“A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.”

• Wilson Mizner ( 1876-1933 )

In my last post, we talked about social media and its implications to your PR strategy. I promised you that we were going to cover the issue of listening on what people say about you and/or your company.

Before we start, it will be very crucial to remember that listening is a very big part of communication. In fact, it could even be argued that listening is a part of life that we can’t live without. Any good communicators out there will confirm this fact. Just ask somebody you admire for his / her communication skills. It’s undeniable.

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In the context of Social Media, it can become quite confusing, – especially for a first-timer -, to scan and monitor what people say about you. As in real-life communication, it takes a skill to listen. The good news is, it’s easy to acquire the ability to listen in Social Media. Enter the “Search” function.

To elaborate more on this, we’re going to use Twitter as an example. By now, you must know already about what is it. If you have not join Twitter, do so now. You owe it to yourself. Find some important people to follow, – or better yet -, some people who is relevant to your field.

Assuming that you have already done all of the above, what you need to do now is searching the public timeline for the topic pertaining to your field. Owing to Twitter’s wild popularity, there are some excellent tools out there to do this very thing. Make use of them. Followings are three of them that I myself use most often :

• Twitter official search tool
• Tweetscan
• TwitterTroll

Official Twitter Search page

Now all you need to do is go to their sites and type your topic, much as the way you use Google or other search engines. For example : Peter is in the business of airlines. He would want to search for “airlines”, “flying”, “flight” or other similar search terms. The search tool will then give him tweets from people that used such words in it. Don’t just stop there, however. Push your listening act a little bit further. You might want to even search for your brand. Type “Apple” for instance, and you will see what I mean.

Once you reach this point, it will become easy for you to see what people say about you and/or your brands. Don’t forget other valuable information like what their needs, preferences or anything else that might help you to sell more. Good luck !