Online marketing is all about actions and reactions. Listening to your audience and responding to their needs is the key to success. With proper and well-planned monitoring, you can obtain data that will help you create relevant content, monitor industry trends, analyze whether your actions are working, and ultimately improve your strategy.
However, finding information that interests you in the social media universe can be a big challenge. Below we present the steps you should follow so you don't get lost in the process.
1: Set the objectives.
Before you start monitoring social media, you need to ask yourself what you really need to know. Define specific objectives: what data you want to find, what platforms you want to study, why you are interested in them, and what value they will have for your business.
You can focus on analyzing conversations about your brand or online opinions, observe the actions of your competitors, identify new trends in the industry, analyze the performance gambling data taiwan phone number of campaigns or detect a potential crisis. You are not going to measure everything in the same way; you have to establish a personalized search strategy for each objective. To find data about your business, you can focus monitoring on searches by the brand name, its possible variations and errors, or with hashtags and campaign slogans. To observe the competition and identify trends, you should focus on keywords or hashtags frequently used in the industry. The key is to keep testing and improving, since there is no universal formula.
2: Choosing the tools
Once you've decided what data you want to find, it's time to choose how to measure it. Choose a monitoring tool to make the task easier. There are a wide variety of programs on the market, from free and simple ones to more complex and expensive ones. Determine how much you are willing to spend, analyze the available options and choose the one that best fits your budget and can meet your needs.
If you don't know where to start, here are three tools that can be adjusted to different budgets and objectives:
Brandwatch : This is a fairly expensive tool and one of the most complex options on the market. Brandwatch offers products not only for monitoring millions of conversations across the web, but also for monitoring the data. With HelioSight, its rapid social media analysis program, you can obtain personalized insights in real time about your sector, brand, campaigns, competition, etc. All data can be exported as visual reports.
Hootsuite – One of the most popular social media monitoring tools. It allows you to monitor conversations about a brand easily and in an organized way: you can create custom columns that monitor the chosen data, filter them by keywords or geographic locations. If you work with a team, Hootsuite also offers a system for approving responses and assigning tasks to different members.
Alto Data Analytics : This paid real-time big data analysis tool has a human factor. It provides the client with a team of data analysts and linguists who manually study the conversations that appear on different social networks around a brand. Its goal is to reduce the gap between users and the information they seek, which is why it makes it easier to understand each piece of data by offering personalized insights from experts.
3: Look for insights.
The data you find on the networks will not be relevant if you do not interpret it in the context of your business. You must analyze it in detail and look for opportunities for the future. To start, you can focus on some of these results:
Feedback and opinions : Users are the best source of information about any business and the products and services you offer. With monitoring, you can see if they speak well or badly of your brand, since the insights are part of real customer conversations. Being aware of your reputation helps you find the elements that need to be improved.
Questions : Pay attention to recurring questions you receive about specific topics related to your business or industry. Join the conversation, react in real time, and engage with your audience to build trust. Take advantage of opportunities to get inspired and create valuable content that clarifies questions.
Pain points : Conversations that occur online are not under your control, but they are very important for your online reputation. By monitoring, you can identify crisis moments before they break out. If you notice that many customers have similar problems or complaints about the same topic, you can resolve the issue before it is too late.
Trends : Monitoring popular topics gives you the opportunity to create real-time marketing actions before your competition takes advantage. Staying on top of market trends can serve as inspiration and help you deliver useful and relevant content to your audience.
Influencers and brand advocates : Listen to conversations to find the most important voices and know who to contact for different marketing actions. With monitoring, you can discover brand advocates who support you through word of mouth and influencers who fit your business.
As you can see, there are multiple tools and different approaches that can be applied when creating a social media monitoring strategy. Having clear objectives, metrics and tools is the basis, but you must not forget to dedicate time to optimizing the plan and analyzing the data. Only with a good analysis will you be able to know what to do, what not to do and how to improve to get the most out of online marketing.
