What is Social Media Monitoring and How Does it Work?
Social media monitoring is often presented as a "must-have" service for businesses—especially those with a substantial online presence. But you'd be forgiven for wondering how, exactly, social media monitoring is different from the periodic checks of your mentions that you're already doing. The truth is that what you're doing now isn't *that* different, you're just operating at a smaller scale. Let us explain!
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring, as you've guessed, is the process of searching for conversations about your brand (or your products or services) on social platforms, including:
● TikTok
● YouTube
● Glassdoor
Among the things you're hoping to learn through monitoring:
● What do people think of your brand? Do they love your products or services? If they dislike them, why?
● Are customer services issues being resolved through your primary contact channels? Are customers bringing up issues on social? If so, are you in a position to help them?
● How does your brand stack up against competitors?
● What do people think of the content you share via your social accounts? Are you generated strong engagement, or are posts getting a bare minimum number of likes?
● Do employees like working there? Are they posting about their work experience? Are ex-employees talking about their time with your company? Is that feedback positive or negative?
● Are people talking about key personnel at your company? Does your CEO attract special attention?
The more you learn about the perception of your brand through social, the more data you have to optimize your products and services.
How Does Social Media Monitoring Work?
First and foremost, you’ll be glad to hear that you don’t need 13 different tabs open on your browser to learn about your audience. Instead, you’ll need to choose a solution that gathers all the information and insights on your behalf. Our firm recommends pairing a human strategist capable of assessing importance and sentiment with a tool in order to ensure nothing is missed. Essentially, these tools index and crawl websites to locate mentions of your brand or products. This even happens in real-time with some tools, so you’re always seeing the latest conversations. However, tools also generate a lot of useless noise, which is where having a strategist dedicated to analyzing and prioritizing content comes in. Plus some tools can’t monitor sites with closed off APIs and that’s where a digital listening strategist shines.
Benefits of Social Media Monitoring
A key difference between social media monitoring and social listening is that the former is performed with responses in mind. On the other hand, the latter is designed to inform future decisions and big picture brand strategy. You can certainly use social media monitoring to inform decisions, but the main aim is to respond to people and make your audience feel heard. Social listening reviews brand mentions and industry trends to improve high-level decision-making.
According to recent statistics, around 60% of people use social media to discuss companies because of a positive experience. Rather than just boosting your ego, identifying these posts offers an opportunity to thank them and start a strong relationship with them. The customer feels heard, they appreciate the message (or even just a like), and they’re more likely to recommend and return. On top of that, positive feedback online is often able to be repurposed as user generated content for future posts of your own.
Using the same study, between 45% and 50% reach out to companies because they have questions. If you don’t respond, the prospective lead will likely choose another company instead. These leads are offering themselves to you; all you need to do is answer their question to encourage conversion — don’t miss this opportunity.
Finally, around four in every ten reach out because they’ve had a poor experience. Instead of burying your head in the sand, respond to the feedback and attempt to transform their negative experience into a positive one. Can you replace a broken product or placate them another way? Was there an issue in someone’s employment experience you can address on Glassdoor? This will save them from talking negatively about your brand, improve their experience, and impress others who are watching from a distance.
Curious what we’d recommend focusing on for your brand? Reach out to shout@luminodigital.com for a free consultation!