The benefits of social media monitoring and listening: part 2

Last week, we covered how a social media listening strategy could provide unparalleled insights into your brand’s reputation. This week, we’re taking a look at two of the biggest benefits of social media monitoring.

#1: You become more useful to your audience

The internet makes browsing easy, and most of your audience will do their research before engaging with you. When they do decide to take the plunge and reach out, they go from window shopping online to communicating with an actual person – that’s a huge leap in your relationship!

Sprout Social found that 35 percent of people would prefer to reach out to brands for customer care through social media. That’s more than live chat, email, and 1-800 numbers. Why not meet them halfway? Show them you’re online by maintaining an active social media presence (both publishing and responding to inbound messages) – that way, they’ll know you’re available to chat on their platform of choice when they need you.

It isn’t enough to just respond. Research shows that about 90 percent of messages to brands go unanswered and those that are answered usually exceed the audience’s expected wait time. Improving your response time would put you miles ahead of most competitors and help build your brand – another reason why you need to be consistent with your monitoring efforts.

However, don’t just be approachable – be useful! Google found that connecting with audiences’ passions and interests is one of the most important factors in running successful advertising campaigns. The same can be said with your organic efforts. That doesn’t happen by accident. You need a solid strategy to be this in tune with your audience.

#2: You receive free, relevant feedback

Actively monitoring, listening and communicating on social media is one of the best ways to get insight into how people genuinely feel about your brand.

It’s tough to hear negative feedback and not get a little defensive, after all, it’s your brand, your company, your baby! A few hard truths can set your brand free, but it can also hurt if you don’t have the right strategy to deal with it.

One of the best practices of good online listening is to reflect on the types of conversations you are having. However, if you’re monitoring your social channels by yourself, you’re probably continually bombarded with all kinds of information, which can make analysis hard. A wealth of information can quickly turn into a sizeable headache. If you don’t know which stats really matter, how can you accurately measure your success?

If your social media publishing platform allows for it, a good strategy is to start tagging your inbound messages with things like sentiment and types of messages received (questions, complaints, etc.). This will help you analyze the quality of the conversations you are having online and refocus your measurement strategy to be more outcomes based.

If all of this seems a little out of reach, consider using a social media monitoring service, like Sprout Social, to better manage and analyze your social efforts or hire someone with fresh eyes to handle this for you. If you need extra help, get in touch with us.

Next week, we will wrap up this series on social media monitoring and listening by sharing the last three and most important benefits our clients realize when we help them develop a social media strategy.

Can you say bottom line impact?