Last Updated on Jul 7, 2021 by James W
Do you know that about 48% of Earth habitats are social media users? I bet there are your customers among these 3.78 billion people. In 2020, the number of social accounts per user was 8.8 on average. It means that your client is on at least 5-6 social platforms!
On social networks, your customer can post not only photos and tweets about their work routine, news, and leisure but also discuss your company with other users.
Sometimes, your clients become your brand advocates who tell their friends and colleagues about your excellent service. However, it sounds too good to be true. Unfortunately, companies give negative feedback on their products online far more often.
Ignoring what the web is talking about your brand can cause a PR scandal.
Luckily, you can prevent the disaster by using social media monitoring or social listening. It lets you keep track of any discussion, review, and brand mention on social platforms.
You can try social media monitoring for free since there are many tools with a free trial on the market.
Here are five reasons why social media monitoring is a bright idea for your business:
1. Prevent PR crises
Media outlets dedicated to marketing publish lists of the biggest PR scandals on social media yearly. These stories usually are connected with staff rudeness, poor service, or controversial brand tweets.
Sometimes the fire is catching around one post where a dissatisfied customer shared the details of what happened. After a while, there are hundreds of posts with brand tags, thousands of comments, and shares. Journalists will pick up the story any day now!
For example, in 2020, Oh Polly lost a public battle on Twitter. A fashion brand ran a contest for NHS workers that a nurse from Glasgow won.
The woman couldn’t receive her prize — a new outfit and an invitation to a virtual event — because of her 12-hour shift. Then, she tweeted about the situation.
Her post earned more than 14 000 likes and multiple responses. People were disappointed in Oh Polly.
In the end, the brand apologized on its Twitter page and sent a prize to the winner.
In this case, social media monitoring could have saved the day! They detect all posts where users mentioned your company.
You can be the first to comment on a negative review and take control of the situation.
2. Start influencer marketing
When you plan a campaign on social platforms, for instance, a holiday sale or a giveaway, you can contact bloggers with a big following. For now, people trust their social favorites more than ads.
With great authority among their subscribers, influencers can help you market products in a competitive niche. Also, you can provide new products by collaborating with them.
Social media monitoring enables you to identify micro- and macro-influencers in your industry and save your time.
Usually, tools reveal the number of subscribers, the engagement rate, reach, and the sentiment of any post. That is all you need to start influencer marketing on a new social platform.
3. Sell on social networks
People use social media not only for chatting with friends but also for purchasing. Popular social platforms are adjusting their features so that you can sell more. For example, your business account on Instagram can turn into a developed online store now.
Tracking what topics related to your brand people are discussing helps you, too. You can monitor online conversations associated with your industry to understand your prospects better and target your audience.
Sometimes users ask their friends on social media to recommend a quality product or good service. Social listening tools can identify these requests. By regularly replying to such queries, you can convert prospects to leads.
4. Monitor how your campaigns perform
Running a campaign on social media, you can check its results in embedded metrics that a social platform provides. Sometimes, this data is not enough to measure campaign performance.
For campaign tracking, social listening tools come in handy again! Many of them provide specific metrics you do not find in social network analytics. For instance, you can see Share of Voice, the sentiment of your post, or your target audience location.
Additional statistics help you discover where your campaigns perform better to identify the best social networks for your marketing endeavors.
You can mix standard metrics with social listening insights that give you the full picture.
5. Identify and analyze your competitors
Competitor research enables you to develop your marketing and content strategy. Spying on your competitors, you can reveal what brands you compete with, what they do, how their posts perform, what their strengths and weaknesses are. Additionally, you can benchmark your results against the competition.
Social listening tools make competitive analysis easier. You can monitor the social efforts of your competitors, estimate how their campaigns perform, and how users react to their activities. Also, you can steal some good ideas to replicate. For instance, change your post scheduling, or rewrite your messages with an emphasis on the pain points of your prospects.
The majority of tools provide gorgeous white-label reports (PDF and Excel file formats are often available). So, with social listening tools, you can generate detailed reporting for your team and boss.
