7 Reasons to Monitor Your Social Media Activity

Creating an ongoing social media presence you learned about in our online social media marketing course is only half the battle. The next step is to real-time monitor all social media activity and understand who is saying what about your company, product or brand. The insight you gain can help craft relevant messages, create effective campaigns and respond to any press you get. Being part of the conversation also gives you the power to positively sway public perception.

Listed below are seven reasons why you should be doing real-time monitoring of your social media activities across all channels:
1. Respond to Complaints
How do you know if a customer has written a blog that negatively describes your brand or company and has shared it on their social media channels? A social media monitoring tool will let you stay on top of what is being said and will notify you once the posting or any posting for that matter is made. That way you can respond quickly and address the gripe before it snowballs. We will provide you with several options for these tools in our follow-up to this article.

2. Share Good News
Find compliments and positive reviews about your business and leverage them to position yourself as a trusted information source in your industry. As well, do not forget to end each praise, compliment of mention with a simple “thank you” and a straight-forward call to action.

3. Customer Service/Brand Protection
It is not a pretty sight to see when a customer has complained about your business and its products or services and shared the complaint on social media for the entire world to see.
But these situations already present themselves as opportunities and that is where you should shift your focus. Real-time social media monitoring will help you identify and resolve all issues in a timely manner before they snowball. Without it, you will most likely not know if and when customers are talking about you and expressing concerns about your products/services.

4. Reach Customers
The most important reason to monitor social media is your customers! Know who’s looking for what right now. Only social media gives you this kind of instant insight into the habits of your best prospects. Ignore it at your own risk.

5. Track your competitors
You cannot work in silos. You need to know what is happening in the world to grow. And you cannot do that alone without tracking the industry and your major competitors! Study the trend and plan your activities accordingly.

6. Manage Multiple Social Media Pages
Some businesses rely on multiple social media networks for their marketing efforts, which can make managing social exponentially a bit difficult. There are many reasons why a company would have multiple social pages (different product lines, teams, locations, etc.), but imagine how much harder it would be to log in to those pages individually. Social media tools like Hootsuite can aggregate the messages sent to all of your profiles and networks in one place, saving you the time and effort needed to manage multiple accounts and do real-time monitoring.

7. Analyze Performance
In order to plan for the future it is crucial to look at the past so you can determine the strategies that worked and the strategies that did not. Social media monitoring tools provide you with data you can use to direct your marketing strategy moving forward. When looking through your data, use the following questions to help make sense of the data:
• Which social networks yield the most optimal results?
• Which demographics are most likely to engage with your content?
• Which types of posts get the most engagement on your social networks? (i.e., images, videos, infographics etc.)
• Why keywords or phrases get the most clicks?

If you want to know more about real-time social media monitoring and the tools that will help your company do this, we recommend that you sign up for our corporate training session. The social media corporate training is always customized and is presented either in live format or through a live webinar. The social media training specifically assist and train your staff on the essential tools that make social media monitoring easy and hassle-free. To learn more about how corporate training can improve your social media service or to book a free consult, please click here.

DMAC is an online academy offering courses and customized corporate training sessions to businesses and individuals seeking to develop or upgrade their social media marketing skills. To learn more about our Social Media Marketing course click here.