Four Free Social Media Listening Tools Your Hotel Can Take Advantage Of
Decades ago, businesses did all the talking when it comes to sales and marketing. Back then, the flow of messages was unidirectional — businesses talk and consumers listen. There was no way for customers to respond immediately.
Social media changed all that. Today, almost everyone has a Facebook and Twitter account. Day in and day out, thousands of conversations about brands and products take place across different social networks and if you’re not monitoring what people are saying about you, you are missing opportunities to correct misconceptions, leverage on positive word-of-mouth and engage your customers in meaningful dialogues.
This is especially important for hotels because social media is becoming a strong influence when people plan their travels. Knowing what guests and travelers are saying about you is crucial if you want to preserve your hotel’s positive image as well as mine insights as to what travelers are looking for, which you can later use to craft persuasive marketing and sales messages.
Enterprise social media listening solutions can be a bit expensive (but they are really great if you can afford them). To help you, we culled five of the best social listening tools available online that you can use absolutely free of charge. Here are our four favorite social media listening tools.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is primarily used by marketers to automate the posting of their social media content. Aside from this however, Hootsuite also boasts of a great weekly analytics report that gives you a bird’s eye view of what people are saying about your hotel and measure that level of engagement across different social media channels. Further, you can give your team members access to your Hootsuite monitoring report so you can delegate effectively how to respond to social mentions about your hotel. Get started for free: https://hootsuite.com/
TweetReach
As its name suggests, TweetReach is a social media listening tool that is specifically designed to measure the reach and impact of your Tweets or your Twitter mentions. It gives you data such as total number of users reached, estimated number of impressions, activities (tweets, re-tweets and replies), and the most re-posted tweet that mentions your hotel as well as your most influential follower. Having this information is great because it will allow you to engage your most influential followers to leverage on their network. More: http://tweetreach.com
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Social Mention
This free social listening tool is quite popular among brands who are active in social media because of its in-depth and comprehensive analytics. It will gauge your hotel’s social media performance in four different criteria: Strength, Passion, Sentiment and Reach. More specifically, it gives you the ratio of negative social mentions to positive social mentions, the top hashtags associated with your hotel, the top keywords used in social posts for your hotel as well as the social media user who most frequently visit your hotel. Check out Social Mention’s site: http://www.socialmention.com
Addictomatic
If you’re a novice in social listening, Addictomatic is a great place to start. It’s extremely easy to use — just enter your hotel name on the search bar and you instantly get how your hotel is being talked about across different social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Bing, YouTube and even WordPress. It offers a great overview of what online conversations are happening about your hotel in real time. http://addictomatic.com
In this day and age, what you say is not as important as what travelers or potential guests say. Listening to what people are saying online about your hotel is a goldmine of insights that can help you improve your sales and marketing strategies. Please share the social media listening tools you use, comment below.