Honestly speaking, social media monitoring strategy wasn’t even a word a decade ago. But it has all changed now!
Today, brands of all sizes know what social media monitoring is. And some even use tools to track social media engagement.
But why? They probably know the importance of having a social media monitoring strategy in place and the benefits that come along with it! In fact, 7 out of 10 clients of ours understand the importance of social media monitoring and use our social monitoring tool.
They say it helps them to track their social engagement and grow their brand better with the right kind of insights they need.
So, if you’re reading this, you’re probably in the initial stages of setting up social media monitoring for your business. But before that, you want to know the reasons why you need a social media monitoring strategy!
This read is all you’re going to need! Right from what social media monitoring is to why you need a social media monitoring strategy, we’ve covered everything here!
So, let’s get started, shall we?
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
“Social media monitoring is the process of watching and keeping track of online conversations about a specific brand or a campaign for a set period.”
Generally, social media monitoring gives you more of a bird’s eye view of what people are talking about your brand, even on posts without mentions. This helps you deal with PR crisis scenarios proactively and track brand influencers as well! You also get to understand metrics like customer sentiment, conversation volume, your brand value and even campaign performance metrics.
Simply said, social media monitoring gives you an idea about what customers are saying about your brand every day. And you can carry out daily activities like decision making and responding to mentions & queries based on the insights you get.
P.S. There’s this confusion that has been prevailing for a long time – social media monitoring vs social listening. If you need better clarification on this, check this read out!
Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring
With the basics discussed, let’s head to the part where you get to know the benefits of having a social media monitoring strategy for your brand!
Why You Should Have a Social Monitoring Strategy for Your Business?
Before we look at the benefits of social media monitoring, it’s important that you understand what a social media monitoring strategy is!
A social media monitoring strategy is the action plan you create to monitor social conversations and respond to brand mentions & customer queries.
Building an ideal social media monitoring strategy involves steps like,
Deciding on what to monitor – brand name, possible brand name variations including common misspellings, specific brand & campaign hashtags, mentions comments, reviews, direct messages and more.
Choosing whether you want to monitor your C-suite level executives.
What social media monitoring tool to use.
What do you want to discover with the social media tracking tool – Brand & Industry trends, influencers, pain points, customer feedback, and more.
Deciding on what to do with the insights – if it’s a pain point, forward it to the R&D team. If it’s a complaint, let the support team handle it, etc.
Deciding to what extent you want to monitor your competitors – whether it’s the entire metrics again or or specific metrics alone.
We’ll tell you how to create the perfect social media monitoring strategy for your brand in a separate read. For now, let’s head to what we’ve been waiting for – the first benefit of having a social media monitoring strategy!
1. Overall Brand Health & Insights
Remember the bird’s eye view we were talking about? This is just that!
Social media monitoring can help you understand,
Where does your brand stand in the mind of the audience?
How do people perceive your brand?
What is the overall sentiment of your brand among the audience?
Apart from this, you also get to know your campaign performance, the data of the social media mentions like impressions, customer sentiment and more.
Understanding what your brand on the whole looks like is the first step to take greater business decisions. Having a proper social media monitoring strategy can help you achieve this!
2. Know More About Your Competitors and Industry
Not many say this but having a strong competitor is good for your business growth. They tell you what to do and how to go about most of the time!
All you have to do is, watch them, learn from them and implement the same for your business. And with social media monitoring, the job just gets easier.
You can easily track your competitor’s social media mentions and understand what customers are saying about them – the good/bad comments, the complaints, what customers like the most about your competitors, what makes them so loyal and more!
When you jot down a few points like what we’ve mentioned and monitor them constantly, you’ll get a whole new perspective on what you should be doing for your business growth!
A good social media monitoring tool comes with the competitor analysis tool as a part of it, making the monitoring part easy for you!
Here’s an example where a customer reaches out to Coca-Cola asking for caffeine-free regular coke
If a competitor brand takes a look at this, they can have this as a starting point and conduct surveys with their customers to find out whether they need one such product as well! And the product locator tool, they can think about coming up with a similar one – a version that works fine!
That’s how powerful competitor analysis can be – helps you gain new insights for your business growth.
P.S. Letting our imaginations run free, wouldn’t it be great if Pepsi stepped up here and replied to Anthony saying maybe he should switch to Pepsi instead! Just saying!
3. Helps With Reputation & Crisis Management Scenarios
As a brand, the last thing you want to happen is your online reputation being sabotaged! In today’s world, a bad reputation can get carried away so quickly and your brand can get the 
reaction in no time.
To prevent such things from happening, you need a social media monitoring strategy in place!
Constant monitoring of what people write about your brand can help you identify the good & bad stuff and provide real-time support. If it’s a good comment, thank them personally and make them feel special.
If it’s a bad comment or a possible reputation tarnishing complaint, respond as quickly as possible and try fixing the problem.
Remember that you’ve got a lot of eyeballs watching your brand and everything you do makes an impact on how people perceive your brand.
We love how Pizza Hut handles this! Here’s an example where a twitter user says something about Pizza Hut without tagging the brand.
Normally, it would be practically impossible for a brand to monitor untagged tweets like this. But with social media monitoring, they actually can. And Pizza Hut exactly did this!
They replied to the tweet in their own way. And a couple of other users also replied to the same tweet which Pizza Hut constantly monitored and replied to most of the tweets.
You can even take a look at this thread yourself to know more!
Every time they get a message of concern, the support team reaches out quickly and makes sure that the issue isn’t further blown up – tagged or untagged, it doesn’t matter for Pizza Hut (most of the time at least)!
Here’s an example where Pizza Hut is replying to a tagged customer complaint tweet!
Every time they get a message of concern, the support team reaches out quickly and makes sure that the issue isn’t further blown up – tagged or untagged, it doesn’t matter for Pizza Hut (most of the time at least)!
Here are examples where Pizza Hut is replying to a tagged customer complaint tweet!
Today, social media monitoring tools are quite advanced and come with the option to escalate queries based on the nature of the issues. You can even set custom alerts for the same – helps resolve issues on time!
Without having an effective social media monitoring strategy, brands can miss out on positive user content just because people are misspelling their names or complaints where users are not tagging them.
The opportunity lost here is huge!
Now that you know how a social media monitoring strategy helps manage your online reputation, let’s look at the next reason/benefit!
4. Find Influencers & Brand Advocates for Your Brand
Influencers are people who have a significant audience following and whose opinions are valued in their industry (at least by the following audience). When an influencer talks or promotes your brand on their social media handles, your brand gets recognition and traffic flows in eventually.
Most of the time, brands reach out to certain influencers asking them to promote their products/services and offer them incentives. This helps brands drive traffic from a completely new potential source.
So what part does a social media monitoring tool play here? We’ll tell you that!
Sometimes, micro or nano influencers (people who have a relatively low audience base) tweet about products they’ve recently purchased or used on their social media handles. It’s these posts and mentions that your social media monitoring tool identifies and allows you to capitalize.
Say for example, a comedian with a significant audience base is a tech enthusiast and loves listening to music.
He often tweets about music in general. This time, he tweets about speakers he purchased, talks about the amazing clarity in sound and how much he is enjoying it. He tags the speaker’s brand and the brand gets some visibility.
With social monitoring in place for industry based keywords like “Sound Quality”, a headphone brand in the same space easily gets to know about this. They analyze his profile and plans for later collaborations.
They deliver a new pair of headphones to the comedian during their product launch and he is surprised by the gift and later shares it on his YouTube and other social media handles. More awareness for the brand!
Social Monitoring tools also help in identifying top fans for your accounts, people who engage with your brand’s content on a regular basis. These people can be nurtured to become your brand advocates.
Sounds cool, right?
The social media monitoring tool eliminates manual work by identifying advocates automatically. You just have to analyze and make decisions!
5. Identify Trends & New Ideas for Content
Creating fresh content based on trends is important. And there’s no business/brand that would argue against this!
But often, businesses get stuck not knowing what to write! And without fresh content, brands lose the traction they need to keep their audience engaged.
You know what we’re going to say next – social media monitoring can help you with this!
When you start monitoring your industry, your competitors and a couple of other related topics, you’ll have fresh content ideas to start with in no time!
The more refined your search is, the better content ideas you get. Always try to create content calendars based on data and thorough research – helps you stay with the trend and perform better.
With a social media monitoring tool, you can monitor specific competitors, keywords, topics and more.
6. Lead Generation Opportunities
Let’s just say that this is an uncracked benefit of social media monitoring. An effective social media monitoring strategy not only does the above-mentioned but can also generate leads for your business!
Here are a couple of ways how you can do this,
Track your competitors and find out if there are any unsatisfied customers out there. Reach out to them and introduce your business. Who knows? They could turn out to be a loyal customer for you!
Look for people who ask questions and advice on social comments. You can offer them solutions and start building relationships.
Find people who interact with your social posts. See if there are opportunities for conversions.
Don’t just stop with Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Start looking on YouTube, Google and more.
Fresh leads are one of the most important factors that keep your business afloat. If social media monitoring can help you get that, why miss it? We don’t! Hope you won’t as well!
So, yes! Those are the six reasons why you should have a social media monitoring strategy in place! The benefits that come along is something you cannot afford to miss, especially in today’s competitive landscape!
But wait! How do you do all this? Yes! With a social media monitoring tool! We’ve been talking about social monitoring tools for some time now. So, here’s a suggestion for that as well!
Tools for Effective Social Media Monitoring
What’s the best social media monitoring tool?
The answer is obvious! It’s us! Okay, on a serious note, there’s nothing called the best social media monitoring tool.
It all depends on why you need a social monitoring tool and what features you expect out of the tool. Based on that (and a few other factors like pricing, reliability, etc), you end up choosing a tool for your business.
When it comes to Simplify360, it is an ideal social media monitoring platform that helps you with all the above-mentioned use cases seamlessly.
Simplify360’s social media monitoring suite comes with even more advanced features like,
Monitoring brand name, product names, hashtags and keywords
Monitoring mentions, reviews, comments and direct messages
Collecting and displaying reviews across all social platforms
Competitor performance with direct comparison to your social channels
Automated responses for customer feedback & complaints and more
You get a 30-day free trial and a 1-1 personalized demo session to help you know the tool better!
If you need more options choosing a social media monitoring tool, we’ve got that covered as well!
This read can help you out!
👉7 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools You Should Consider Using
The Bottom Line
Social media monitoring is an essential part of good social customer service. And it’s only the bits & pieces that make the big picture come out well and look great!
Today, having a social media monitoring strategy can help you stay alert and act on time to prevent unfortunate scenarios. Also, you get to discover loads of useful insights that can help grow your business and brand awareness at the same time!
Okay! Enough talk!
Now that you know the benefits of having a social media monitoring strategy in place (and a tool to monitor as well), it’s time you create one and start monitoring your social channels!
Also, feel free to post your questions in the comments section! We’re super happy to help you out!