Why You Should Use Monitoring Tools For Social Media

In this day and age it has become increasingly easy for customers to communicate with brands over social media. As good as this might be though, it poses a challenge for brands. The process of handling multiple messages across different social media channels is an overwhelming task.

 

If your brand is serious about improving communication with your customer base, you cannot afford to overlook the importance of social media channels.

You will not be surprised to learn that according to a survey conducted by Sprout Social in 2016, brands respond only 12% of the time on Twitter. The rate of engagement on Facebook is lower and was recorded at 9%.

These numbers show why it’s important now more than ever to invest in social media monitoring. When done well social media monitoring allows you to have more effective conversation with your audience.

Here’s a list of benefits you stand to gain from by actively monitoring various social media platforms where your brand has a presence.

Gives You A Better Understanding of The Social Cycle

By investing resources in social media monitoring, you’ll be compelled to make a distinction between social monitoring and social listening. Many people confuse the two and use them interchangeably. However, the two terms have different meanings.

Social media listening refers to the process of going through a large volume of messages sourced from topics and keywords that require your brand to draw analysis from.

On the other hand, social media monitoring, is the process of collating messages you receive on social media and responding to each one through commenting or liking.

When you start monitoring your social channels you’ll need to know that neither one nor the other is more important.

Social data obtained from listening is very important as it offers valuable insights on how your target audience interacts with your competitors and your brand. When you listen to your customers you’re able to analyze what customers are saying about your brand. But, when you’re monitoring, you’re looking for ways to broaden the range of engagement and discussion around your brand.

Your Brand Becomes Approachable

One way to inspire brand loyalty is by providing excellent customer service. In order to do this you’ll need to be responsive across all social media channels where you brand is represented.

A survey conducted by Sprout in 2016 showed that 34.5% of customers prefer to reach out to brands over social media. Other mediums of communication had lower percentages. For instance, those that preferred live chat were 24.7%, email 19.4% and phone numbers were 16.1%.

The biggest problem, however, is that at least 90% of social message brands are ignored. By monitoring social messages, you’ll be able to identify conversation starters and provide your audience with solutions.

When you use social media monitoring tools, you allow your brand to become more approachable by identifying opportunities to engage with your customers faster.

If you’re a big brand chances are that people are constantly sending you messages which you can easily reply to. But, what about the messages that don’t tag you or instances where your brand name gets misspelt?

That’s where social monitoring tools come in, they help you locate these messages which otherwise would go unnoticed.

According to a survey conducted in 2017 by Sprout Social, 32% of Generation X and 30% of millennials interact with brands on a monthly basis via social media.

When you create positive experiences for your customers you begin to command brand loyalty which will pay off in the long term.

Never Miss a Message

When you engage in social monitoring, you’ll discover new opportunities to engage your followers. As an organization, this means that you’ll need to spend more time on brand-related messages even when you’re organization is not directly mentioned.

You can’t underestimate the power of directly answering a product question. Whenever a customer has a question that touches on any of your products, your response could be a make or break decision for the buyer.

You can also use tools such as Mention to make sure you discover queries that mention your brand even when the user forgot to tag you.

Organize Your Marketing Campaigns

When used social media monitoring tools tend to keep your campaigns very organized. This is because you’ll need to be prepared to offer an effective solution to any problems that your customers are experiencing.

Most social media monitoring tools are easy to set up and run. Basically, all you’ll need to do is identify a keyword you’d like to monitor and put that into your monitoring tool of choice. Next, you’ll need to filter out user-generated content that contains your keyword (usually a hashtag).

While organizing your marketing campaigns you might want to ensure that you align networks with their purpose. Sometimes, brands will create two separate accounts on the same social media channel. On one they’ll receive customer queries about their products. This is to make sure that they have a single network dedicated to marketing campaigns.

If your brand hasn’t done so already this is an idea worth considering because a well-organized social marketing campaign will help you build a stronger brand.

Engage Brand Advocates

Social media tools make it easy for you to interact with your key customers and top brand advocates. Brand advocates play an important role in helping you promote your service or product and sustain engagement on a smaller scale.

Social monitoring tools will help you identify places you can interact with influencers as well as key customers. By using monitoring tools, you’re able to find and engage customers who are still on the fence on whether to buy your products or not.

Brand advocates, are people who’ve already made a purchase from your brand. Brand advocates are an important segment to engage. Why?

Because they’ve already bought from you and so they know the ins and outs of your products and since they’re already in the market, they’re the best group of people to sell your brand to potential customers who might not be sold on your brand.

In order to identify this group of people you’ll need to use social media monitoring tools. The tool you choose, should be able to identify the person’s levels of influence, engagement, and industry pull.

According to a research paper by Google, word of mouth has an enormous influence on buyer decision; 74% to be exact.

Create an Effective Strategy

Using social media monitoring tools you’re able to spy on your competition and analyze their marketing strategy. You can easily tell what’s working for them and what’s not.

Using monitoring tools, you could find out what the pain points of your competitor’s customers are then go ahead and offer a solution which in turn would draw these new customers to your brand.

Monitoring tools can also be used to find out the strengths of their competitor’s and replicate them in their own business model. You don’t need to copy their entire strategy but you definitely can use your analysis of their strengths to gain insight on what you can improve on.

If you want your brand’s social media marketing strategy to gain traction in 2018, you can’t afford not to have a social media monitoring tool in your arsenal.

 

 

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