7 Must-Have Features for a social media listening tool

By Sowmya Rao, August 24, 2017

In my previous blog, I spoke about Why you just can’t miss out on Social Media Listening. So what should you be looking for when implementing a new system to do this? [inlinetweet suffix=”via @BCTGlobal #SocialListening”] Know the must-have features for a social media listening tool.[/inlinetweet]

1. Listening and Monitoring

The tool must have a real time listening and monitoring capability by integrating with various social media websites. The system should be able to capture content, from anywhere publicly available online, and from different social media sites. Multi-Language listening of data from the various social media sites would be an added advantage.

2. Sentiment Analysis

The tool must be able to analyse the content for sentiments expressed by Social Media users. NLP engines (Natural Language Processing) can be used to read and understand millions of social media postings every day.

Sentiment Analysis is used to extract, identify or characterize the sentiment content of a text unit using NLP, statistics, and machine learning methods. It aims to determine the attitude of a speaker or a writer with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity of a document.

 

3. Campaign Management

The tool should be able to schedule marketing campaigns to be posted on social media sites. It should allow you to create campaigns and run them across the various Social Media channels that have been integrated. It should also allow users to monitor / engage and understand sentiment of each post that has been posted in response to campaigns. This would help you understand the effectiveness of your Social Media campaigns.

 

4. Customer Engagement

The tool should provide the ability to start engaging with customers / SM users. It should have a ticketing feature that helps raise tickets based on comments and posts received through social media channels. These tickets can then be assigned to customer support staff for handling and resolutions. A full-fledged complaints management solution that handles the entire workflow from the call center to the field-service would also be an added advantage.

 

5. Competitor Analysis

The tool must be able to compare your brand with competitors. It should be able to monitor mentions of your competitors online and provide you with a neat dashboard that compares your performance with that of your competitors. This would offer you great insights to help you fine-tune your campaigns / interactions with your customers.

 

6. Dashboards, Analytics, and Reports

Dashboard: The system must provide a comprehensive dashboard which would give an overall analysis of the topic searched. With rich features like animated word bubbles and click through charts, you’d be able to make better sense of your data.

Reports: Reports includes summary report on social media mentions, monthly trend report on sentiment, mentions, influencer, source, and demographics.

Analytics: The system must have the ability to provide analytics such as:

  • Trend line on the post count
  • Trend line on Sentiment Value
  • Top Sources
  • Demographics
  • Locations
  • Top 10 opinion makers

 

7. Lead Generation

The tool should also provide a Lead generation system; it could turn out to be the most crucial weapon in your arsenal. The system should allow you to

  • Identify potential leads from the mass social chatter and display the same results with ready-to-engage features
  • Engage with potential leads with ease so that you don’t lose out on any business.
  • Keep track of all the potential leads you have engaged with, making sure that their needs have been satisfactorily met with.

A comprehensive Social media listening tool should have at least these features, to help you run your Social Media presence effectively. There are plenty of other features as well, like brand management, influencer rating, triangulation module, etc., but you can add these as your business grows.

Can you think of any other must-have features?

Author Profile
Sowmya Rao

Currently working as a business analyst with BCT, Sowmya has experience in pre-sales engineering, marketing tools, product launches, and creating sales strategies & developing customer bases. She also plans and executes social media marketing strategies and has a knack to manage Social Media posts and responses, highly impacting Marketing, Sales, and PR. Being a communication expert, she has played a key role in employee hiring and inside sales.

Sowmya holds a Masters in Computer Science from California State University, LA. Prior to corporate work, she was a student mentor at an international early learning centre. While she puts her thinking cap on during the daytime, her other interests vary from singing to solving Sudokus. In short, a jack of all trades!

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Sowmya Rao

Currently working as a business analyst with BCT, Sowmya has experience in pre-sales engineering, marketing tools, product launches, and creating sales strategies & developing customer bases. She also plans and executes social media marketing strategies and has a knack to manage Social Media posts and responses, highly impacting Marketing, Sales, and PR. Being a communication expert, she has played a key role in employee hiring and inside sales. Sowmya holds a Masters in Computer Science from California State University, LA. Prior to corporate work, she was a student mentor at an international early learning centre. While she puts her thinking cap on during the daytime, her other interests vary from singing to solving Sudokus. In short, a jack of all trades!

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