Why Do Brands Need a Social Media Monitoring Strategy?
Social media monitoring is an integral part of your social media campaigns. Find out how it allows you to identify what’s being said about your brand.
If you’re an active internet user, you’d already know the sheer scale of social media. With hundreds of millions of daily active users, it’s daunting to wrap your head around it.
People share their ideas, opinions, and thoughts on social media constantly regarding any topic conceivable, including business.
According to recent studies, more than 3.78 billion people across the globe use social media, and this number is expected to reach 4.41 billion by 2025.
It’s a massive figure that illustrates the great potential that businesses can utilize to improve their conversion rate.
If you’re a business owner, it’s critical to put the best of your efforts into improving your digital marketing and social media strategies.
But the fact of the matter is that it’s only possible if you have valuable insights into how your current marketing strategies are performing.
That’s where social media monitoring comes into place.
Not only does it allow you to understand how people perceive your brand, but it also helps you to improve and expand your business.
This article discusses what social media monitoring is and why your brand needs it.
So, let’s dive into it.
What Does Social Media Monitoring Mean?
Social media monitoring, in its essence, is a series of continuous actions that you undertake in order to track your business mentions on social media and respond appropriately.
In other words, it’s a strategy that allows you to maintain your brand image by keeping an eye on all the relevant data flow surrounding your business.
It’s important to note that social media monitoring also includes posts where people mention your brand’s name without tagging. Such posts don’t show up in the list of your regular alerts or notifications.
Many people confuse social media monitoring and social media listening, but these are two different concepts.
In social media monitoring, you track the posts about your business and respond accordingly.
On the other hand, in social media listening, you utilize the collected data and insights to modify your digital marketing decisions.
The Importance of Social Media Monitoring
One of the most important benefits of social media monitoring is that it allows you to have a clear idea about your brand’s social media presence.
Moreover, it also enables you to find misconceptions about your business so that you can take appropriate actions timely to correct them.
Other than that, here are some of the most significant reasons why the social media monitoring strategy is the lifeblood of your business.
Helps You to Generate More Leads
Because of their extensive use, more and more people search for products and services on social media platforms.
The recent stats suggest that in order to search for products and services, about 54 percent of people use social media platforms.
It means you can use this to identify prospects by monitoring different types of keywords.
- Hashtags
A social media monitoring strategy allows you to track important hashtags relevant to your business as well as the industry.
For instance, one of the best hashtag advertising examples of all time is #NationalFriedChickenDay by KFC.
If you own a fast-food restaurant then monitoring this hashtag means you will not miss any updates on this topic. Moreover, you’ll have a great opportunity to find potential customers.
- Brand Keywords
These are different combinations of words that social media users commonly associate with your brand and they include the product/service name that you offer, your brand name, and possible misspellings.
- Location-Specific Keywords
You would want to target location-specific keywords if your business physically exists in a particular area.
For example, if you own a restaurant that specializes in Pizza in XYZ location then you’ll need to track keywords such as best pizza in XYZ.
This way you’ll have a chance to recommend your restaurant whenever a person searches this particular combination of words.
Without a social media monitoring strategy, you won’t be able to track such metrics and they’ll go unnoticed.
- Industry Buzzwords
Industry buzzwords are the important keywords that are most relevant to the services or products that you sell.
For example, a digital marketing company would want to track, “social media marketing”, “holiday marketing calendar”, “digital marketing”, etc.
On the other hand, a company offering a writing assistant should track “grammar”, “spelling mistakes”, or even “best Grammarly alternatives”.
The industry buzzwords enable you to monitor the conversations relevant to your business. You can then find people (leads) who aren’t aware of your business and products.
Elevates Your Customer Service
Most people think that customer service is about a team of dedicated professionals answering and solving the customers’ questions and queries.
But the truth is that customer service goes a lot deeper than that.
Now, social customer care in this era of technology has become standard practice.
Social media strategy allows you to ensure that you never miss a single message, post, tag, or even review from your customer.
This way, you can respond to everything that you come across and, most importantly, address all the misconceptions about your business.
Identifies Brand Influencers
On social media platforms, influencers are like celebrities and their opinions and thoughts carry a lot of weight.
They have a massive following and people generally trust their recommendations.
That’s why it’s critical for your brand to get the relevant influencers’ support that can expand your following dramatically.
You can use social media monitoring to find out influencers talking about products and services related to your business industry.
You can then build a strong relationship with them to improve your audience and keep them engaged.
Helps You Stand Out of Your Competition
One of the most beneficial uses of social media monitoring is that it helps you to stay ahead of the competition.
You can devise a monitoring strategy that provides you with valuable insights into how your competitors are interacting with their audience.
You can also find out their strengths and weaknesses and use them to empower your business.
For example, you can explore what your competitors’ customers are complaining about and focus on filling those gaps.
On the other hand, you can improve your services by working on your weaknesses after identifying everything that other similar businesses are doing right.
Finds New Content Ideas
Before discussing how a social media monitoring strategy helps you find new ideas for innovative content, it’s important to bear in mind that visuals are the most effective content type and communication medium.
The recent stats show that around 54 percent of people prefer video content and want businesses to upload more of it.
There are countless benefits of creating video graphics and other forms of video content that can help your business to achieve new heights.
Therefore, incorporating video content must be in your digital marketing strategy.
Creating fresh content works as a backbone for your business, but at times, it’s not easy to find marketable and innovative topics.
Social media monitoring provides you with valuable data that include the most trending topics and critical public concerns.
You can use such data to come up with innovative topics to make sure that your business is following all the latest market trends.
Moreover, you can also create content to address the issues and problems that your existing or potential customers are facing.
You can create animated commercials, and blog posts with attractive infographics and visuals. Moreover, you can also ask for video shoutouts by influencers if possible.
One important thing about video content that you must keep in mind is that you must keep your videos short and focused. Otherwise, people will lose interest and rebound.
Best Tips to Create an Effective Social Media Monitoring Strategy
There are certain factors that you need to consider before creating your social media monitoring strategy.
Moreover, you also need to follow the right steps so that it generates the most effective results.
Step One: Determine What to Monitor
The first step and obvious step is to identify everything that you need to monitor to obtain the best possible results.
You’ll need to conduct meetings with your digital marketing team and discuss what to monitor according to your brand’s unique goals and needs.
Here’s a list of the most important ideas that’ll help you to have a head start.
- Determine whether you want to focus on your brand’s name or the overall industry
- Finalize all the possible variations of your business name. You must also write down all the potential misspellings that people can write in your meeting notes
- Mentions and tags of campaigns specific to your business
- The taglines, slogans, blurbs, or catchphrases that your business uses
- Most common hashtags of your business industry
- Most frequently used keywords regarding the services or products that you offer
Step Two: Choose Social Media Monitoring Tool
Once you have created a roadmap that you’ll use to start your social media monitoring journey, the next step is to choose the right monitoring tool.
There are tons of options available online, such as Wiki List, and you can find the ones that suit your needs the best.
Most of these tools allow you to monitor all the mainstream social media platforms. It means whether you’re targeting Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even Quora marketing, you can find a suitable social media monitoring tool.
Pro Tip: If you’re looking for a strategy to take your social media marketing to another level then consider following the 5 Ps of marketing strategy which are product, placement, promotions, price, and people.
Step Three: Results and Insights
One of the most exciting factors about social media monitoring is that it provides you with something new each day.
It’s like fishing in a huge pond and you’ll just need to wait and see what’s biting.
Here are some insights that you most probably will come across.
- Feedback on your services or products
- Questions related to your products/services, business, or industry
- Sentiments from people that can be both positive and negative
- People mention your brand in different languages, which means you need to translate your content to target those people as well
- Pain points and weaknesses regarding your products/services and reputation that you need to address
- Potential content ideas to create, such as Instagram stories to grow your business
- Latest industry trends
- Potential influencers
Your social media monitoring results allow you to keep your audience engaged and help you refine your monitoring and digital marketing strategy.
All you need to do is to analyze the data carefully and use it to keep getting better.
You might need to hire a few dedicated professionals to execute and maintain your social media monitoring strategy, but because of the benefits it brings to the table, it’s totally worthwhile.
