As David Alston rightly said, “Social media is not a media. The key is to listen, engage, and build relationships.”
Over the years, social media has grown into a prolific tool for companies to engage and entice their customers. But to outperform your competition, listening to your customers is also important.
It is important to know what your customers and target audience are saying about you – your brand, your products, your super bowl ad, your mascot, your customer service experience as well as your competitors. Only then would you be able to develop a powerful digital marketing strategy – one that helps your brand shine through the roof.
But wrapping your head around hundreds of millions of posts, comments, tweets, and reviews being generated on an everyday basis is not easy. That’s where Social Media Monitoring tools step in. By giving real-time information about conversations happening about and around your brand, social media monitoring helps you stay relevant and informed.
Let’s see what social media monitoring is and how it is helping brands strengthen their digital footprint.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing relevant online conversations happening about you, your brand, products, or services. It helps organizations gather valuable information about their customers, competitors, and industry influencers so as to develop effective marketing and communication strategies that help them stay on top of it all.
Social monitoring goes beyond identifying posts, tweets, reviews, and complaints that are tagged with your brand name. It extends to track posts in which people might have mentioned your brand’s name without actually tagging you.
It helps you sort out through the noise and focus on posts, tweet, and mentions that are relevant.
For example:
Look at this tweet from a customer:
"Just tried the new plant-based burger from #ImpossibleFoods and I'm blown away! The taste and texture are amazing, and I love that it's better for the environment. Definitely my new go-to burger option."
This tweet does not directly tag Impossible Foods, and in the swarm of tweets, it would obviously be difficult for the company's social media team to find their mention.
But because of competent social monitoring practices, Impossible Foods was able to respond to a customer’s tweets that didn’t directly mention them. This is what they posted in response:
“Hey Jamie, thank you for trying us out. We’d love to have you over again!”
Not only their reaction made the customer happy, but it also fostered trust in the brand and ensured that they are always listening to their customers.
That’s the power of social media monitoring!
The Benefits of Social Media Monitoring
Social media has become a go-to platform for people to make announcements, share their opinions, likes, dislikes, suggestions, and more.
In fact, it’s believed that nearly 80% of users have mentioned a brand in their social media posts, with or without tagging them. For brands, this brings a magnanimous opportunity to understand their customers and engage with them at a more personal level.
Here are some of the biggest benefits of social media monitoring for brands and organizations:
1. Elevates Your Brand Presence
Are all your customers aware that your brand exists on social media? Do they talk about you? Staying in the buzz, for the right reasons, can help you gain more popularity on social media.
Media monitoring helps you to know if people are talking about you or your products. It also helps you understand your customers better – their needs and wants – and spot any misconceptions they have about you.
2. Helps in Reputation Management
When you fall behind in your service commitment, the unhappy customers go and announce their discontentment to the world.The result? A tarnished online reputation.
Social media monitoring allows you to quickly identify and address customer concerns and complaints. It gives you the opportunity to engage with customers, resolve their issues, build meaningful relationships, and track brand sentiment.
3. Facilitates Lead Generation
Through social monitoring, you can easily identify potential leads who are talking about your products or services or are expressing a need that your brand can fulfill. This gives you an opportunity to reach out to them, start meaningful conversations, and convert them into your customers.
4. Improves Customer Service
Not only do you get insight into customers’ requirements, leveraging social monitoring you can resolve their complaints too. This leads to better customer service and happy clients.
5. Helps to Beat Competition
Using social media monitoring services, you can gain an in-depth insight into your competitors' social media activities and campaigns. You can use this knowledge to improve your products and services and bring better products to market.
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