got Your Ears On? Set Up a Listening Post
The online world is a big place. There are many places that people could be talking about your small business. You could even be active on the same social networking site where these comments are flying all around you and not know they exist.
Let’s take Twitter for example. You can’t follow everyone so tweets about your small business may never make it to your feed, or if you follow too many people these tweets can get lost amongst all the others in your feed.
You could do periodic searches to find these tweets, but wouldn’t it be nice if you were notified anytime someone tweeted about your small business? This is exactly what a listening post does for you.
A listening post is a query that you set up once that automatically updates itself and notifies you whenever it finds anything that matches your query. You can set these giant electronic ears up on almost every social networking site or search engine.
What Should You be Listening to with Your Listening Post?
Okay, that sounds great. What should we be listening for though? Well, pretty much anything your heart desires. Here are some possible ways you may want to consider.
Customer Feedback
The first query for your listening post should be your company’s name. Hopefully, your company name is unique enough that you won’t pick up interference in the form of hits on other company’s with the same name.
Employee Activity
A disgruntled employee, either current or former, can be very damaging to the reputation of your small business. Setting up a listening post to gather this information can help you effectively stop and counteract the damage done.
Competitor Analysis
Just like people are talking about your small business, they are probably talking about your competitors too. If your competitor is getting rave reviews then you can look at what they are doing well and incorporate it in your small business.
If there are complaints then you can make sure your small business is not making the mistakes, or perhaps it is an area where you excel and can market to these potential customers.
Where Should You Set Up Your Listening Posts?
You want to set up your listening posts anywhere your customers hang out online. Social media networks are becoming more specialized so do a little research to find out which ones your customers would be most likely to use.
Over the next several posts in this series, we will look at some of the most popular social media networking sites, how you can use them, and how to set up listening posts on these networks.
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I think a twitter listening post is imperative (and it's so easy to set up too). As a customer, I'm always thrilled when I tweet about a company and it tweets back! It can be big companies too – like airlines even. I've even had a senior Israeli politician tweet me back the other day!
My recent post How to Recognize Comment Spam
That's pretty cool. David Risley talked about his experience with listening posts recently on his blog. He was at a blogger conference in Las Vegas and tweeted about being lost in the Luxor hotel. He received a tweet from them while he was lost with directions. That's pretty awesome customer service only possible with a listening post. Thanks for the comment.