Social listening for small businesses

Our latest webinar was on social listening. Social listening is monitoring social media for feedback, mentions, or relevant chatter to gain insight or act. The price tag on this capability is at least $150 per month putting it outside the budget of a small business. With #GoSmarter, we're introducing a practically free and highly extendable option for small businesses.

Social listening is automation

Automation is using a system to perform a specific task, where you define the steps and the system performs them. You can have multiple outcomes depending on the situation and add human or artificial intelligence (AI) intervention steps to supplement the information used to trigger an automated process.

Social listening is important customer services

Customers expect us to be online most importantly on social media with them.

• 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. (Oracle)
• 45% of consumers share bad customer service experiences via social media. (Dimensional Research)
• Consumers are 71% more likely to make a purchase based on social media referrals (Hubspot)
• When companies engage and respond to customer service requests over social media, those customers end up spending 20% to 40% more with the company. (Bain & Company)

This means we need to be identifying messages to or about our business and acting quickly on any problems. Before small businesses think about trends, tracking competitors etc, this is where we think business owners should be focusing their efforts.

The #GoSmarter social listening tool

Keeping an ear out for mentions and working out whether they're negative, inappropriate, or problematic is the perfect use of automation and AI. We've been rustling up a social listening tool that is fully customisable, uses a low-code/no-code program, and costs a tiny fraction of a penny for every mention.

Aiming initially for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, our tool will listen out for mentions on any of these platforms. When a mention happens, it'll then use Microsoft's AI tools to analyse the text and images. If there's a problem it'll send you an email so you can handle it ASAP.

The flexible solution means that you can evolve it to whatever your business needs it do. Want it to add the mentions to a spreadsheet, add it. Want to retweet a tweet if it's glowing praise, RT it. We're doing the hard technical bit of making it easy to find out what's happening and hooking it up to AI but we're setting everything up so that the solution is owned by you. This means the ownership and data is entirely yours.

Next steps

• Check out the video and slides from the Social Listening webinar and learn more about it and see a demo of our early social listening tool for Twitter.

Cut out the grunt work and automate your social media from Stephanie Locke