Utility of Social Media Monitoring

Social Media Monitoring is defined as the systematic observation and analysis of social media contributions and dialogues in discussion forums, weblogs, microblogging and other social communities. It is a simple concept that can be widely used by brands around the globe to monitor their online activities and track their mentions on the web.

1. Reputation and image management


Here we are talking about the positioning of the brand in the minds of the consumers. By monitoring user’s comments, brand managers can track down the people’s perception about their brand. By analyzing the mentions of your own brand thoroughly, brand managers can diagnose issues related to brand image at early stage and can handle them before they do any damage. Positive mention of the brand should be thanked and negative ones should be resolved and apologized.

2. Campaign Analysis


A brand builds and maintains its image among the audience by running marketing campaigns from time-to-time. Nowadays, a lot of these campaigns are being run on social media and even offline campaigns are widely promoted and talked about on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. Thus, it becomes imperative for marketers to gauge the impact and reach of these campaigns on social media. Marketers can know the number of times a campaign keyword or hashtag has been used, how many people are talking about it and page’s top advocates and influencers of the campaign.

3. Customer service


Lately, with the advent of brand pages on Social media platforms, most of the customer complaints have shifted to them. Visit any company’s social media page and you will find a lot of fans either praising the product/service or complaining about it. Infact, this case is very much evident with the e-commerce companies. Social media monitoring allows the company to gather all the complaints and queries at one place and answer them from the monitoring dashboard itself. This allows the brand to improve their service level and also save on the call centre costs.

4. Competitor Analysis


This platform helps in not only analyzing one’s own brand but also that of your competitors. This helps brands to know and understand the marketing strategies being used by competitors. It becomes easy to plan the course of action once the picture is clear and you know what they are thinking of and trying to do. Brands can use insights from social media monitoring to maintain pace with its counterparts and look out for strategies to surpass them.

5. Industry Analysis


Social media monitoring not only helps in monitoring one’s own brand and that of the competitor but also the overall industry of interest. It helps in understanding the current trends in the industry and the challenges faced by it. One can easily change their marketing plan keeping in mind the current industry trends so as to be relevant to the market.

6. Strategy formulation


When marketing and branding via social media is done there are direct conversations that take place between a brand and the user. In such cases monitoring helps a great deal in understanding their needs by listening and reading to what they have to say about you and your brand. By inserting valuable keywords proper analysis on the target group can be achieved. Once it is understood that what is required only then can it be delivered with quality. Social Media Monitoring is thus helping in framing strategies and then taking the businesses to the next level.

7. Lead Generation


Many companies are using social media monitoring for lead generation. By analysing certain keywords one can find out who all are searching for a product like theirs in the market. Once this is found, companies approach the individual person concerned directly and try to engage him with their brand. Companies have been able to increase their businesses in such a way and have benefitted by this technique abundantly.

8. Monitoring Services For Government, Law Enforcement Agencies

Nowadays with the growth of negative usage of social media, it has become important for government and law enforcement agencies to monitor the activities of anti-social individuals. A complete audience profiling of such individuals can be done and their social media activities can be monitored on a daily basis. One can also find a lot of groups active on Facebook, Twitter lead by organisations which intend to organise protests and bandh/lockdown against the government. Monitoring them can help in pre-empting such moves by these groups.

via SocialAppsHQ Blog http://www.socialappshq.com/blog/2013/11/29/utility-of-social-media-monitoring/