Many businesses are seeing the benefit of social media. Social media gives you an unparallelled opportunity to research, monitor and engage with people who are relevant to your business. This can include existing customers, prospects, influencers within your field and even competitors.
The management of this across different social networks and accounts however can be complex and time consuming. Fortunately there are several apps available that can make your life so much easier, and Hootsuite, our July 2015 lead generation app of the month, does just that.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social networks from just one place. You may already know that by connecting your social media accounts to Hootsuite, you can schedule your future posts to be published at particular times and also get analytics to see how well your posts performed. However, you may be less aware of how Hootsuite can be used for monitoring and listening to prospect and customer conversations.
The Hootsuite dashboard is divided into tabs (with every social media account that you’ve connected getting its own tab by default) and each tab can contain information streams. You can customise these streams to reflect what you’re interested in monitoring across your social networks.
Let’s take the tab for your company’s Twitter account as an example. If you want to see how people are interacting with the content you’re posting, you can create streams which let you know whenever someone has retweeted, favourited or replied to one of your posts. If you want to find out what people are saying about a particular topic (perhaps sales, marketing or lead generation), you can add streams which update you whenever something is posted on Twitter that includes your chosen keywords. If you’ve made Lists on Twitter (which is definitely worth doing if you haven’t already), you can add a stream per List so that you can easily monitor what members of your Lists are posting alongside each other.
Hootsuite is not just for Twitter – you can also use it for Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and more. And it’s not just for business profiles – you can connect your personal profiles to it as well.
How to use Hootsuite for lead generation
Social media marketing is not just about posting content. That’s an important part of it, but the real point of social media is to be ‘social’ i.e. to engage with people. Using Hootsuite for social monitoring and listening allows you to easily find opportunities for engagement across all of your networks, so that you can then become involved in valuable conversations online.
Monitoring for mentions of your company name will allow you to quickly respond to customer feedback, whether it’s positive or negative. Looking out for certain keywords or phrases (e.g. ‘help with lead generation’) will enable you to give people advice, providing value and building trust. Interacting with influencers among your peers will put you in front of a larger audience than your own, increasing your online visibility and reach. These are just some of the ways you can use social listening via Hootsuite to build your reputation and make useful connections.
Conclusion
With so much being posted on social media every day, it can be a challenge to manually filter out what is relevant to you and your business from ‘the noise’. Using Hootsuite’s dashboard, you can monitor people and posts that you’re really interested in seeing and become involved in conversations that are worth your time.
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