10 Reasons Why You Should Become Friends With Social Media Monitoring

Over the years the impact of social media on reality has increased significantly. Every day millions of users share various content, from their feelings about the new restaurant to deep personal struggles or beliefs. Nowadays a social media crisis can seriously harm the company’s image becoming viral and reaching tons of users in a few hours.

But!

On the other hand, it can also be a powerful weapon in the fight for a client. Powerful and mostly free. Here are 10 reasons why you should become friends with #SocialMediaMonitoring

1. The Importance Of Knowing Your Customers

Having access to mentions about your brand, product or service you are able to immediately react to your customer’s thoughts, opinions, complaints praises etc. Reducing the distance between customers and the company makes them feel thinking you honestly want to solve their problems and satisfy their needs, not only to charge them.

Also, you can see why people like and buy your product, what they admire most or what your weakest links are. It may be invaluable knowledge while planning your marketing strategies. You can also develop your product based on your customer’s feedback.

They do your homework!

You need to know that every mention about your company in social media can be profitable for you.

Even negative.

What’s more, negative mentions can be a huge opportunity to turn negative emotions into positive ones. How to achieve this?
Every company all over the world has unhappy customers. The difference between those companies is the way they react to negative opinions.

Now, when you know how to get to know your customers, next you should…

2. Engage Them

Engaging your customers in social media activity is one of the best ways to increase your reach completely free. All you need to do is just make your customers want to talk about you. Yes, I know that it is easy to say but difficult to do but I prepared an example for inspiration.

https://twitter.com/AdamYT/status/539890978862407680

You see, if your customers talk about your brand – answer them! Use social media monitoring tools to improve your communication with them. Thank them for their kind words, apologize when they complain about your service, product – be close to them, make them feel that you care about their feedback and take it seriously. After all, thanks to them you can earn money and improve your product.

How to do it?
Turn your customers into your ambassadors!

Use our social media monitoring tool find the most popular mentions about your brand and try to keep up the engagement by getting into a conversation with your potential and existing clients. Shock them (positively of course) by your approach, react on what they say about you and my favorite – make them feel important.

In “How to win friends and influence people” Dale Carnegie said that people are “creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.”.

By making your customers feel pride and important they’ll soon become your customers because they’ll believe, that their opinion has a serious impact on you and your company.

I prepared some interesting data from Zendesk for those who still underestimate the power of the buzz marketing:

62% of B2B and 42% of B2C customers purchased more after a good customer service experience

66% of B2B and 52% of B2C customers stopped buying after a bad customer service interaction

88% have been influenced by an online customer service review when making a buying decision

Ok, we know our customers and they are quite engaged in your social media activities. What’s next?

3. Base Your Marketing Campaigns On Social Media

People use social media everywhere. During the lunch break, on a bus, at home, at work, anytime and anywhere.

Here is a short clip about a restaurant, which delivered pizza to hungry people, who posted about it on social media. What’s more, the restaurant used Brand24 to track those people and pizza was totally free. You probably expect, a lot of startled people shared pictures of free-pizza online.

Although it wasn’t free for the restaurant (costs of pizzas, delivery etc.) the impact of this campaign was magnificent. Watch the full story in the video below:

Despite shocking positively your audience in social media, you can also use web monitoring tools to analyze, which social media channels give you the best effects. Then we move to the next point…

4. Find The Right Channels For Your Marketing Strategies

Before we start I would like to point out that there is no one-size-fits-all selection of social media channels. You need to know, where people interested in your product or service are and where your existing and potential clients are.

By using web monitoring tools like Brand24 you can easily check it by starting a new project. The first thing you need to do is to type keywords describing your brand. Although the choice of keywords is up to you, we recommend you to think about:

1. the name of your company
2. the name of your product
3. your branded hashtag
4. general terms related to the industry

Then in the main view, you’ll see the latest mentions about your brand. In “Mentions” section You’ll see in which channels your brand is most popular.

5. Find Influencers

When you know what your best-performing channels are, finding some influencers on those channels would be useful and could increase your reach. Also, influencers are individuals who have influence over potential buyers and their recommendations are often much more than just standard advertising.

Why?

Apart from advertising and recommending products or services they usually have a huge engaged community. While working with influencers you get not only a valuable review of your product from a high-end user but also benefit from influencers social media and blogs reach.

6. Measure effects

By tracking your brand name you get lots of data that shows you the amount of buzz you generate. It helps you to decide on which channels you should focus more and what the weakest links in your strategy are.

But how to do it?
How to get it straight?

It’s not that difficult but it can be tricky for two reasons: social media are constantly changing and you need to know how to figure out the data you get.

It’s important to know what you want to achieve by your campaign, a defined goal. It may be reaching a wider audience, increasing brand awareness or driving traffic to your website. It’s up to you but remember about SMART rule while planning a target. Why is it so important? Because different metrics will be relevant for each of these purposes.

Let’s have a look at metrics that our social media monitoring tool can provide you and what do they exactly mean:

The volume of mentions – total number of mentions related to your keywords.

Influencer score – measures impact of the authors of posts about you. From 0 (practically invisible impact on your target group) to 10 (you better know this author, true authority).

The share of voice – the amount of social media conversation generated by a particular post. Shown as a percentage.

Social media reach – tells you how many people have seen your post.

Sentiment – tells you if a post is negative, positive or negative. But remember, although our tool is extremely smart, it may be wrong. For example, it won’t detect sarcasm.

7. Track Hashtags

If you manage Instagram profile you probably use hashtags in descriptions of your photos. Further, I can bet that you use usually more than just one hashtag.

Am I right?

Ok, so as You may know, Instagram doesn’t allow you to search more than one hashtag and for me, it was quite problematic.
It was problematic until I discovered Brand24 and it’s capability to track more than one hashtag. It’s very easy and I’ll show you how to do it.

1. Create an account in Brand24

2. Enter keywords you want to track. It may be the name of your brand, service, product etc.

Now You need to choose which medium you want to check. I’ll take Instagram. Type in search box a hashtag you want to track.

Here it is! Now you track posts with the hashtag of your brand and hashtag which you typed in a search box.

Not enough?

Ok. Look at this.
In search box type {AND} between hashtags. Just like in this screen:

Voila!
Now you can track a few hashtags at once and become a hashtag tracking ninja.

BTW. If finding popular Instagram hashtags sounds like rocket science for you here is something you will love.

And it’s free.

You’re welcome, we are on a cloud nine, too.

8. Track Your Competition

I don’t think I have to convince you why it is so important to know and track your competition but I can tell you how Brand24 can help you with it.

Brand24 shows you which social media channels your competitors use and get engagement. Also, our tool compares your reach with your competitors. The tool will give you a number of mentions, its sources, sentiment (positive and negative) and percentage share of each channel in total traffic.

Having those data you can keep ine step ahead of your competition.
See how:

9. Customer Live Testimonials

Think about who you are going to trust more – an advertisement of a product you are interested in or your good friend’s recommendation? Research shows that we tend more to believe other customers’ opinions than typical advertisements.

Showing your customers’ testimonials on a website and making them clickable (so your website’s visitors can see original post) can bring you a range of benefits like:

Absorbed and eager for details? Click here to get to know more about live testimonials and why is it worth using. 

10. Deal With PR Crisis

Let’s be honest, digital marketing is not a bed of roses and sometimes PR crisis may happen to you. What’s more, it’s totally normal, we are only humans and make mistakes. Maybe you were tired and haven’t served your customer properly, maybe he or she got up on the wrong side of the bed, maybe this, maybe that…

Whatever.

It may be dozens of reasons for your crisis and you have to deal with it. It is a serious test of your social skills and when you pass it you can even turn negative emotions into positive!

Interesting, isn’t it?

A crisis may be an opportunity for you to give your business a human face, show and emphasize your uniqueness. Using Brand24 you get access to all mentions about your brand including negative ones so you can immediately react and extinguish a fire before it spreads through the Internet jungle.

Just try to behave like a friend, confess your mistake, apologize, offer compensation. Show that you care about their opinion and appreciate the feedback.

Look, somebody took a time to develop your business and find mistakes.
And did it for free!

Maybe it will be difficult to turn this unhappy client to your ambassador but your reaction and approach can make you great in the eyes of those people observing the crisis.

And remember one thing – an unhappy client is your fault. Don’t try to blame the unhappy customer.

Don’t you even think about it.

Ok, looks nice but hey, do I have to check the tool minute after a minute just because crisis may happen anytime?

No, fortunately, Brand24 offers a nice feature called Storm alert which informs you about every unusual traffic around your keywords. The notification will be sent on your email or as a message on Slack, however you want.

Eager to learn more about crisis management? <- We have prepared more details for you.

Thank you for attention! I hope this post will be helpful for you and you’ll become a web monitoring master using our tool. Share this to your friends whose lack of faith in Social Media Monitoring is disturbing.