Social Media Marketing Tools for Listening

“Effective questioning brings insight, which fuels curiosity, which cultivates wisdom.” Chip Bell. Listening, whether it is life or in business, is a skill that is necessary for any kind of success. If you are always talking, you are never listening.

With the amount of information that is available online nowadays, you have the advantage of a heightened sense of awareness. On the flip side, however, is the fact that you need to sift through so much to discover what is important and valuable. There are now tools that are available that allow you to listen to what is available to you and to organize the information in a way that will help you to be efficient and effective in business. The following are some of the available tools that will help you in your quest to become ultra organized.

• Bing: Bing is a search engine by Microsoft that seeks out the information and organizes it for you so that you are able to make decisions quickly.
   
• Commentful: This is a service that monitors comments and follow-ups on blog postings, Flickr photos, and other sorts of content. When there is a status update, you get an instant notification from Commentful.
   
• BlogPulse: This is a free search engine that was designed specifically for blogs. It identifies patterns on a daily basis.
   
• Complete Blog: This is a free-access platform that showcases how other people use the web as well as showing you where valuable and interesting websites are located.
   
• Cotweet: Cotweet is a web-based social media engagement tool. It engages, manages, and offers solutions that help businesses of all sizes to monitor and analyze discussions about their brands across two of the most popular social media channels: Twitter and Facebook.
   
• Digg: This is where people find and share content from all over the Internet. Digg’s members vote on various things and it is communicated to the entire social community. Tools are provided by Digg to uncover content, speak about impassioned topics, connect with other members of the community who share the same interests, and form new connections.
   
• Feedky: This is a tool that scans video websites such as YouTube, Google video, etc, for new videos that match whichever tags you have entered.
   
• FourWhere: FourWhere allows you to find tips for venues and comments that are left by users of Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla. This tool automatically gathers and aggregates comments and puts them into a map.
   
• Google News: This tool automatically pulls in news items from various websites from the past 30 days.
   
• HootSuite: HootSuite publishes websites (like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare, etc). It also has customized analytics, group collaboration, and the capability of setting messages in advance across all of your social media channels.
   
• Klout: Klout allows activity and engagement levels for various brands in social media and assigns each user a score from one to one hundred.
   
• OpenBook: OpenBook allows you to do a live search of status updates from Facebook members in real time by searching peoples’ posts on Facebook.
   
• SamePoint: This enables clients to effectively connect social media to their business processes.
   
• Sideline: Sideline is a service from Yahoo!, which allows you to create and collect specific queries that you arrange by topics of interest.
   
• Technorati: This measures the position and influence of a particular website.
   
• Trackur: Trackur lets you watch your reputation, mentions, employees, competition, and public relations campaigns.
   
• Trendpedia: This is a social media monitoring and research tool that has multi-language capabilities. It will give you insights into what people are saying about your brand (around the world).
   
• UsernameCheck: This lets you find out instantaneously where your username is registered.
   
• Website Grader: Website Grader is a website search engine optimization (SEO) tool (produced by HubSpot), which can measure the marketing effectiveness of your website. It also gives you advice on how to improve your website from a marketing angle.
   
• Yahoo Pipes: This tool aggregates, mashes up, and manipulates content from all over the Internet. With this tool, you have the ability to create information that will help you in your business.

Conclusion

The listening tools that have been mentioned in this article are just a small number of what is available. Listening must always be your starting point, even before you do anything else. The tools will make your experience with social media much easier, more efficient, and successful. As time goes on and you continue to work social media to its fullest potential, it is important to constantly understand which tools are available and how you can make the best use of them for your business. Just remember that you need to have a good handle on which tools you need first and then you can make good use of your selected tools.

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