Whether you’re an individual blogger or a giant corporation, it’s very important to monitor your brand and industry’s social media presence. Millions of people flock to social media sites to share their thoughts and opinions, so even companies without Facebook or Twitter profiles would benefit from monitoring the conversation.
Once you nail down the monitoring process, you can monitor your social media presence in 10 minutes a day. There are numerous tools, such free tools like Google Alerts or Google Reader, and paid tools like Radian6 and HubSpot that streamline the monitoring process. But why should you bother?
1. Learn what people think about your brand
Monitor keywords including your brand name, product names, and key executives. This way you can learn what people are saying about your brand in the social space. This is an easy and free way to garner insight on people’s opinions of your brand. You can then tweak your social media campaign messaging accordingly.
2. Discover unmet needs in your industry
Monitor industry terms such as product types, niche topics, or relevant terms people might use when referring to your brand or industry. This serves a couple purposes:
- Direct people to your solutions. People may voice their needs for your products without realizing your product exists. You can reach out to these individuals and, without sounding overly self-promotional, make these people aware of your company’s solutions.
- Get product ideas. People come to social media to ask questions and voice their frustration when they can’t find a solution to any given problem. This gives you the opportunity to fill that untapped need and high-demand market.
3. Join the conversation and answer questions
If people have questions about your brand or industry and you have a great answer in mind, join the conversation. Only provide an answer if it provides high-value insight; don’t participate just for the sake of of participating. You also don’t need to answer every question about your brand or industry otherwise social media can become a full-time job. But answering a few questions a day can help increase brand exposure and establish your brand as a knowledge leader.
4. Become a knowledge leader in your industry
Tools such as Google Alerts will also notify you when your target terms are mentioned in blogs or news articles. Here, you’ll often have the opportunity to reply to the author in the comment section of their blog post or article. Rather than spam the comments with an ad messaging and links to your site, add value to the conversation by crafting a message based on their author’s content. You can either agree or disagree with the author, but maintain a friendly and professional tone. You can even add a disclaimer that you work for your company/blog if you want to add the plug.
5. Provide customer service
People often come to social media to rant or voice their concerns, and some of these negative remarks may be directed at your brand. This doesn’t hinder your brand; rather, it gives you an opportunity to reach out to these individuals, give them your customer service contact information, and publicly show that your brand cares about your customers and audience.
6. Keep tabs on the competition
You can also add your competitor’s names as keywords you track to keep tabs on what they’re up to. This way you can make sure you’re ahead of the curve on their latest product launches and promotions.
7. Generate content ideas
Monitoring social media will provide valuable information, including content that people are writing about your industry. Take note of at least 1-2 ideas per day; since you know people are discussing these topics in the social sphere, you know there’s interest in the topic so that if you write a similar piece on your blog, you’ll likely gain traffic and interest.
What is your biggest reason for monitoring social media for your brand/industry? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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