What is social media monitoring?
Keeping track of what is being said about your brand online and responding to any mentions of it is social media monitoring. This is a proactive strategy that covers all aspects of your brand, including reviews, product questions, and service repair complaints.
It’s not just about posts that mention you directly or people commenting on your posts. Social media monitoring also includes posts that mention your brand without tagging you. These don’t necessarily come up in your regular network notifications, so it’s important to have social monitoring tools set up.
Unlike social media monitoring, social media listening does not always require an immediate response. Social media listening is more like gathering information about what is being said about your brand or industry online and then using that information to inform future marketing decisions.
It is important for businesses to monitor how the public perceives their brand in order to ensure the health and longevity of the company. There are many ways for people to talk about brands online, but there are also many ways to track and understand these conversations.
A company’s social strategy generally includes both monitoring and listening. Monitoring is more reactive, while listening is more proactive; however, both can provide important insights into the company. Additionally, listening can help uncover important conversations that are not tagged.
What is brand monitoring?
Working to keep track of where and how people mention your brand can help you to better understand how people perceive it. Additionally, you may be able to collect valuable feedback from your audience this way. Another benefit to brand monitoring is that it may help you to nip potential crises in the bud by responding to questions or criticism quickly.
Brand monitoring vs. social monitoring
Brand monitoring is a way of tracking how your brand is doing by looking at not just social media coverage, but also anywhere else people are talking about your brand. This includes using social monitoring and social listening, as well as methods of tracking brand mentions on other non-social media channels, to collect audience insights.
Why brand monitoring matters
It’s important for brands to take into account what their target audiences think. Although a brand might not agree with some of the conversations going on about it, it’s still beneficial to be aware of the general sentiment. How a brand is perceived by the public and how it responds to feedback can have a significant impact on its growth.
Of the business executives that were surveyed, 72% reported that they use social media to inform their company’s business decisions.
There are several benefits that come with brand monitoring for businesses. For example, it can help you identify and rectify negative sentiment, track how your brand is performing compared to others, keep an eye on your competitors, and more.
Understanding sentiment
Brand monitoring allows you to keep track of how people feel about your brand. A sentiment analysis looks at the language used in comments and can determine if people are speaking positively, negatively, or neutrally about your brand.
This is a great way to read between the lines and observe people’s reactions to certain posts, campaigns, or your brand on a large scale. Monitoring tools like Sprout Social let you access sentiment analysis, which shows you how your audience feels about your brand. Sprout’s social listening tools look through your post comments and mentions to create a sentiment summary.
Reputation and crisis management
It’s important to monitor your brand’s reputation online, so you can quickly address any customer issues. This way, you’ll increase your audiences’ trust in your brand, and show that you care about what they’re saying.
Identifying issues and improvements
Not only is it crucial to keep an eye on how your brand is received, but it’s also beneficial to actively seek feedback that could highlight any areas in need of improvement regarding your product or service. Make sure that you have a plan for how you will collect this feedback from your audience. It’s just as vital to have a way to share the feedback you receive online with the appropriate people at your company who can make the necessary changes.
The following text provides tips on how to use social listening to improve your business.
Creating two-way communication
If you are aware of where people are discussing your brand, it will be much simpler to respond. By publicly answering reviews or comments, you demonstrate to your audience that you are carefully attending to what they are communicating.
If you’re responsive to questions and criticism online, it looks like your brand is available and willing to listen to feedback. If you don’t take advantage of opportunities to answer questions or address criticism, it may appear that your brand is unresponsive or ignoring input.
Identify user-generated content
Monitoring your brand’s mentions can help you curate a content strategy that complements user-generated content. You can also identify new influencers and content sources this way.
What brand elements should you monitor?
When you are monitoring your brand, it is easy to want to track every single mention of it from every possible place people might talk about it. However, it is crucial to be strategic and selective about what you are monitoring as well as the channels you are using to do so. Having too much data from too many places can be confusing and make it difficult to find any patterns. It is better to focus on a smaller amount of data that is easier to analyze.
Some of the main channels to monitor are:
- Online news media
- All social media platforms
- Online forums such as Reddit and Quora
- Online review sites such as TripAdvisor or Yelp
- Print media (if you have the resources to check relevant publications actively)
It’s important to not only track the right channels, but also to monitor all elements of your brand that might receive attention.Choose elements to monitor that are relevant to your brand and industry. Some key brand elements to consider monitoring are:
Name variations
Make a list of all of the different ways people refer to your brand. This can include nicknames, blog names and other variations of words that your brand is associated with. Some people may use different spellings or abbreviations of your name, so it’s important to track all the variations you know. Conducting keyword research on the searches your brands’ web presence receives can help you identify variations and even common misspellings.
In addition to your brand name, it is also a good idea to track your campaign name or product name in case you get publicity or comments about those specific aspects of your brand. All of this will help you stay informed on the conversation about your brand, even when people do not mention your brand accounts directly.
Competitors
What are your competitors doing? What is their audience talking about? Keeping tabs on this will ensure you’re on top of the latest industry news. Having this knowledge will allow you to set a benchmark to see how your brand compares to similar brands in your industry.
Many online brand monitoring tools allow you to compare your social media activity to that of your competitors. This can be a useful way to gauge your performance and see how it changes over time.
Choose a metric to focus on and track how it changes over time as you gather information from brand monitoring. See how changes in your content strategy or industry news affects your audience growth and engagement.
Brand monitoring can help you understand how effective your marketing tactics are. For example, if you have a campaign with influencers or use hashtags, you can track the posts to see which ones are successful with your audience and which ones aren’t.
Industry buzzwords and trends
If you own a business in a specific niche, you should monitor popular trends and keywords associated with your industry. Knowing what people are saying about your industry can help inspire new content ideas and also help you join online conversations in new and interesting ways.
It can be beneficial for your brand to join conversations that are not just focused on customer service or complaints. This shows that you are active in your industry and just as involved in the latest news or trends as the people who are dedicated to following your brand.
CEOs and public figures
It is important to keep track of how public figures or company representatives are mentioned in relation to your brand. This includes monitoring conversations about your CEO and any other prominent people associated with your brand. Even if the news surrounding these people is not directly related to your business, the way they are portrayed in the media can influence people’s perception of your brand as a whole.
How can social media monitoring benefit you?
The most immediate benefit of social media monitoring is that it makes your customers feel heard and supported. The Sprout Social Index: Empower & Elevate found that:
- 59% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they had a great experience
- 47% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they have a product or service question
- 40% of consumers reach out to brands on social because they had a bad experience
The majority of marketers that Sprout surveyed responded to a customer request within 12 hours. When you respond on social media to consumers, they’re 21% more likely to purchase from you.
Airlines have a lot of social media notifications and it is helpful to keep track of brand keywords. United Airlines was able to quickly respond to a customer’s tweets that didn’t mention them directly because of listening tools.
A social media monitoring strategy will help you to quickly and easily find any mention of your brand online, as well as sort out which messages are the most important. This way you won’t have to waste time scrolling through your social media timelines or conducting manual searches that may not find all the variations of your brand name. Having a social media monitoring strategy in place will also allow you to quickly respond to any negative comments or complaints from key influencers, which could help to avoid a PR disaster.
Tagging brands in photos and locations on social media can help them connect with influencers they might not have otherwise been aware of. In the example below, Project Juice was tagged in a photo and location, allowing them to comment and interact with an influencer who has 59,000 followers on Instagram. This provides an opportunity for the brand to build relationships with potential customers and create marketing campaigns around them.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring involves tracking online brand mentions and responding to them. Monitoring keeps your brand on top of messages before they might become viral for the wrong reasons. It also helps you maintain a positive brand image among consumers and identify potential influencers.
The best monitoring tool for you is the one that covers all the networks you’re on, in one space. This way, you can focus on social customer care and maximizing the value of your campaigns, without having to switch between apps and browser tabs.
Brand monitoring can help you see what people think of your brand, so you can make better marketing decisions and create campaigns that your audience will love. When you see negative comments, you can offer help and responses, and control the message being put out. The more you monitor, the more you’ll know about your industry and how your brand measures up to the competition.
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