In a day and age when social media is a major marketing tool, it’s essential for business owners to keep tabs of the interactions that the public has with their social media profiles. It can help you gauge the attitudes about your brand, improves your engagement with your audience, and allows you to get a general idea of how the public feels about how you are doing as a business.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and all of the other social media channels out there have really changed the shape of the business world. They are excellent marketing tools, as they allow business owners to connect with a much larger audience than ever before. Every time you post on social media, you increase your chances of being seen and boost your interaction with your existing customers. Social media also provides an excellent opportunity for building your brand and your reputation; if it’s done right, that is.
Monitoring your business’ social media channels is essential if you want to make the most of the benefits that this type of marketing can offer. It involves three considerations that are separate, yet related:
- Intently paying attention to the various social media channels and paying attention to any mentions that are made about your brand.
- Linking together various snapshots of the mentions of your brand across social media channels in order to follow trends.
- Paying attention to the overall attitudes that surround all of the mentions of your brand.
By keeping these three factors into consideration, you can gain a real understanding of how the public feels about your brand, and more important, you can foster more positive sentiments and keep negative sentiments at bay.
Social media monitoring is absolutely essential; however, a lot of business owners find that actually taking action and starting the monitoring process is daunting. And once they do, they don’t know how to act on whatever it is that they find out when they are monitoring.
How do you engage with social media monitoring? Here are some tips that will make your monitoring and measurement efforts – and the overall success of your business – more successful.
Define your Objective
First things first: you need to determine why it is that you are monitoring your social media channels. If you’re monitoring simply because everyone else is doing it and you think that you should be too, then you aren’t going about it the right way.
Your objectives should be clear. Some goals might include:
- Instantly knowing when the public is mentioning your business, whether those mentions are for the good or for the bad.
- Being able to respond to all inquires your customers may have as quickly as possible.
- To see who is talking about a specific industry-related keyword so that you can jump in on the conversation and establish more credibility for your brand.
- To stay abreast with the trends in your market so that you can determine what your business actually needs in order to stay relevant.
- To identify people who are interested in products or services that you offer and turn them into potential customers.
When you have a specific goal in mind, your media monitoring efforts will not only be a lot easier, but they will be a lot more effective and successful. Plus, it will help you find the best tools to get the job done the right way.
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Determine Where You Should Monitor
One of the reasons why social media is such a valuable marketing tool is because it allows businesses to build relationships and have conversations with their audience. The central component of social media is building relationships with other people; but, it’s impossible for you to be on every social media channel at the same time.
The channels that you monitor the most should be determined by wherever your targeted audience frequents. Monitoring will make it easier to figure out where your audience is located – both your current customers and your potential customers – so that you can determine which channels you should be listening to and engaging with the most.
Find Out What You Should Monitor
Social media monitoring is keyword-based, which means it’s important to choose the right keywords to monitor. You should be keeping tabs on your company name, brand names, product names, the names of execs, the names of your competitors, keywords that are relevant to your industry, and your tagline, at the very least.
Establish Priorities
Conversations are constantly occurring on social media, and those conversations are happening across multiple channels, which can make things complicated. To make things even trickier, the signal-to-noise ratio that pertains to social media isn’t in your favor. That’s why your media monitoring has to be smart and actionable.
You should be paying attention to all messages that come into your view so that you can really hone in on what is the most important.
Establish a Crisis Management Plan
It’s also important to establish a crisis management plan. If you find out that there are any negative attitudes or a reaction concerning your brand, acting swiftly is crucial for saving your brand’s reputation. Make sure you know how you are going to react to any negativity so that you can repair any potential damage that comes along with those sentiments.
Listen First
If you find a certain community is the place that you want to be, though it may be tempting to jump in and starting chatting and plugging your product, don’t do it. Before you open up your digital mouth, make sure you take the time to really listen and observe the community. Find out what their culture is all about, the type of interactions they have with each other, how they express themselves, and even if they use a specific type of vernacular. By taking the time to really familiarize yourself with the community before you speak, you’ll increase your chances of attaining positive results for your media monitoring efforts.
