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4 Ways to Listen to Your Customer

Submitted by Sean McCandless on Wed, 01/13/2010 - 2:14pm

We started our social media series exploring ways a user can listen to what is happening on the Internet.  In this post, we’ll move a bit farther down the listening road and apply a broader perspective to listening.  Listening to your customers also means learning what they are searching for, where they are coming from (when viewing your website) and what sites and experts they might be learning from.  The web is a mass of content that changes in real time, so keeping up with everything is impossible.  However, you can use these tools to keep tabs on what’s happening on relevant topics specific to you and listen to your customer.

 

 

  • Rank Checker.  You’ll need to run a FireFox browser and download this extension to the browser to utilize this feature; however, it provides a useful analysis of potential keyword searches and the resulting location of your web-site on the major search engines.  Rank Checker provides a 5 minute video of their technology capabilities on their home page.  Note: this is a pay service. 

 

  • Google Analytics: Google Analytics provides you with insight into your web-traffic and marketing effectiveness.  Once accessed, you can view your web page hits, average time each user spends on your site, how people have accessed your site, pages most visited and entrance sources.  I’ve provided a sample screen shot below.   This video is also helpful.

 

 

  • Search Twitter:  I’ve found Twitter to be both fascinating and frustrating.  It’s fascinating because it allows you to connect with so many different people, read their thoughts and access unique information on the web-site.  However, navigating and keeping up with Tweets is the frustrating part – at least for me.  I know many of our members are involved in real estate, so the sample search used below is on “green real estate”.   

 

  • Google Alerts: Google alerts is a great way to keep tabs on competition, industry or anything for that matter.  You can have the alert delivered to your reader (see our post on how to set up a Google Reader) or to your in box.  If you don’t have a Gmail account – sign up now.  It’s an absolute must for any social media work. 

 

Sean McCandless and Beth Bond