Table of Contents
Social media monitoring includes all actions to monitor the activity of users, followers and competitors in social media. Based on network monitoring tools, a complete listening process can be carried out that foster new and effective ways of interacting with the target audience. In the following lines, we will explain how to achieve better business results thanks to information extracted from Twitter, Facebook and other media.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process that companies carry out, aided by specific software tools and solutions, to “listen” and “search” for content published by users in social media that refers to your brand or the names of your products.
Why is social media monitoring necessary?
Brands invest a lot of time and resources in building the right brand image. But today, the speed at which the Internet is evolving networks pose a major challenge to companies. Anyone anywhere can challenge or tarnish the image of the brand with a negative comment or the publication of an image that damages their reputation.
Social media monitoring gives brands the ability to control this flow of information, locating the negative mentions they receive before they escalate and cause irreparable damage to the company’s prestige.
But it’s not just about tracking down negative mentions. Brands also use monitoring to track customer sentiment and feedback in real-time. Understanding how customers feel about products and services helps them improve their offerings and increase their competitive advantages.
What is not the monitoring of social networks
He social media monitoring it is often confused with other terms like social media listening or social media intelligence, but in reality, each of these terms has its own function within the framework of a social analysis strategy. So:
– Social Media Intelligence: it is a general term that covers some key areas of social analysis, such as monitoring social networks and listening to social networks. The peculiarity of intelligence in this environment is that it puts the focus on the analysis of competition.
– Listen to social networks: helps discover consumer ideas that can be applied to brand strategy. It is an ongoing task that focuses on allowing the company to get to know its audience and understand what their emotions are. Thanks to listening to networks, Gain a basic understanding of the consumers you want the brand message to reach. The objective is to learn what is most important to users, customers and potential customers, to introduce it into the strategy, incorporating it into the customer experience at all levels.
Social media monitoring is also an ongoing effort, but with a slightly different approach. While listening on social networks creates a baseline to know what the audience is feeling, monitoring them makes it possible to maintain that baseline.
How to take advantage of social media monitoring opportunities?
Listening to social media is identifying how the brand/company/product / CEO or any other valuable keyword is mentioned in social media. When applying a social media monitoring strategy, not only do you have to focus on these media, but the scope of ongoing initiatives can reach websites, blogs and forums., among others.
The way of taking advantage of opportunities arising from social media monitoring It has to do with the following tactics:
- Convert online reviews to benefit the brand image. Oddly enough, negative online reviews provide more opportunities to differentiate yourself from the competition and attract customers compared to positive ones. A negative evaluation followed by a response from the company is clearly authentic and reliable, unlike some positive evaluations, which can be prepared. Followers of the interaction may have the impression that the brand cares about its customers, but to achieve the desired effect the social media monitoring is essential. You have to be punctual with the apology, the response and the proposed solution.
- Help advance prospects through their buying cycle by solving their queries. Achieving this depends on finding out about the questions about the brand or the company, which are raised in this type of media, instead of addressing the company directly. Through social listening, each person can be offered what they need right now (an answer, an instruction, an article for more details). The option delivered is likely to attract interest and possibly traffic.
- Implement social selling. Thousands of searches every month try to find out where to find a product or where you can buy it. The creation of alerts in a social media monitoring tool with similar questions, and others related to the industry and location, if considered relevant, will allow discovering the prospects to follow., since these people are interested in the type of product that the company sells, but they may not yet know the brand.
- Establish yourself as an industry leader. Social media monitoring also serves to advance leadership through demonstrations of knowledge and experience. It is the ideal complement to the publication of valuable content on accredited sites and the web itself. For become an industry leader you have to be online and answer questions from the audience.
Tools for monitoring social networks
Some tools help make sense of the actions taken on social media. How have followers grown this month? Which posts seem to work best? When does publishing make the most sense? Social media monitoring is easier and more effective when used:
- Buffer. With your Pro and Business plans, it is possible to obtain all the main participation statistics for each update published on social networks. Buffer provides access to the correct metrics needed to track and improve social media performance.
- Social sprout. It is a comprehensive management and monitoring tool for social networks It provides a wealth of options at the enterprise level. Its multi-channel social listening features allow for contextual and qualitative analysis by topic, hashtags, and keywords. In addition, it allows knowing the performance of the content published in the different social networks from visual and intuitive reports.
- Hootsuite. It is a great combination of social media management, listening, publishing and analysis tools. It helps determine what type of content works best, increases the reach of posts, improves the effectiveness of ads, and makes the entire social media teamwork in alignment. Of this tool, its in-depth analysis functions, which offer a clear understanding of performance on all social platforms.
- Zoho. This is a unique software package that features CRM, collaboration options, and other SaaS benefits that optimize operational workflow. Social Zoho Lets understand the social media audience and how it relates to the brand. Among its benefits is the one that makes it possible to listen to multiple channels from a single control panel and respond in real-time. It also makes it easy to drill down through each post to gauge its reach and engagement.
- Sendible. It is a social media management tool with monitoring, listening and reporting functions. Provides ready-to-use information about post content and engagement, mentions, and audience profiles across all digital channels. Sendible also allows you to track what is said about the brand across the various web and social platforms and identifies mentions that may need attention or response.
- Keyhole. It offers multiple trackers that help you monitor industry-specific events, campaigns, influencers, brand mentions, and social conversations. It allows tracking hashtags, keywords and accounts, for which it provides a large amount of information such as reach, main publications and participation, about the brand or its competitors.
- Rival IQ. It allows you to track different companies and compare their performance not only on social media platforms but also in SEO. Too Analyze Facebook and Instagram ads, and presents historical data of up to 24 months. In this way, you can identify general digital strategies that work for top competitors and learn from their tactics.
- Social Report. It provides an overview of the company’s activity on multiple social networks and blogs. You can track new topics, measure ROI and export data to reports. This tool not only facilitates the supervision of your own social profiles but also those of the competition.
Once it is clear what tools to use, you should not forget what effective monitoring of social networks to attract competing customers. You just need to know how to convey that the product itself is better than the one you are already using. For this, the supervision of the main competitors and certain keywords could indicate the uncertainty and unhappiness on which to act.