Social Media Monitoring is the process of listening out for social media conversations that are relevant to your brand. Businesses use these tools to collect social mentions and track keywords, hashtags and URLs that they are interested in. Knowing what your social media audience is saying is crucial.
Why is Social Media Monitoring important?
Monitoring your social media channels is essential. The Sprout Social Q2 2016 Index discovered 34.5% of consumers prefer to reach out to brands for customer care through social media. That beat out other channels like live chat (24.7%) and email (19.4%).
The information you accumulate can help you make major decisions about your marketing strategy and your brand as a whole. Additionally, it can help you identify leads, build relationships, stay on top of trends, learn about your competitors, protect your brand and much more.
Why Should You apply Social Media Monitoring to your business?
- To measure social media sentiment
Social media sentiment is a way of measuring the emotion behind social media mentions; it allows you to measure the tone of the conversation that is taking place. Sentiment adds context to social media and without it, data can be easily misleading.
Sprout Social found that 89% of social messages go ignored, which is a huge problem as not only do potential customers feel under-appreciated, but your business could be missing out on valuable opportunities. Brands need to be aware of whether their customers are happy or angry as people use social media to discuss the topics they care about.
- To find leads & build strong relationships
Powerful relationships are essential to business success. When businesses build strong relationships with their target audience and customer base, it can lead to loyal clients, positive word of mouth and ultimately an increase in sales. Index found 30% of millennials and 32% of Gen Xer’s interact with brands on a monthly basis. With so much communication toward your brand on social, it’s important to monitor, respond and engage with those reaching out, to build or maintain a relationship with your clients.
- To stay up to date with the ever-changing trends
It is crucial to monitor and listen to your customers’ requests, as if you are ill-equipped to meet their needs and respond to their requests, you risk looking antiquated and may lose that business to your competitors
- To perform competitor research
This is a field of strategic research that involves the collection and analysis of information regarding your competitors. It is an essential tactic as it allows businesses to find out what their competitors are doing and the kind of threat they present to the overall success of the business. Keeping your finger on the social pulse will alert you about any unforeseen issues that may have repercussions for your business.
- To protect your brand
Building up your brand’s reputation takes a lot of time and effort, unfortunately, all it can take is one messy situation to tarnish your brand forever. Monitoring your social channels allows you to identify any issues customers have and it is imperative to jump on solutions before they blow up. Problems occur, it’s inevitable. Responding promptly, especially to negative reviews, can help prevent and cure a toxic brand reputation.
Observing and monitoring your social media channels is crucial, and businesses are becoming more aware of this every day. The information you gather can help you make major decisions about your marketing strategy and your brand as a whole. If you do not have a plan in place to analyse, respond and integrate results into your business’s ongoing strategy, you may be missing out on some important opportunities.
Find out more about Social Media and how it can help grow your business, book a consultation now.