Social Media Monitoring is the process of listening to discussions, shared mentions and comments, regarding a brand, on social media. In other words, it is about monitoring the behavior of the audience and the reviews on a brand, the products or services of a company, but also on the competition.
Social Media Monitoring is often referred as Social Media Listening. However, we need to know that there are differences between these two terms. While it’s easy to understand why they are seen as identical processes, Social Media Monitoring (SMM) and Social Media Listening (SML) are the two unique methods to view, measure and analyze your audience and your brand’s performance in digital environment.
Each brand should listen carefully
- Social Media Monitoring is the process of collecting data and messages from the Internet in a single stream, and then the process of responding to each message (via like, comment, etc.).
- Social Media Listening requires a large amount of data that responds to specific keywords or topics. These data can then be analyzed and evaluated for each brand (sentiment analysis, tagging, relevance) so that the brand can receive the information wanted.
Understanding the difference between SMM and SML is critical for your social media strategy, but it is, also, important to know that none of them is more important than the other – that misconception usually leads to the these two processes often be treated as a single one and offered by experts as an overall solution.
As data recording gives you valuable insights into how the audience interacts with your brand or competitors, SML is the key to analyzing the public’s point of view, meaning to understand what customers are saying when they talk about you. Social Media Listening is essential for extracting information, while Social Media Monitoring helps to increase debate around your brand and therefore the interaction of users with it.
However, in the term Social Media Monitoring there is a point of ambiguity: SMM is not just about “listening” to the social media debate. In fact, most SMM tools detect many different types of sites, such as:
Forums- Blogs
- Review sites
- News sites
- Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn)
There is no doubt that social media has changed the terms and conditions for brands all over the world. If your business thinks to be actively involved in social media or if it already does, it’s important to use Social Media Monitoring and Social Media Listening tools to make sure you manage your social media accounts professionally and successfully. After all, the presence of your social media business is now your professional profile in the world.
When you have the right data in front of you, you can analyze the information to make specific decisions about how to promote your brand on social media in order to achieve maximum engagement – which can increase your sales.
The key to collecting the data you need is to use a proper Social Media Monitoring tool. A specialized platform has the ability to monitor everything about user behavior and so you can enjoy the benefits of the demanding digital “mapping” that others do for you: Watch mentions, keywords, hashtags, URLs, and more, and you can search for real-time mentions and also look back on data for any issue you’re interested in.
Make your brand more “customer – friendly”
The first step to getting started with SMM is to make a list of the keywords associated with your business. Keywords are the words customers and the audience use in social media when they search for your brand or refer to your products or services.
Start brainstorming all the keywords your customers can use online, including current language and words with negative timble.
Social Mentions- Target market
- Competition
- Customers
- Hashtags
These are the guidelines you need to keep in mind by starting SMM – in the future you can expand your list with more specialized keywords.
8 benefits of Social Media Monitoring
Social Listening can be extremely valuable to your business in the long run. By carefully following the comments shared by the audience, customers, potential customers and / or competitors about your business, you can:
- Respond to customers’ complaints promptly, avoiding the escalation of differences.
- Improve your online image and your brand by showing that you care and you are interested in your customers.
- Promote and initiate discussions around your brand to increase awareness of your products and services.
- Gain the feedback you need to help and develop your products and services that match your customers’ needs.
- Identify who your “heavy users” are and reward them.
- “Spy” on your competitors and “steal” ideas, examples which may help you, but also see what may harm you.
- Find out if consumers are negatively or positively referring to your brand, services and / or products – and for what reasons.
- Identify a crisis on time and treat it properly before it becomes giant.
Feel the rhythm of the market through Sentiment Analysis
If you want to improve the relationship and communication with your customers, you need to respond to incoming messages. In fact, Sprout Social research shows that the average response of brands is less than 12% on Twitter. Moreover, that drops to less than 9% on Facebook.
[Response rates on Twitter are 36% better than they are on Facebook. Source: sproutsocial.com]
That’s why you need to invest in Social Media Monitoring. SMM does not have to be difficult, costly or time-consuming. If you handle properly and efficiently tools and platforms, that can improve your customer service, your brand reputation, and the general recognition of your business on the Internet. Superior customer service is a top priority for most of the brands. And that certainly includes your presence on social media.
The problem is that almost 90% of the audience’s messages to brands are ignored.
With SMM, you will have the opportunity to enter the discussion and provide to the public the answers they need, as well as be notified whenever the audience mentions you in a shared comment. SMM allows your brand to become more accessible and you can interact with your audience faster and more efficiently. Since positive user experiences can really affect your customers and sales, it’s always better to think about building a strong communication bond with your customers in a long-term relationship.
For many brands, there are so many incoming messages that it’s easy to lose important queries because they do not have tags, mentions or do not use the brand’s hashtags. However, identifying your brand keywords on a Social Media Monitoring platform like PaloPro makes it simple. With the help of a specialized platform, you not only locate all reports and comments about your brand, but you can also analyze the performance of the hashtags you use and see how users interact with the content you post.
A main advantage of SMM tools is the ability to evaluate and further organize a brand’s campaigns. When you ‘run’ a campaign, it is really important that you can see and respond to the audience’s comments and mentions on time. In addition, tracking interactions and conversations from key customers can provide valuable information that will potentially be measured for brand campaigns and digital marketing.
As we already mentioned, your quick response is a very important element for your social media presence. For example, when an upset customer shares a complaint about your brand on social media, you must respond to this immediately to resolve the problem. Even if you can not find a solution for the current situation, you could restore your relationship and increase the chances of working with them in the future.
Do not let negative customer experiences be unnoticed in social media: Every big brand can collect hundreds or thousands of mentions a day, but the right Social Media Monitoring tool is the one that will help you locate the most important issues that arise deal properly. Sentiment Analysis, that is, automatically detecting the mood of user publications and categorizing them as positive, negative, and neutral, is your ally if you want to listen to market moods to you and “Map” correctly.
The meaning of Social Media Monitoring for Influencer Marketing
Considering the particular importance of SMM, we should not forget to mention influencers and brand ambassadors who changed the way traditional advertising works: influencers are important to promote your brand and services, but also to increase the engagement with your brand. With the help of a reliable Social Media Monitoring tool, you can easily locate users who have a real influence on the digital environment, interact with the audience, and develop partnerships with influencers and ambassadors who have a great impact with the customers you want.
SMM is not strictly limited to your brand. It’s helpful to watch and see what your competitors are doing and how they engage with their audience. This means that SMM enables you to detect not only the interaction of users with any brand, but also the activity of influencers that “use” the competition.
If you are convinced about the importance of Social Media Monitoring, give a try to PaloPro platform
Since social media enabled customers to talk about their brand experience and services, it is important for businesses to be able to see what’s going on online by spending time and investing in a modern and reliable Social Media Monitoring tool, such as PaloPro, the Palo Services platform, which has been recognized internationally by publishing 5 Papers in international magazines, honored with 7 awards and a Seal of Excellence from the European Union.
PaloPro aggregates all the news, posts, discussions and videos of the Greek-speaking internet in a simple, friendly and useful tool for analysis and intelligence. The user is able to see in real time where discussions start, what positively or negatively affects the organizations’ reputation and what is ultimately its overall picture in the web.
PaloPro offers a unique service experience by gathering, and analyzing brand-specific web-references in real time. It is an integrated tool for the creation and execution of corporate communication strategy.
It offers the possibility of direct, real-time monitoring of all internet sources by using, not just keywords, but entities. It aggregates data from over 1.500 websites, 10.000 blogs, forums, hundreds of thousands of public Facebook pages, Instagram, Twitter & YouTube.
Most importantly, it alerts for possibly underlying crisis that may have to be addressed immediately. Therefore, it contributes significantly to the preparation, evaluation, or even to a corrective intervention to our client’s strategy, and ultimately to the protection of the companies’ reputation.
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