8 common social media listening myths

Myth #1 – Social Media Listening lacks a good amount of return on investment (ROI)
With ever increasing user base of social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and others, brands always remember to talk about themselves but always forget/ignore the customer service part.
Having an effective social media listening strategy in place will not only help the brands to keep a check on complaints/reviews about them appearing on the web, but it will also establish a positive dialogue with their present/future customers.
Myth #2 – Through Google search, it is possible to find all the relevant conversations about my brand
Typing in your brand name on Google or twitter will surely provide you some conversations but that would be a very limited set; what about numerous review websites and blogs where customers rant about varied products/services every day.
So, it’s about time that you should seriously re-think your decision
Myth #3 – There’s this comprehensive tool in the market, which can provide me all the conversations from every content platform
As of now, there’s no social media listening tool in the market which can provide you one-stop access to all the relevant platforms for your monitoring needs.
Best practice is to A/B test more than one social media listening tool to get the best outcome.
Myth #4 – Social Media listening and Analysis is sufficient to optimize my PR strategy
While a robust social media listening tool is very important for your online reputation, but these tools are not alone sufficient to create a win-win PR strategy.
A successful PR strategy is always a combination of experience, insights, story-telling capabilities of PR executives strongly coupled with technology.
Myth #5 – Sentiment Analysis is a waste of time
Though sentiment analysis is never 100% accurate, but it definitely gives you a fair amount of idea of how your product/service is being perceived by the audience.
So, choosing a social media listening tool which doesn’t provide you sentiment analysis is surely a waste of time and effort.
Myth #6 – Social media listening tools violate user-privacy laws
All the tools, are allowed to access publicly-available data only, so even if you are seeing conversations from users on your feed, then it is the data which is public anyway, so there is no place for privacy violation
Myth #7 – Google Alerts are as effective as paid social media listening solutions
Through Google search you might end up cluttered in lots of spam data which is not required.
Social Media listening tools provide you the flexibility of writing specific keyword search queries which solves your purpose.
Myth #8 – If a tool is strong in X platform, then it would be also in platform Y
Social media listening is not only about tracking conversations; it’s also about finding the right tool which will most efficiently track them,
It is not necessary that if a tool is good in tracking twitter, would also be great in Facebook – So, the key lies in finding the tool which suits your business requirements