For a long time, the terms “social monitoring” and “listening” have been used interchangeably in the marketing world. If you have a social media team, you’ll want them to stay on top of what’s happening on your target platforms. Following industry leaders and influencers, observing trends, and learning user sentiments about your products/services are all examples of this.
A social monitoring routine can be as simple as regularly taking a casual look at social media timelines.
What Exactly Is Social Media Monitoring & How It Works?
Monitoring your social media audience with a tool to understand what they are saying about you, your products and services, and even your competitors are known as social media monitoring. It’s a quick-response strategy that allows you to hear and understand all types of conversations about your brand, such as product-related questions, reviews, and more.
Listening to your audience is an integral part of social media management. Social media monitoring allows you to engage with them at the right time to explain the benefits of your product and services.
Several tools are used by brands to track audience behavior on social media. These tools monitor keywords, hashtags, URLs, and other variables.
The majority of social media monitoring tools operate by crawling and indexing social media sites on a regular basis. Twitter, for example, is crawled in real-time. If a site is less important, it may be crawled less frequently, every 10 minutes or once a day.
The majority of these tools support major social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on) and allow you to search for mentions and crawl various websites that monitor media.
Forums, blogs, news, and much more are among them. The social media monitoring tool then compiles all of these mentions from all over the internet into a single platform for you to view, analyze, and respond to.
Best Practices For Social Media Monitoring
Social media managers actively monitor their companies’ social accounts and newsfeeds through social monitoring, acting one-to-one to address issues and engage with customers.
Companies can use the following best practices when implementing social media monitoring:
Have A Well-Defined Social Strategy
The customer takes the initiative by contacting, tagging, or mentioning the brand. The business must then respond appropriately. For your team to understand how to interact with your audience, you’ll need a well-defined social strategy. Brands frequently target multiple audiences. What you share, comment on, or like depends on whom you’re talking to.
Begin With A Purpose
Expectations and goals should be clearly stated, and these should be shared with key stakeholders and the people who will be performing the social media monitoring. You will better understand the key performance indicators and the value the investment will bring to the organization if everyone is on the same page about the intent behind the financial and time investment.
Construct A Messaging Grid
The creation of a messaging grid is essential so that community managers can monitor and respond to mentions in real time. Account managers should enlist the help of their social, creative, and public relations teams to role-play possible responses.
Community managers will be aware of common topics based on previous social listening, creative will provide the appropriate tone of voice, and PR will simulate any potential crisis scenarios.
Leverage Social Monitoring Tools
The sea of brand mentions on social media is vast. Even the most dedicated marketer will burn out if they monitor and respond manually. Use social monitoring and management tools like Talkwalker, Google Alerts, Hootsuite, and Reputology to save time and focus on social media strategy and tactics to attract your target audience.
Address Negative Mentions
Reaching out to your fans is great, but don’t forget that negative attention can also be an opportunity to engage and demonstrate your customer service skills. If you can fix the problem and make the customer happy, they’ll most likely tell their friends about it, just like they did with the first interaction.
Highlight Positive Mentions
Customer service has changed as a result of social media. It’s now open to the public. As part of your social media messaging campaign, highlight your positive brand mentions. Encourage positive interactions and community building by boosting social media posts.
Maintain Consistency Throughout
Customers must continue to interact with the brand on social media if consistency is to be maintained. Consumers are perceptive, and if a company responds to some comments while ignoring others, they will notice. Make sure your responses are consistent across the board when you begin the process of social monitoring and responding to individual brand mentions.
Conclusion
Brands can better serve their customers by tracking social media with the right social media monitoring tools. As consumers interact with and talk about brands more frequently online, it’s more important than ever for brands to stay informed.
Companies that listen to their customers and respond and improve will be successful. With intelligent monitoring and careful listening, it’s time for brands to step up their game.
