Are you listening? People might be talking about your brand on social media, and you might have no idea, be it good or bad. Why does this matter? There are some obvious reasons and not so obvious reasons why this matters. We will start with the reasons you might want to pay attention to what people are saying about your brand online.
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Reputation Management
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This is something that should have all of our attention. The internet is an open landscape that anyone can publish content on, and this can be good and bad. If happy customers are speaking highly of your brand, then there is no need for concern. However, if a competitor is publishing negative reviews or publishing articles that paint a negative portrait of your business, this is something you should be aware of for your business. Having the ability to be notified so that you can respond professionally will help you keep your online reputation from being falsely tainted.
User Engaging Interactions
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Monitoring the internet for mentions of your brand can alas help you to positively engage users that may have left a helpful comment or review on a social platform you don’t actively monitor. Engaging users on these threads might also encourage other users to be more active on your social media profile. People like engagement and social media is a great place to extend that reach and communicate with users that you may not regularly interact with on social media.
The Difference Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening?
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So what is the difference between social monitoring and social listening? Some might say that there is no difference, but for those in the know, they will tell you there is a difference. Social media monitoring is more about collecting data, user interaction, and conversion optimization.
Social listening looks a little deeper into the meaning of those conversations and brand mentions. It should measure emotions and feelings to give you a better idea of how people really feel about your business. This allows you to keep your finger on the pulse of your business and gain a better understanding of the customer experience and how they feel they are being treated. Monitoring the mood of users and how the public perceives your business can help you manage the growth and development of your social media marketing and engagement efforts. You should use this information to create a better solution for online reputation moving forward.
Why This Makes A Difference For Your Business
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First, every business should have a social media profile. If you own or manage a company that has an online presence, having a social media profile is a must. The amount of people on social media every day is undeniable, so understanding the opportunity for reach is obvious, even for local businesses. With these social profiles, comes social interactions.
These can be positive interactions like comments, likes, smiley face emojis, and shares. With these positive interactions also come negative input, comments, frowning emojis, thumbs down, dislikes, lack of views, lack of shares, and other social signals that indicate there is negative feedback among the social community regarding your profile.
Social Media Monitoring will allow you to track the good and the bad, and it will help you plan for a more engaging, interactive, and positive social experience moving forward with your social media campaigns. This interaction and engagement with customers and potential customers show that you are paying attention and that you care about what they have to say.
Realtime Social Strategies For Your Business
Social media trends change like any other trend. Keeping an eye on what people are engaging with and how to optimize that information for your use will allow you to make real time updates to your social media campaigns.
Monitoring what the competition is doing, following the social media profiles of other local businesses, and measuring engagement will allow you to borrow these strategies and apply them to your campaigns successfully. You don’t need to reinvent the wheel, just find what is working now and duplicate the process with your twist on it.
Syndicate Your Social Media
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In addition to social listening and monitoring of your brand and the competition, you should consider syndicating your content to extend your reach online. This may include using online software applications like Hootsuite to manage the syndication of the content for you. These online programs can be triggered to post content to your branded social profiles after a post is published on one of your primary social media profiles. Consider this an excellent solution for getting your content out in front of more people.
Having syndication in place can be beneficial if you need to address any issues. If there is a PR disaster, you can simply post to a single branded social profile and have the message syndicate across all social media profiles.
Using Social Monitoring To Your Advantage
It’s not all about reputation management and picking up on the most recent trends. There are opportunities for businesses to key in on hot topics and trending conversations to target potential employees for the company. Engaging with the local community on a hot topic might allow you to get in front of people that share similar views and may be interested in employment opportunities should they arise. Social listening is a great way to pick up on that and use it to your strategic advantage.
You Vs. Them
Social monitoring can also allow you to analyze how you compare to the competition through the eyes of the consumer. When peers communicate through social media, there is often chatter about purchases, household items, services, and other topics that may relate to you and your competition. Knowing how buyers feel about you vs. your competitors can also give you a strategic advantage when game planning for future marketing and business goals.
Identifying Disaster Before It Happens
Monitoring social media and brand mentions is a great way to prevent something from blowing up and getting out of control. If you can identify these disasters before they happen, you can save face, learn from potential mistakes, and continue growing your business through positive, engaging social media management.
With that, we will also leave you with some social media management and brand monitoring resources that we recommend trying before you find your brand name, becoming the topic of hot gossip before you ever know about it. Here are five great resources for any business.
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- Beutler Ink
This innovative group of marketing professionals at Beutler Ink has developed the tools and reputation to manage your social listening and brand monitoring efforts for you. Outsourcing this tedious, often time-consuming task is quickly becoming the preference of choice among business owners not wanting to be bothered with social media monitoring and brand listening.
- Hootsuite
We mention Hootsuite earlier, and this is an excellent option for the small business owner that wants to manage this themselves or even an internal marketing team that wants to leverage technology to get the most of their social media campaigns. You can syndicate content and monitor social activity and brand mentions using this suite of software tools.
- Reddit Keyword Monitoring
Reddit is a core social hub where very engaging content is published, and intellectual conversations are held about all topics. Knowing what this type of audience is converting about can help you project future growth trends in various markets.
- Google Trends
No business collects trending data like Google. They have been collecting analytics and traffic data for almost twenty years. They own and operate online companies outside of the search engine. Youtube, for example, is owned and operated by the Google parent company and is a social network capable of generating a massive amount of data regarding user behavior. Google Trends is a free tool to use, check it out to see what’s trending.
- NetBase
This algorithm was designed to pick up on trending conversations across the web using technologies that allow you to target trending keywords and identity growing topics of discussion that may be taking place.
There will always be new and improved tools being developed for social media listening and brand monitoring. Having access to these tools will never be the issue, like anything else, it comes down to time and knowledge. Do you have the time to learn these applications, accurately track mentions, and monitor conversations? Or are you better off outsourcing these services to a company that specializes in them?
NJN will not be monitoring brand mentions or social activity, but instead, we will be passing that responsibility to capable hands.
