Social media is now a native language for the modern consumer. It’s a blend of channel, content, and conversations that likely include information that would be valuable for your brand to know — especially if they’re about your brand.
Social media monitoring is how you track and analyze those mentions across various social media platforms. This can naturally include specific references to your brand, competitors, industry trends, or other pertinent topics. Social media monitoring tools empower brands to:
Let’s explore the benefits of social media monitoring, and why it’s essential for your brand to navigate today’s digital ecosystem.
Social media monitoring involves using various tools to collect, analyze, and interpret data from social media channels such as Facebook, X, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It’s an invaluable tool for brands of all sizes, providing valuable insights into their audience, competitors, and overall industry.
By monitoring social media, you can better understand your brand’s target audience, including their preferences, interests, and pain points. These insights can be used to tailor marketing campaigns, develop targeted content, and improve customer service. It can also help you identify potential customers and influencers who can amplify your brand message and reach a wider audience.
The crucial aspect of social media monitoring is tracking brand reputation. By keeping a close eye on online conversations, your brand can quickly identify and address any negative feedback or complaints, and mitigate potential reputational crises. This can enable your brand to maintain a positive brand image and build trust with your customers.
This is key for social media, as both opportunities to engage your audience and respond to their needs are crucial for modern social media engagement. Today’s customers want you to provide seamless customer experiences. In fact, 52% of consumers expect a response from a brand within one hour, and 39% report often waiting more than two hours for a reply.
Social media monitoring is key to helping your brand meet these expectations, and typically, social media listening is an excellent way to stay ahead of whatever is on their minds.
It’s important to understand the relationship between social media monitoring and social listening, as they’re often used interchangeably. There are actually some key differences between the two.
Both are valuable tools within social media strategy and for understanding different aspects of your target audience. If you’re looking to track and analyze public conversations about your brand on social media, then social media monitoring is the right tool for you.
Monitoring helps you discover items that require your brand’s immediate attention, including questions or issues with your brand so you can react quickly. If you’re looking to understand broader conversations about your audience, social listening is the right tool.
Social media monitoring is, essentially, an assessment of your brand. As such, many of its benefits stem from the ability to understand how audiences perceive you. Let’s review all the benefits of social media monitoring and how they might be applied.
Many of the benefits of social media monitoring fall within reputation management. It can help you do so by tracking negative comments or reviews about your brand on social media so you can respond quickly. Addressing this negative feedback can show your customers that you take their concerns seriously and are committed to resolving any issues and maintaining their trust. This will help you improve customer service and help you build customer loyalty and trust, which can lead to increased sales and repeat business.
Social media monitoring can also help you identify and engage with influencers who can help you reach a wider audience and promote your brand. By tracking and analyzing the online conversations of key influencers in your industry, you can identify those most likely to be interested in your products or services so you can reach out to them with personalized messages. Building these relationships could result in them sharing your content with their followers, increasing your brand awareness and website traffic.
Competitive intelligence through social media monitoring can help you stay up to date on your competitors’ latest products, services, and marketing campaigns. This may help you identify opportunities to differentiate your brand and gain a competitive advantage. You can also learn from your competitors’ successes and mistakes, which can help you improve your own marketing and business strategies.
Audience monitoring – similar to what you learn from social listening – can provide you with valuable insights into your audience, including their interests, needs, and pain points. By analyzing the online conversations of your target audience, you can learn more about what they’re looking for and how you can best meet their needs. This information can help you develop more effective marketing campaigns and create products and services your audience will love.
As social media monitoring is primarily a data-based activity, not having a way to distill information from countless social media activities to find actionable insights can be extremely difficult. Thankfully, platforms are available to help you reap the full benefits of social media monitoring.
Here are a few ways a social media monitoring platform can help.
These dashboards can aggregate data from your multiple social media channels. This consolidation is essential because it provides:
An example of a social media dashboard within the Emplifi Platform. Emplifi Unified Analytics
Raw data doesn’t become actionable insights without advanced analytics tools, which social media monitoring platforms can help you obtain quicker.
These platforms enable some of the timely tactics needed to take advantage of social media monitoring through things like:
How you approach setup and approach your monitoring is a pivotal first step that a platform can help you maximize.
The discoveries you make with social media monitoring will eventually scale. With a platform, you’re in a position to easily do that.
You will eventually want to do something with your data, and a platform will help ease integrations, particularly around customer care activities.
By investing in a social media monitoring platform, brands can harness the power of data to not only stay reactive to the current social media landscape but also proactively strategize for the future. The platform serves as a crucial component in understanding and engaging with your audience at scale, providing the tools necessary to navigate the complexities of online brand management effectively.
Perhaps the most important benefit of social media monitoring is that it can significantly enhance customer experience and engagement. Being able to understand your customers, their needs, their desires, and how they feel about your brand is key to how you approach engagement and creating positive customer experiences.
Social media monitoring is an important step to connect with your customers on a personal level. By engaging in conversations and responding to their comments or mentions, your brand can create a sense of community and build rapport with your customers. This personalized approach enhances customer loyalty and encourages brand advocacy, potentially leading to increased customer engagement.
If you’re interested in learning how to deploy social media monitoring within your digital marketing strategy or looking to do so using a platform, we’d love to give you a demo of our Emplifi Social Marketing Cloud.
Emplifi helps boost efficiency, increase revenue, and scale your social media — whether you have a small team or a complex product. Want to see how? Let’s talk today.
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