Social media monitoring has been around for a while, but especially in 2015 is becoming more and more common place for agencies and businesses. Whether categorized as customer service, research or prospecting, listening to conversations online can help answer impactful questions about your company, like:
- Are there problems with our brand’s reputation we weren’t aware of?
- Who could we encourage to be a brand ambassador?
- What causes spikes in positive or negative sentiment around brand terms? How does our marketing activity (email & social) impact traffic and sentiment?
- Where are people talking about your brand? Are we paying attention in the social media channels where we’re mentioned most often?
- How does the volume of conversation change over time and what impacts it? Are there specific days or times of the year when there is an increase?
- What else do people talk about when they mention our brand? Who and how should we partner with other organizations?
What caused a spike in positive and total mentions of KC BBQ on October 16th?
There is a strong positive correlation between emails and social posts we instigate and chatter about our brand online.
Most businesses know they should be listening online, but few have the time, or really know how or what to look for to impact their brand.
Where to start when monitoring your brand in social media and online:
- Brand name: Be searching for mentions of your own company or brand name, and any possible variations, including abbreviations or acronyms.
- Slogan or common phrase associated with your brand (if it’s commonly known)
- If you’re doing a lot of traditional advertising, you might want to monitor your brand name and the word “ad.” You can learn a lot about what people think about certain ads, and see where you’re getting the most traction.
- People associated with your brand, i.e. spokespeople, executives, and board members.
- Popular or key products or product lines. Find your share of voice within your industry. For a report that will perk up any C-suite’s ears, report on how it compares to your sales numbers and share of market dollars.
- Affiliations and partners, i.e. major events or charities.
- Hashtags that your brand uses, or people may use when mentioning your product.
- Current promotions or campaigns, and the language around them.
Once set up, the challenge that many companies have is that they don’t check on their results regularly, or do anything to act on them.
Social Media Monitoring is like a garden; you have to constantly tend to it, or it can become full of weeds, and the beauty (usefulness in this case) will be gone. If it’s hard to find time, take just 15 minutes each week to dig in, and look for red flags.
A few red flags to look for in your Brand Monitoring reports:
- Any gradual or sudden changes in sentiment and be ready to find out what caused them
- Spikes or dips in total mentions of your brand or conversation about your topic area, specifically noting what sites are seeing fluctuations in activity.
- Find what common phrases are “cluttering up” your monitoring. Find those words that are most likely to mean a comment is irrelevant and add exclusions to your search queries to keep noise out, and your data as relevant as possible to your brand.
Also, reevaluate the topics you’re monitoring about 4 times a year, to make sure they are still relevant and reporting accurate data. Conversations, channels and sentiment constantly shift online. What used to be a perfect query could now be getting a lot of noise.
Thinking about getting started but still not sure where to dive in? Chat with one of our monitoring pros! Reach out to [email protected].
Source: spiral16.com
