One of the ways we encourage our clients to use social media is for listening. A good listening strategy can be extremely useful when you monitor conversational terms that people use to indicate a need for your products or services. One example is a term we’ve been listing to for XINSURANCE’s  Animal Liability product. We currently listen to the phrase “my dog bit” on Twitter. This allows us to identify all users that, not only have dogs, but who have high-risk dogs that bite. This is what listening is all about, and with these results you can respond with a tactful suggestion or refer them to a blog post or website content on the subject.

Up until now Twitter has been the only micro-blogging tool that is truly public to the point where you can put your search in Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and actually get results back. Well, as of today the game has changed and now Facebook searches are available to use (in Hootsuite at least, I’m sure Tweetdeck isn’t far behind). This opens even more doors for valuable interactions with people around the social media-sphere!