15 free social listening tools
Social Listening Tools by Rosie Siman outlines some free tools you can use to better understand your brand, your audience, how your audience perceives your brand in the social space. These are also great tools for researching bigger conversations, themes or trends in the social space.
This is my favourite one:
Bit.ly (now Bitly.com, since .ly is a Libyan domain extension)
Bitly is a URL shortener, but can be used (sneakily) to find out how influential a brand or person actually is. By adding a +to the end of a bit.ly link, you'll be taken to a stats page where you can see how many people have clicked on that specific link, where they were when they clicked on the link (physical locaIon and site location) and when these clicks happened (dates) amongst other things. If you have a client with a Facebook page, you could have them share a link, shortened by bit.ly about themselves and one about something else to see what their fans are most interested in. Or if youre looking at a brand or a competitor's Twitter feed, you can see how many people click on the links that they re sharing (if they share links using Bit.ly.)
Listening and monitoring: what is the business benefit?
In the age of Facebook and cloud computing, listening to customers is more important than ever. It sounds simple enough, but there are tweets, online comments, and various other channels of digital communication to pay attention to.
According to a 2011 Dell-commissioned Forrester Consulting survey of 200 US-based companies, 63% of surveyed companies believe that listening and digital engagement has helped them see positive results in brand awareness.
But what areas of their business will benefit most from listening and digital engagement?
More in this Infographic: How Brands Listen in the Digital Age @ getsatisfaction.com
Facebook for business: traffic to site most prominent KPI
Custom fan page designers Pagemodo conducted a survey among small business owners who were using Facebook as a marketing and revenue generation channel. The results show that, while only half of respondents use Facebook, a significant number of users report increased revenue as a result.
Highlights from the survey:
- 47% of SME owners said their Facebook pages are pushing a significant amount of traffic to their websites.
- 48% reported that a portion of the traffic converts into customers.
Businesses that use Facebook for business engage in the following activities:
Social is gaining share in referrals
From Study Gives Insight Into Content Discovery Trends Across the Web’s Leading Publishers @ blog.outbrain.com:
Currently, search methods [...] send the largest slice of referral traffic to content. Links from publisher sites make up 31% of referral traffic to content pages [...], portal homepages (AOL.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com) account for 17% of traffic, and finally, social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Fark.com, reddit, Digg) send 11% of traffic to content pages.
What kind of content do people share online?
This infograph says it all:
Download a high-res PDF of the report: Content Discovery and Engagement Report, Q1 2011 (.pdf)
The Content Grid: a framework for the process of Content Marketing
From the (excellent) Social Media ProBook:
The "buying" process begins long before a sales person contacts a prospect. The fuel that drives a prospect from latent interest to active demand is created, curated or procured by a brand, distributed over social channels and measured against business objectives.
Their list of KPIs is particularly interesting:
Awareness:
- traffic / page views / time onsite
- content downloads
- inbound links / page rank
- fans / followers
- mentions / comments / shares
Consideration:
- open / click-through rates
- inquiries / database growth
- form submission rate
- funnel conversion (stage change)
Close:
- qualified / accepted leads
- meeting with sales
- opportunities
- active pipeline / pipeline value
- closed deals
Facebook as traffic builder for news sites
In The Conversity Model I don't really recommend a Facebook Page if your only objective is to drive traffic to your website. Things change, however, if you use Like Buttons and other Social Plugins on your website.
A recent study by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism investigated several traffic drivers online for news sites. Pew’s report also states that finding news is no longer important in this digital age - sharing the news is: “Google and Facebook are increasingly set up as competitors (for) sorting through the material on the Web."
A few other highlights from the report:
- 30% traffic originates from Google organic search
- 3% traffic come from Facebook through Like Buttons and links posted by users
- In comparison to Facebook, Twitter seems to make little or no effect
- 77% percent of the referral traffic comes in the form of casual users , who visit these sites not more than twice a month
Further reading:
- Facebook An Important Source Of Traffic For News Sites: Pew Internet @ watblog.com
- Where people Go, How They Get There and What Lures Them Away @ journalism.org
Social media monitoring no longer for PR and marketing alone
Social Media Monitoring is being taken more and more seriously and delivering value to more and more departments within organisations.
It is no longer the preserve of PR and Marketing.
Customer Service, R&D, Innovation and Insight leading to New Product Development are all well represented in The state of social media monitoring, a survey run by London based 90:10 Group with 99 professionals from around the world.
According to this survey, Social Media Monitoring is finally moving out of its experimental phase and claiming its place at the top table of serious, action-oriented research
Organisations attempting to understand their customers and their needs without tuning into the online conversation are missing out on an unprecedented opportunity - one their rivals are already taking advantage of.
More in this slide deck:
Facebook fans can be bought
On page 98 of The Conversity Model I mention a current form of black hat social media services:
I have met social media consultants who claim to be able to ‘sell’ you Facebook fans for as little as 50 eurocents per fan. This must mean that after ‘click farms’ (to click on your advertising), ‘content farms’ (to write your blog posts), there are now also ‘fan farms’ (to give you the illusion that your fan page is popular).
According to digital marketer Shiv Singh, the going rate for fan acquisition is roughly $0.60 to $1.00 per fan:
If I wanted to create the largest brand page on Facebook, I could do that quickly by just spending. I could use a large percentage of a digital media budget to buy those fans. It'll take probably two weeks but I would have the largest Facebook brand page in no time. Does it mean that I have the most popular brand online or that I'm the most social media savvy marketer out there? Of course not. It just means that I have a very large budget.
In the end, these non-organic "fans" will barely interact with the messages on your Page. And that's a shame, since Facebook's advertising solutions, if used well, can quickly scale up your fan count too.
Source:
- Will you tie bonuses to Facebook fan counts? @ goingsocialnow.com
How much do people pay for social media monitoring tools?
- 54.7% pays $100/month or less
- 19.7% pays between $100 and $500/month
- 19% pays between $500 and $5,000/month
- 4.4% pays between $5,000 and $10,000/month
- 2.2% say they spend $10,000/month or more
Based on a survey collecting data from 150 U.S. social media professionals, conducted by "social business software hub" oneforty.
More where this came from: All about social media monitoring tools infograph.