Most companies today are engaged in Social Media. Social Media Monitoring is a key piece of Social Media marketing. Here are 6 reasons why you need to get into the social media monitoring game right now:
1. Listen and engage with customers: Social Media is an incredible place where you can have a one-to-one conversations with your customers. Your customers are talking about your brand or product and you need to monitor what they are saying. You need to engage with them and show them you are listening.
Once you start monitoring you will also be able to find out who are the influencers talking about your brand or industry are. Those influencers are great people to engage with to help you grow your social media program.
2. Manage your reputation: As you monitor what your customers are saying on Twitter, Facebook, Blogs or other channels you will be able to see what users are saying about your brand. At times you will find users who are not happy with your product or service and are voicing their opinions. You should listen to these users, connect with them and try to solve the issue. At times, certain comments might suddenly blow up into a PR disaster and hence its important to have real -time monitoring and a timely response. You will certainly need a PR plan to discuss the negative comments, but monitoring your brand is the first piece of managing your reputation online.
3. Find leads for your business: One of the best things about Social Media is that people are reaching out to their friends or the public to find out about product reviews. They ask questions like “What are the best tools for …” or “What do you think of this camera?”. That’s someone who’s an interested buyer and replying to them with why they should consider your product will help you generate product leads.
4. Monitor your Competition: Since most of the information users are sharing about you and your competitors are public, you can see what customer are saying about your competitors. That might give you feedback on what people think about your competitors product and where you might be able to differentiate.
5. Product Research: Customer opinions about your product or service are a rich source of information for new product research and development ideas. You can see what features users want or what pain points they may have like poor customer service or a not finding some information on your website. These are great ideas for your product improvements. Tweet clouds or tag clouds are great tools to visualize this rich customer information and gain product insights.
6. Measure your Engagement: All the effort you are putting into Social Media needs to be measured. Measuring social media is hard. For example you could choose to measure how many users are coming to your site from different Social Sites. As you monitor your brand, you should also see how many times people are engaging with your brand and use that as a measure of engagement – like how many Twitter followers, how many people are talking about brand, etc. The first start is to monitor your brand to measure your success.
We might have missed other useful insights you have gained from monitoring your social media programs. Please do write to us and we share your insights. Email us at support@actionly.com
