What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring, or social listening, is a continuous tracking and analyzing process of your brand, competitors, customers, target groups, and the most influential industry figures since the advent of social media. Social media monitoring deals with the engine that pulls together user-generated content from networks to identify trends, measure brand sentiments, and give immediate feedback to end customers or jump into the fray in case of crisis.
The process of social media allows companies to have an overview of the online opinion about their brand, helps them improve the quality of customer care, saves their reputation, and highlights expansion and engagement opportunities. Timely identification of any damaging remarks or trends allows a company to mitigate the risk of reputation damage or even prevent it altogether.
While social media monitoring typically runs continuously, social media analysis is in contrast, a one-off task, or conducted depending on the circumstances. The collation of information from the monitoring provides a basis from which social media analysis can be delved deeper to enable a brand to make data-based decisions and reflections on strategy.
Using social media monitoring tools helps businesses simplify and automate the monitoring process. These tools can track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and gather insights from various platforms in real-time, making it easier for companies to respond promptly and strategically. (Source: Sprinklr)
Importance of social media monitoring
Social media monitoring is a way of helping any type of organization finitely do good customer service, generate leads, find influencers, and improve on products and services. Some of the main advantages and reasons social monitoring has become an indispensable part of modern-day businesses are listed below.
1. Improved customer service
Good customer service is not only about solving complaints; it is also about addressing customer feedback, questions, and concerns voiced on social media. A timely and helpful answer to a customer cost not only contributes to a good image of the brand but also involves building customer allegiance.
– Feedback responding: Research suggests that when a brand responds to customer posts on social media, it makes them feel valued. Timely replies to complaints or questions are a major factor in restoring customer satisfaction and ensuring the quality of the experience they expect.
– Untagged mentions tracking: A customer may sometimes not tag a brand in their post. By using social listening tools to monitor relevant keywords associated with their brand and conversations, brands can track, find out about, and react to these mentions.
By monitoring relevant keywords associated with their brand and conversations, brands can track, find out about, and react to these mentions.
– Tracking on various platforms:
– Twitter – monitor mentions of your brand with or without the “@” symbol.
– Instagram – track for your brand name with or without the “#” symbol.
– Facebook – monitor the posts and messages made to your business page.
2. New leads through social media
Social media acts as an online search engine of sorts, where people ask for product recommendations or reviews on a particular service. When brands engage in monitoring social conversations, they can pick new prospective leads.
Types of keywords to monitor:
Brand keywords: Track your company name, product names, and common misspellings.
Industry buzzwords: Track terms related to your product or service.
Location-specific keywords: Monitor keywords linked to your business location.
Hashtags: Track hashtags relevant to your brand and industry.
Competitor mentions: Identify gaps where your product or service might offer a better solution.
3. Identifies influencers and brand advocates
Influencers and brand advocates are valuable assets for promoting your business. Social media monitoring helps identify individuals whose opinions are trusted and valued in the industry.
– Influencers: Influencers have large followings and can expand your brand’s reach when they post about your product.
– Brand advocates: Loyal customers who frequently mention or recommend your brand online.
– Collaboration: Engaging with influencers and brand advocates can lead to increased brand credibility and higher conversions.
4. Collects valuable customer feedback
Monitoring social media conversations helps brands collect direct feedback from customers. This feedback is valuable for improving products and services and addressing pain points.
– Product innovation: Track feature suggestions and customer frustrations to improve your offering.
– Customer satisfaction: Respond to negative feedback with solutions or explanations.
– Business roadmap: Adapt your business strategy based on customer needs and market trends.
5. Protects brand reputation
A social media crisis can damage a brand’s reputation within hours. Social media monitoring allows businesses to identify and respond to negative trends or complaints before they escalate.
– Identify early warnings: Detect and resolve complaints quickly to avoid viral backlash.
– Crisis response: Have a predefined strategy to handle negative publicity effectively.
– Transparency: Acknowledge mistakes and take responsibility to regain customer trust.
6. Tracks competitor activity
Monitoring competitors provides valuable insights into their marketing strategies, product offerings, and customer interactions.
– Competitive positioning: Identify gaps in your competitor’s strategy and capitalize on them.
– Customer pain points: Track complaints about competitors’ products to offer a better solution.
– Benchmarking: Compare your social media performance against industry standards.
Social media monitoring success stories.
1. Hilton
While Hilton shares information about customer complaints on social media, typically these complaints get handled by Hilton’s social media team very soon after. By resolving issues quickly and personally, Hilton stopped great negative experiences from blooming into a full-blown PR crisis.
2. Netflix
Netflix introduced smart socks, tapping into the wave of frustration of people falling asleep while binge-watching. It greatly improved customer experience and gathered a lot of press.
3. Black Girl Sunscreen
Black Girl Sunscreen engaged recognition for its untagged mentions and researched how that could affect customer satisfaction and how it shapes relationships with its purchasers.
4. Starface
Starface contributed to a successful UGC campaign in engaging and sharing customer posts; hence developing authenticity in the eyes of the brand and trust among their consumers.
Conclusion
Media monitoring is a must for having a strong online presence with multiple links to its customers. It helped amateur businesses to get in touch with customers, provide products and services, and safeguard brand reputation. By following an organized structure of social media monitoring together with appropriate tools, business entities could ceaselessly catch great opportunities for future business growth, gather leads, and elevate customer satisfaction.
