Why You Need a Social Monitoring Strategy
November 17, 2021
Social monitoring is an important part of social media management.
Most forms of digital marketing are one-way streets. Whether it’s video advertising, a Google Ad or a blog, it’s about getting information out. Social media marketing, on the other hand, is a two-way street.
If your social media management strategy consists only of creating posts or tweets, you’re missing a huge piece of the puzzle. Even if you’re posting regularly, there’s nothing more important than engaging with your followers, because it encourages them to keep engaging with you!
Social media monitoring helps you stay on top of engagement because it involves keeping a close eye on every mention of your brand on social media, as well as responding to the engagement generated around those mentions.
Social monitoring is similar to social listening — as both involve keeping a close eye on brand mentions — but with one key difference. Social listening involves looking at trends in brand mentions in order to make more informed marketing decisions; whereas, social monitoring involves responding to and creating engagement around mentions.
Both social listening and social monitoring are important and can be beneficial for your brand.
The benefits of social media monitoring
#1. Take advantage of user-generated content
Posting regularly may not be the only thing you have to do to create an effective social media marketing strategy, but it’s still important. But sometimes, posting regularly can be difficult to do. After all, you’re probably quite busy running your small business; it’s not as if you have an endless amount of time to create posts.
Reposting user-generated content is a great way to ensure that you’re posting regularly and engaging with social media users who are mentioning your brand.
By monitoring your social media mentions, you’ll always be in the know about user-generated content that you could repost and reuse across your social channels.
#2. Respond to complaints and negative reviews
Thanks to years of having to wait on hold for customer service representatives, most people prefer to make complaints on social media than to call a business. This has led social media to become the new hub of customer service for businesses. Unfortunately, this means that complaints and negative experiences are displayed for the world to see, but it also means that you can respond in a public way.
The way a business responds to a complaint or a negative review online has the potential to turn a bad situation around completely. Of course, there’s also a wrong way to respond, and that can further hurt your business’ standing on social media. But, if you respond the right way, you can build customer loyalty and trust.
Social monitoring will help you stay in the know about any new negative reviews or customer complaints. It’s not only important to respond appropriately. You also want to respond promptly, and social media monitoring will help you do so.
#3. Generate, nurture and follow up on leads
Social media monitoring will allow you to stay on top of it any time someone mentions your product online, whether they’re asking questions about it or talking about how they want to purchase it. Social monitoring will allow you to respond right away and promptly nurture your leads on social media.
You can also use social media monitoring to keep an eye out for people looking for similar products to yours or searching for relevant keywords, as well as to be in the know about any complaints or negative mentions of your competitors. Immediately engaging with these people will help to give you a leg up on the competition, and social media monitoring will make it possible.
Most businesses recognize that social media is a powerful tool for building brand recognition and building relationships with current customers, but few recognize its power in generating leads. That’s why it’s a great time to develop this kind of social monitoring strategy; there’s relatively little competition at the moment.
#4. Build links to your website
In an ideal world, every time someone mentions your brand online, they’d also include a link to your website. However, that’s not the reality of the situation, and you’ll find that a lot of brand mentions are linkless. Social media monitoring will help you stay in the know about linkless mentions so that you can respond with a link to your website and an invitation to learn more.
You can apply this same kind of monitoring strategy you use on social media across the web. Link building is one of the key aspects of search engine optimization (SEO), along with keyword research and content, and social media is an effective way to start building more links.
#5. Identify micro-influencers
When most people think of social media influencers, they think of big, flashy brands and expensive products, but the truth is that social influencer marketing can benefit most businesses.
Small businesses probably don’t have much of a shot at working with the biggest social influencers, but not to worry, because research has found that micro-influencers are actually much more effective at establishing trust in a brand and connecting with its target audience.
Social media monitoring will help you find these micro-influencers within your industry as soon as they start emerging. Identifying is the first step. The second is to start working with them to promote your brand.
Regular posting, generating engagement, social monitoring and responding are all important aspects of an effective social media management strategy. There’s no doubt about it; social media can be a lot of work and incredibly time-consuming. If you’re looking to build an unstoppable social media presence for your brand while saving time and energy, turn to Marketing 360®.
Learn more about what our social media team can do for you.
Originally published on 2/25/20
Get Plans and Pricing Below
Get the know-how to get ahead
Get business, marketing and sales tips written by experienced industry practitioners. 100% free. Cancel anytime.