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:
- Unlock critical insights regarding their audience
- Pinpoint prospective clients and key influencers
- Oversee their brand image
- Efficiently manage their presence on social media
Let’s explore the benefits of social media monitoring, and why it’s essential for your brand to navigate today’s digital ecosystem.
What is social media monitoring?
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.
What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening?
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.
- Social media monitoring is a subset of social listening, which is about understanding what’s being said about your brand, industry, competitors, and any other topic that might be relevant at a given time. Social media monitoring specifically focuses on tracking and analyzing public conversations about your brand, products, or industry on social media platforms.
- Social listening involves a broader range of sources, including social media, blogs, forums, news sites, and more.
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.
What are the benefits of social media monitoring?
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.
Reputation management
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.
Influencer management
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
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
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.
Why you need a social media monitoring platform
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.
Centralized dashboards
These dashboards can aggregate data from your multiple social media channels. This consolidation is essential because it provides:
- Efficiency: It saves time and resources by eliminating the need to manually check each social media site for mentions and conversations.
- Comprehensiveness: It ensures you don’t miss out on any conversations about your brand, regardless of where they happen.
An example of a social media dashboard within the Emplifi Platform. Emplifi Unified Analytics
Advanced analytics
Raw data doesn’t become actionable insights without advanced analytics tools, which social media monitoring platforms can help you obtain quicker.
- Data-driven insights: Platforms offer advanced analytics tools beyond basic metrics, providing deeper insights into audience behavior, campaign performance, and more.
- Custom reports: Focus your reports on the metrics that matter most to your brand, facilitating strategic planning and decision-making.
Real-time alerts and notifications
These platforms enable some of the timely tactics needed to take advantage of social media monitoring through things like:
- Spike alerts: Stay informed about real-time mentions and conversations, enabling swift responses to both opportunities and issues.
- Crisis management alerts: Quickly identify negative sentiments or potential crises, allowing you to take immediate action and mitigate the crisis’ impact.
Automated tracking and segmentation
How you approach setup and approach your monitoring is a pivotal first step that a platform can help you maximize.
- Keyword and hashtag tracking: Automatically track specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags related to your brand, competitors, and industry trends.
- Audience segmentation: Segment your audience based on demographics, behavior, and engagement levels, helping you create targeted marketing strategies.
Scalability
The discoveries you make with social media monitoring will eventually scale. With a platform, you’re in a position to easily do that.
- Grows with your brand: As your brand expands, the platform scales to accommodate higher volumes of social media conversations and data.
- Adaptable to changes: Easily adjust your monitoring strategies as your brand’s goals and the digital landscape evolve.
Integration capabilities
You will eventually want to do something with your data, and a platform will help ease integrations, particularly around customer care activities.
- Compatibility with other tools: Seamlessly integrate with other marketing and customer service tools, enhancing your overall digital strategy.
- API access: Some platforms offer API access, allowing for custom integrations and further flexibility.
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.
How social media monitoring improves customer experience and engagement
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.
