Social media monitoring: the systematic process for understanding, analyzing, and reporting insights and conversations on reputation, brand position, community health, and opinion of key audience members virtually. It is looking to the past, gathering information, focusing on details and measuring success. Monitoring is goal-centered, using the insights learned to achieve business and communication goals. It is essential for your business’ social media success.
Why is Social Media Marketing Important?
As social media is becoming more and more popular in the world, the need to be actively engaged on social media becomes more and more essential. Your influence through social media, whether positive or negative, is expanded because of social media.
Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com said, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell 6 friends. If you make customers unhappy on the internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”
Shares, retweets, reposts and the like make it so that anything said on social media spreads like wildfire. People follow business pages and use review sites to gauge where they want to spend their money. In fact, the Consumerist says that 70% of consumers rely on online reviews before making a purchase and the younger the consumer, the more they rely on reviews. Businesses need to know what their customers are saying on the internet in order to survive in this world of social media.
How can Social Media Monitoring Help Your Business?
Clearly social media monitoring is vitally important to maintaining your business’ brand image and reputation. Let’s dive into more ways that monitoring can help your business.
1) Monitoring helps you identify the overall responses audience members give you for your content.
You can learn when they are active, what type of content they are sharing, how they are mentioning you during specific times and on which platforms, and how this compares to competing accounts. These measurements are fluid, meaning that as the audience grows or shifts, these measurements have to constantly be reevaluated.
2) Monitoring helps you understand your audiences and what they are responding to the most. It can help you change your strategies to fit what the customers want in a timely manner.
A few years ago, Barclays, a financial services company, launched a mobile banking application called PingIt which allowed Barclays account holders to transfer money to other accounts. Through social media monitoring they were able to see that there were many users that showed negative sentiment towards the app.
Many were unhappy that the app didn’t work for customers under 18 years of age. Barclays quickly saw that this was a trend and were able to make changes to allow younger account holders to have access to the app. After the change, sentiment analysis showed that feedback towards the app improved quickly. This is a good example of how social media monitoring can save businesses from making decisions that could hurt them.
3) Monitoring helps you turn unhappy customers into loyal customers through proactive monitoring, interactions and relationship management practices.
This might be the most important aspect of social media monitoring because it involves direct and timely communication with individuals in your target audience. As Jeff Bezos said in the quote above, it is crucial to make this interaction with unhappy customers a positive one because the influence of a positive experience can reach thousands of people.
Quick response times, personalized messages and genuine concern for customer’s well-being is the most important thing when dealing with unhappy customers on social media. Social media monitoring is how you can be proactive in addressing their concerns.
Here is a great guide in how to handle customer complaints on social media.
How Lava Surf Helps You Monitor Your Social Media Platforms
Monitoring gets especially difficult if your brand has multiple locations and social media accounts. Lava Surf’s unique multi-location platform provides multi-unit brands tools to monitor, track and organize all of its social media needs from a central location. Lava Surf’s platform makes it easy for your internal team to manage any number of pages across multiple social platforms saving you time and money.
Not only do you have to monitor what people are saying to you, you have to monitor what people are saying about you, even without a specific mention. In fact, about 30% of all tweets mentioning your company does not include your Twitter handle. This is where Lava Surf can help you monitor efficiently by giving you a platform where you can track any kind of mention your company gets, which in turn helps you answer these customer’s concerns, complaints or compliments. Social media monitoring tools like Lava Surf is essential to your business’ social media success.