7 Reasons Why You Can’t Ignore Social Media Monitoring

Are you still assessing your online reputation with vanilla metrics like followers, likes, RTs and +1d’s? Well, if you haven’t yet considered monitoring your social media strategy using a tool you might be missing out the key metrics around your efforts and time invested.  Here are some potential reasons for you to consider a social media monitoring and analytics tool.

1. Understanding your Target Group

A social media  strategy isn’t enough unless you have been able to effectively engage with your target group. First, who are your target audiences? your advocates and detractors? what are they talking about your brand? do they feel good or are they cribbing?Monitoring will help you recognize target groups so you can share your story with them. Engaging with the right group can help you grow quick.

2. Addressing your Customer Issues

The social media customer is quick and expects you to find him and respond. A monitoring tool enables you to recognize customers that are not happy with your brand / product. Now, do not limit yourself to just responding to your customer concerns, but build relationships with them and take their feedback seriously.  Keeping a close watch of the volume of negative sentiments around your brand can help you avoid an alarming situation.

3. Crisis Communication

Social media monitoring tools best fit here for they can assist you to handle the crisis situation in a better way. Setting up some advanced custom alerts around your brand can alarm you when a crisis situation is about to hit or has already started damaging you. A tool can also recognize influencers- people that are causing a larger damage to your brand, the channels of crises outreach, the change in sentiment during crisis management and the volume of critical conversations.

4. Competitive Intelligence

It’s not only important that you realize the impact of your social media campaigns but also to make sure your strategy is stronger than competition. Tracking a competitor can have you many benefits. The biggest one is to figure out new and innovative ways to reach potential customers, which you might have otherwise missed. At the same time, as a marketing person you need to be aware of the latest product updates, company news and blogs. Monitoring your competitors social media presence- for channels/sentiment/influencers/demographics, can make you aware of the strategy that has worked for them.  Replicating it partially based on your brand values can always help you save a lot of effort. One important aspect of competitive intelligence is to know where their customers are facing issues and targeting them with your product.

5. Lead Generation

You already know now how competitor tracking can get you more potential leads. Unsatisfied and unhappy customers are always open to alternatives and convincing them how your product is better will be easier.  Social media monitoring tools that are intelligent will also help you with buying indications around your product category. These also include recommendations, discussions, questions and conversations around your product category. You can then always reach out to a prospect to confirm his requirements.  Monitoring conversations around your product category can also help you gain insight on remarkable content, which you can also share with potential leads.

6. Product Development

When you are monitoring your brand, competitor and the product category– you are already loaded with huge data to analyse and implement.  Utilize the existing data by extracting comments on current and competitor’s products. A customer feedback on competitor’s product can show you a new direction for your brand. It can help you identify new product features and the difference between the offerings by your brand and that of your competitors.  The analysis could also be helpful in discovering new ways of using existing product and opportunities for product offerings.

7. Advertising and Marketing Strategies

Social media monitoring tools can help you begin with your campaigns by tracking advertising-specific keywords usage. This is the key to create campaigns based on topics that work best around your product and for social media channels that are active around your product line. Ones your campaign is released, the next important aspect is listening to the social response of your advertising messages, gauging the sentiment towards it and responding to social media users, wherever required. It could be your viral video or an infographics or conversations from trade show or a webinar. A tool can help you monitor conversations, URLs, hastags, authors  and even specific sites, and implement the intelligent system to provide you with relevant data- sentiment, influencers and demographics. At the end, every campaign is a learning to create a better one and social media monitoring tools can help you determine what works best for your brand.

Finally, there are many social media monitoring tools available in the market. The key is to choose the one that best fits your requirements. If you haven’t yet checked out the comprehensive social media monitoring, analytics, management and engagement tool by Webfluenz, then do give it a shot with it’s 14-day trial account.