Monitoring social media

With the exponential growth in social media, customers and consumers have the ability to communicate like never before. They also have the opportunity to judge your brand based upon what others are saying – and when word-of-mouth continues to mean so much, knowing what people are saying about your business is crucial.

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What is social media monitoring?

While many businesses are reaping the rewards of engaging with customers via social media networking, there is a flipside. Imagine if someone, in some way, was unhappy with your services and made it their mission to tell every one of their Facebook friends about it. How damaging would that be to your brand’s integrity?

Of course, the benefits of social media monitoring don’t just extend to correcting negative comments. If you can see that people are raving about a particular aspect of your business, you also have the opportunity to expand on this aspect and give your clients what they really want.

Fundamentally, monitoring social media means keeping an eye out to see where your brand pops up in social networking platforms. From scanning Twitter and Google alerts to see where your brand name pops up, to setting up targeted RSS feeds, using a few free online tools can help you ensure your business’s reputation stays intact online and help you create a closer connection with your customers.

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Why is monitoring social media important?

Monitoring social media and your business's online presence is incredibly important – not least because doing so gives you the opportunity to understand how people view your company. Social media monitoring also allows you to get involved and respond to people talking about your brand. That means if there is negative talk about your business, you can jump right in and assure your existing and prospective clients that you are willing to improve your products and services where needed.

It also means you have the ability to see genuine comments from clients about what they really think of your business – giving you the opportunity to evolve to meet the real needs of existing and prospective customers.

If you combine your social media marketing strategy with social media monitoring, you also have a better chance of fostering a greater online relationship with social media users by responding quickly to their comments and questions in a medium they are most at home in.

Some business owners have concerns that monitoring social media may prove too time consuming – after all, the Internet is a vast forum. But if you get the basics right, your social media monitoring strategy can take just a few minutes of your time each day. Setting a few tools in place and getting into the routine of checking them each morning before you start the day can prove invaluable for your business. If this all still seems to be too much of a detour from your everyday work, employ the services of a social marketing consultant who can do the necessary work for you.

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How can I monitor social media?

There are a range of great tools available online to make monitoring social media even easier. Some are free and some come with a subscription price, but doing a little research online and finding out what your peers are having success with will point you in the direction of a few you’ll find useful.

Setting up and scanning Google Alerts for your company name, your products, and even the names of your key executives can prove extremely helpful and should be your first point of call.

Doing this is easy – all you have to do is enter your search terms and then opt to receive updates, either as they happen or daily. The biggest advantage of this is that as soon as people blog about your products or your brand name pops up in the news, an alert will be sent right to your inbox so you can check it out and respond right away.

With the enormous growth of Twitter, keeping an eye on Tweets for buzz about your brand is equally important. That doesn’t mean you have to park yourself on Twitter all day – simply utilise tools such as TweetDeck or Twitter Search to monitor conversations about your company. You can also set up an RSS feed for a specific Twitter Search to go straight to your Google Reader – just click the RSS icon after you complete a search.

If your company has a Facebook Page, you can check the statistics on this and see if any new discussions have been started. Alternatively, you can use Google Reader to check Flickr, Delicious, Digg and other similar websites.