Social media has allowed businesses a unique opportunity to understand customers, the market, and competition in an easy and efficient way which helps your business adjust accordingly to satisfy their needs and fill any market gaps. This is mainly due to almost everyone using social media these days to express their interest. Naturally, that is a lot of data to process which may cause your monitoring efforts to be overwhelming but fear not as this guide will help you optimize your social media experience to save you valuable time and effort. Social media monitoring tools are arguably the most important tools for businesses looking to learn about the market and their customers as they maximize your benefits from social media.
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
What Is Social Media Monitoring?Social media monitoring is the process of observing information available on the various social media websites to help you better understand your customers, the competition and even your relevant industry. Essentially, social media monitoring involved crawling all publicly available content and indexing them according to their relevant topic to allow for easy searching to find the information you desire. This can be extremely useful as it gives you the upper hand of knowledge which will help you in various aspects of your business which we will be discussing individually.
1-Improved Communications
By constantly monitoring social media, you can much more easily find customers talking about your business. This will help you address their inquiries as well as to respond to any issues they might be having. Additionally, social monitoring will provide you with the chance to engage with customers that have something positive to say about your business which showcases their testimony for anyone looking up your brand online. Additionally, by monitoring social media you will be able to reply much more quickly to customers which significantly improves your brand’s response time. Response time is a very important statistic and is often a measurement of a well established online brand.
2-Campaign Follow Up
Through proper indexing of the gather data, you can easily identify which campaign generated the most buzz for your business. This can be done by indexing messages according to certain keywords that are exclusive to each campaign. This is extremely effective in analyzing the success of each campaign and allows you to understand which types of marketing campaigns work best. If you are interested in optimizing your marketing campaigns, be sure to check out our social media marketing guide.
3- Understanding the Competition
Another great use of social media monitoring tools is to help you analyze your competition in order to see what decisions they are making and how effective these decisions are. This will also allow you to identify any gaps that they are not taking advantage of which allows you to gain the competitive edge. Additionally, you will be able to identify the problems customers have with the competitors which will allow you an opportunity to convert those customers for a bigger share of the market.
4-Understand and Identify Future Trends
By monitoring the interactions of your target audience, you will certainly notice some topics that are gaining interest. This will allow you to have a head start over the competition when it comes to addressing these topics. This ensures that you stay ahead of the curve using the collected information that will allow you to predict the future trends in order for your business to always remain relevant.
5- Niche Market Integration
By definition, a niche market is a small market that requires a specific product or services. This means that members of this niche group are very likely to share common requirements and will often hold the opinion of each other highly. This creates an opportunity for your business to identify an influencer for this group in order to ensure that they have a pleasant experience with your business. This almost ensures business with that whole niche group which would otherwise be very hard to achieve.
Top Social Media Monitoring Tools To Use
Social media is a great option for monitoring simply because of its large user base which will provide you will a lot of information. Unfortunately, not all of it is useful so here are some social media monitoring tools that will help you filter through this data.
1-Hootsuite
This is one of the leading multi-platform social media monitoring tools that will not only help you streamline your social media experience but will also provide you with the necessary tools to effectively monitor many social media websites like Facebook, Foursquare, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and WordPress which makes it the best option for monitoring several social media networks at once.
To begin with, Hootsuite will allow you to setup multiple streams, each tracking their own keywords. You can then share these streams with your team for better collaboration. Their search function is incredibly versatile, allowing you to search for any keyword and even to search by location allowing you to zero in on your desired market. HootSuite also supports Foursquare, Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and WordPress which makes it the best tool to monitor most of the social media networks at once.
2-Brandwatch
2-Perhaps one of the most powerful social media monitoring tools which will allow you to search the web for articles, conversation or reviews regarding any keyword you look up. After you have found your relevant data, Brandwatch will analyze it and provide you with various graphical representations that will help you easily capitalize on that information. Brandwatch aims to provide you with the highest quality of information in real time tailored to your specified keywords using their advanced algorithms to filter out irrelevant or spam data. Additional filters will help you narrow down the results by language, location and “sentiment” which allows you to target exclusively positive or negative comments depending on your intention for monitoring. The sentiment filter is flexible and may be adjusted to suit the nature of your business allowing for more accurate analysis of the data. These advanced algorithms are paired with streamlined graphical representations which makes this one of the most powerful tools when it comes to social media monitoring.
3-TweetReach
Like many social media marketing tools, this one claims to show you the true “reach” of your tweets by showing you your most influential followers, most engaging content and how well your business is doing compared to the competition. This comprehensive service will provide you with valuable information like the best time to post, the most popular hashtags that your audience responds to and graphical representations of the changes in the popularity of your brand. Additionally, Tweetreach will allow you to monitor for multiple clients at once, showing you at which times their post had the greatest reach which allows you to optimize your posting schedule.Finally, these various graphs and statistical data may be used to compare your marketing efforts to the competition in order to identify any necessary adjustments to stay ahead of the curve.
4-TrackReddit
Reddit‘s claim to be the “front page of the internet” is a bold statement but there is some truth to it. When it comes to discussions, almost everyone will head to Reddit to find relevant individuals via subreddits. This makes it an essential website to monitor in order to gain insights about your brand or a relevant keyword. TrackReddit is a simple website that will notify you whenever a certain phrase is mentioned to allow you to stay on top of this vast website full of conversations. When it comes to researching the market, Reddit can be one of your best options to get a general idea of what your target audience wants and what the competition isn’t satisfying. This helps your business improve and win over customers. Here’s a list of what TrackReddit, one of the leading social media marketing tools has to offer you:
- Real-Time search for words or phrases
- Text/E-mail alerts
- Graphical representation of essential statistics
- Filters to narrow down results and remove spam
- Simplified method of exporting data for use with your preferred monitoring systems
Social Media Monitoring Services
Alternatively, if you are not interested in what goes behind the scenes of social media monitoring, you may opt for an agency that will do that work for you. These agencies will not only monitor social media for you, but they will also analyze the gathered data and provide you with useful information that is relevant to improving your business. Here are some of the leading agencies in the field of social media monitoring.
Vuelio
This professional agency will take up the task of monitoring social media for you. Then, they will provide you with real-time notifications about relevant conversations. Additionally, you will be able to use their online dashboard to manage all conversations on every social media website at once. The best part is that not only will they analyze your data for you, but they will also provide you with coherent reports regarding the impact of your current marketing efforts as well as a calculation of your ROI to ensure that marketing is going as efficiently as possible. Vuelio can be a great resource when you cannot dedicate resources to social media monitoring or you simply would like a professional’s take on this convoluted task.
Overview
Social media monitoring is a time-consuming task that ensures that you are constantly up to date with anything that is happening online regarding your brand or any relevant keywords. It is extremely useful as it provides you with a measurable indicator of the reach of your marketing efforts. Additionally, it also helps you identify key influencers that you should use as “brand ambassadors” and major issues that you should address. When it comes to social media monitoring, the key to a successful implementation in your business is efficiency. This is where these various social media monitoring tools come to play. These tools will help you efficiently find and index relevant conversations while also providing you with automatically generated statistics to help you see the progress that you’re making.
