Do you know what people are saying about your brand?
Before paying up for social media listening tools, there are free resources tourism brands can use to discover what people are saying online.
Social media listening is essential for all brands, especially tourism brands. If you don’t know what your customers say about you online, how can you expect to understand them and provide a service, product, or experience they want? You simply should know when people are talking about you online.
More importantly, however, you must know when people say negative things about you online, and social media listening tools are a great way to do it.
Negative reviews and comments can devastate tourism brands, especially when not addressed. Recommendations play a critical role in people’s decision-making.
When was the last time you picked a holiday destination or booked accommodation without seeing what others had to say? Exactly.
So, can you listen to what is being said about your online tourism brand without busting your budget open? Here are three free social media listening tools for tourism brands.
1. Manage Your Push Notifications
There is no third-party app or program here. One of the easiest things you can do to ensure you’re not missing anything your community is doing or saying about your brand is to ensure your notification settings are set up correctly.
You may not want push notifications enabled for your personal account, but push notifications are crucial for business accounts.
What are push notifications? Simply put, a push notification is a message that pops up on a mobile device. If you’re active on social media, you’ve almost certainly been asked to allow push notifications at some stage.
Push notifications look and act like text messages, meaning you don’t need to open an app to receive them; they simply pop up, overlaid on your device’s screen.
If you haven’t already, go into your app’s settings and enable push notifications. These notifications are incredibly valuable, especially if you’re out and about regularly. All social media apps have push notifications, but you’re most likely to get the most significant benefit from Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Bonus: Don’t ignore native analytics tools
Whether it’s Facebook, TikTok, or LinkedIn, all social media platforms have built-in analytics tools. For example, Meta Business Suite is a feature-rich platform that offers more data than we can list. Before you hand over your hard-earned marketing budget, look and see what these tools can tell you about your brand.
2. Google Alerts
If you haven’t set up Google Alerts for your brand or business yet, you absolutely should. Google Alerts is a free-to-use content change detection and notification service. All you have to do is choose a search term (i.e. your brand name), and Google alerts will send you emails whenever it finds new results from web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, scientific research, and more.
3. Boardreader
Boardreader lives up to its name by scanning through message boards and discussion panels to uncover conversations about you and your brand in the challenging realm of comment sections. These areas can be difficult to navigate, but commenters often express more candid opinions than social media posters. It’s essential to be resilient and prepared for potentially stronger language before delving into this aspect of online feedback.
Paid Social Media Listening Tools
Before spending significant money on third-party social media listening tools, we recommend trying all of the free options first. This will help you get familiar with social listening, save money, and help you work out if your brand or business needs to pay for a social media listening tool.
However, if you are keen to try a few paid tools, here are some of the best on the market:
These options are feature-rich tools, but those features come at a premium. If you are considering handing over your hard-earned cash on social media listening tools, research and find the right tool for your brand and what you’re trying to achieve.
Final thoughts
Social media listening is simply something your brand needs to be doing. With that said, there’s definitely no one-size-fits-all approach for how to do it. Whether you’re interested in free social media listening tools or a paid options, it’s essential to research and decide which platform offers the features that suit your needs.
If you decide to go down the paid route for social media listening tools, most platforms offer trials that let you test the fit before making any commitment.
