As one of the most powerful marketing tools of our time, social media can boost brand awareness, give your business exposure to a broader audience, and create meaningful relationships with customers.
However, posting regular content and replying to mentions won’t suffice. Many customers may not even tag your handle while discussing your services with their peers.
💡 Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
So, if you don’t track your audience’s social media activity holistically, you may miss valuable insights.
That’s where you need effective social media monitoring. It tracks millions of conversations on the web to track conversations about a particular brand.
This process offers real-time social media insights and helps you detect product or service issues and discover new business opportunities. 85% of executives also consider social data a primary source of business intelligence for their company’s progress.
In today’s article, we will discuss the multi-dimensional benefits of social media monitoring and what you can do to make it work for you.
5 Ways Social Media Monitoring Can Drive your Business Forward
Here is how investing in social media monitoring can drive business growth:
1. Helps understand customer sentiment and feedback
While modern marketers prioritize metrics, customer sentiments are often overlooked, as they are difficult to quantify.
But customers are more than data points. Their opinions on social media impact your business’s credibility and give you insight into areas of improvement. So, brands must go beyond words and understand the drive behind consumer emotions and opinions.
Enter social media monitoring.
Many social media monitoring tools offer sentiment analysis feature to quantify customers’ feelings toward a brand, its products, and its services. The system delves into customer discussions about your brand and identifies complex emotions. It also analyzes direct customer feedback and pinpoints the exact issues they are facing.
With such insights, brands can curate targeted marketing campaigns and achieve better ROI. Sentiment analysis also lets businesses identify potential brand advocates and improve word-of-mouth marketing.
However, you need the right tools to reap the benefits of sentiment analysis. For example, Determ offers an end-to-end social media monitoring solution.
You get accurate sentiment analysis with AI Synthia to measure public opinion and control your online presence on a single platform.
2. You can identify emerging trends and market opportunities
To grow your business in a competitive market, you need to be on top of the ever-changing developments in your industry. It helps you design effective marketing campaigns, prepare for customer demands, and get better exposure.
With social media monitoring, you can easily track the relevant trends in your niche early on and hit the sweet spot before their popularity fades. You can explore innovative ideas to use these trends and capture attention. It paves the way to enhanced brand awareness and leaves a memorable impression on your audience.
For example, Xbox UK cleverly used the “Area 51” trend with a funny GIF on its Twitter handle.
Social media monitoring also helps brands anticipate potential demand surges for their products and services. With such forecasts, you can create a strategy in advance and be better equipped to handle increased demands.
With social media monitoring, you can also analyze your key competitors and follow their activities closely. It lets you examine what works in your industry and what doesn’t. You can learn from competitors’ achievements and avoid their mistakes.
Determ provides AI-powered social media monitoring features with topic summaries and insights into current trends. You get conclusive data and can discover new trendy ideas for your promotional activities without breaking a sweat.
Read 7 Social Media Monitoring Examples To Take Inspiration From
3. Ideal for improving brand reputation and customer satisfaction
Since the world is online, social media is essential for managing your brand’s reputation. If not handled correctly, one scathing review can damage your credibility and cost you customers.
Social media monitoring lets you track what’s written about your brand and examine its tone. You can set up triggers with the right tools to notify you about brand mentions.
This will keep you aware of every appreciation and criticism of your brand. You can proactively address customer concerns. It helps you identify even the most minuscule issues with your services and improve them accordingly. It shows your audience you value customer feedback and act on them.
For example, Starbucks promptly replied to the above customer feedback and encouraged them to submit the request. It shows the value the brand puts in its customers and uses social media to elevate its reputation.
You can also thank happy customers and use their appreciative comments as testimonials on your website. It further enhances your credibility, drives better leads, and makes conversion easier.
Social media monitoring can gather insightful data points and elevate customer service efforts. However, you also need a skilled team to establish meaningful customer relationships.
Create a CX-focused employee training program to improve your team’s communication skills and hone customer service capabilities.
4. Enhances customer engagement and loyalty
Social media engagement is critical in driving online brand awareness.
More interactions and impressions on your posts and campaigns will get the algorithm to push your content on more feeds. Increased reach will increase brand awareness and visibility, extend your following, and boost brand loyalty.
However, you can’t improve something without knowing where it currently stands. With social media monitoring, you can examine what content formats, such as infographics, videos, blog posts, live streams, or business-related podcasts, attract the most engagement and prioritize them in your marketing.
Social media monitoring tools let you establish prompt, two-way communication by tracking every interaction instantly. It humanizes the brand and creates a lasting connection with your audience. The customer sees you more than a business, which boosts customer loyalty.
For example, Determ provides AI-powered media monitoring features that track, measure, and generate accurate reports on your media presence. With its real-time reach and impression analytics, you will build a thriving online identity in no time.
5. Facilitates data-driven decision-making and strategy refinement
Social media monitoring offers valuable insight into your marketing campaigns and how your audience interacts with them. It gathers data on online conversions and generates reports on customer issues, needs, and desires.
With accurate and insightful reports, brands can make data-driven decisions and achieve tangible results. You can curate better campaigns, resolve customer issues with product improvements, and establish a lasting bond with your audience.
Real-time social media analytics also help you see the gaps in your sales and marketing strategies.
Choosing the proper social media monitoring tools
Social media monitoring offers several benefits to businesses of any size. But to drive the best results, manual processes are not reliable. They are time-consuming, error-prone, and can’t accommodate your reporting requirements as the company scales.
You need proper social media monitoring tools with advanced tracking, analytics, and reporting features. This way, your team can eliminate the tiring data-entry tasks and focus on building a substantial social media presence.
But how do you choose the right platform amidst so many options?
- See if the platform offers custom filters and triggers to set up required monitoring parameters. It lets you focus on the metrics most relevant to your goals.
- An effective social media monitoring solution should offer an AI-powered sentiment analysis feature. It lets you dig deep and accommodate the real emotions behind customer feedback.
- Your media monitoring tool should provide real-time tracking and alert systems. It lets you promptly reply to customer queries and grievances.
There are multiple tools offering media tracking components. But some consolidate every necessary feature and pack it in an all-in-one platform like Determ.
Our media monitoring solution offers features like brand monitoring and campaign tracking to give you a conclusive view of engagement and impact. The comprehensive dashboard centralizes insights from all platforms.
Determ also provides AI-powered analysis to quantify the complex feelings behind customer feedback and facilitates 84x faster reaction time for crisis management. Moreover, with its automated competitor research feature, you will avoid the common marketing pitfalls of your industry and stay ahead of the curve!
Conclusion
Social media monitoring is more than counting the likes and comments on your posts.
With the right approach, it can:
- Detect real sentiments behind online conversations
- Help you understand your audience’s needs and pain points
- Identify areas of improvement
- Measure brand reputation
- Track competitor’s marketing activities
- Enable data-driven decision-making and strategy refinement
Sort out your business goals, audit your budget, and choose an efficient media monitoring tool to boost reach and elevate your brand reputation.
Finally, tweak your strategies according to the generated insights to drive business growth and keep up with ever-evolving trends.
Mehdi Hussen is a SaaS marketing and organic growth consultant. He helps SaaS businesses drive organic growth and customer acquisition through SEO and data-driven content marketing strategies. Mehdi spends his spare time musing about startup growth strategies, personal productivity, and remote work. Connect with him through Twitter or LinkedIn.
