Guest Post: Jolene Rutheford is a marketing specialist- turned blogger, currently writing for Bizzmark Blog. Interested in media and social media, digital marketing and psychology. Loves coffee, jazz, dystopian and fantasy movies. You can find her on Twitter @jolene_rford and Facebook/jolene.rutheford.56.
The digital marketing realm has undergone major changes in the last several years, with frequent shifts in leading trends and practices. Marketers today use artificial intelligence bots for real-time chatting with their prospects and customers, utilize augmented reality technology, live streaming, mobile optimization, and other means to improve their customer experience.
Social media has been around for a long time, and apparently, it will grow ever more popular. You’ve done your research and found out which social media platform suits your business best, created an account, and started building your social media community, but in order to find out whether your brand name resonates among your clients and prospects, you’ll need to utilize a good social media monitoring tool.
Why is social media monitoring essential?
Social media monitoring provides crucial insights on how to understand consumer behavior and learn from it, which has made it a major form of business intelligence. In order to have a good conversation, one must practice both speaking and listening, but it seems that listening is a seldom practiced part. In order to interact with your customers in a way that fosters a positive perception of your company, it’s important to know what they’re saying about you on social media. Social media monitoring enables you to track conversations, identify influencers, buyers and leads, and build a community around your brand, company, and products.
The good news is that social media monitoring isn’t reserved just for large corporations with enormous PR budgets anymore. It is well within your reach and, with the right tools, can easily be achieved.
Social media monitoring tools
There’s a plethora of media monitoring tools for every budget. Having a specific tool for monitoring each social media channel can be frustrating and time-consuming. Thankfully, certain monitoring tools allow for multiple social media accounts to be integrated and synced in one dashboard. They will help alert you to monitor social media and other mentions of your brand on the Internet, as well as the keywords you’re monitoring in offline/online mediums. When you’re looking for a media monitoring tool, know that paid tools are more feature-rich and robust. So, see if they fit your budget, and check out offline and regional compatibility.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage and monitor several profiles and networks from a single dashboard. It’s great for tracking your social media outreach, post scheduling, listening to and engaging with your prospects, executing marketing campaigns across multiple channels, and measuring results. To use it most effectively, you need to craft a stream with keywords that represent your search: add a stream, select the keyword, select the account under which you’re monitoring, type in the keyword/phrase, add it, and then add the stream.
2.Mediaportal
Mediaportal is a media monitoring software that delivers news and mentions as they occur across all your relevant media, including online, print and broadcast. It also provides comprehensive media intelligence and reporting tools, connecting you with influencers and journalists. Social media monitoring ensures you don’t miss out on your news sources, helping you complete your media picture. Mediaportal users can now access their social media coverage, essential news and trends while on the go, being able to respond to issues and gain insights in real-time.
3. Mention
Mention is a tool that allows you to visualize your online presence. It’s one of the newer tools that replaced Google Alerts, and it allows you to monitor countless sources in real-time and in 42 different languages, so you can immediately react and interact. Choose to receive a daily email of the aggregate of media mentions from the previous day or do an online research. You can also export your statistics to CSV or PDF, and share the data with your team.
Use media monitoring to build brand reputation
As social media platforms have become important communication channels for brands, today’s consumers use them to voice out their complaints and concerns. Engage them so they would always stay honest, listen, and use it as a constructive and valuable feedback to improve things. Encourage online reviews of your company, because having a bulk of positive reviews will help spread the good word about your company to new customers on other networks. Maintain your social media channels, feed them with relevant content, share their content, and congratulate them for being there. Be consistent, positive, and respond quickly to engagements.
Media monitoring is important for every marketing strategy because it can help you grow quickly by paying attention to the right things. Use it to listen to what your customers have to say, and be sure that you’ll be perceived as a great, user-oriented brand.