As more and more businesses are becoming aware of the value in understanding their audience’s social footprint, the increase in research into what exactly social media monitoring can offer has subsequently grown. What exactly can social media monitoring do for your business? There’s an endless list of how and where insights can be extracted, but here’s the top areas that will create the most impactful results.
Identify Trends
Coming back to the word ‘impactful,’ trend identification done well will ensure you create content that resonates with your audience that’s also impactful enough to make them take action. With a social media monitoring platform you can identify emerging trends by consolidating data across the social web on your industry and being notified of any emerging keyword terms that are gaining traction. With features such as ‘clusters’ any topic areas of growth or emerging trends within your industry will be automatically detected by algorithms. If you react quickly enough with timely content, you’ll see your engagement levels soar as well as gain an edge on your competitors who don’t have their ear to the ground.
Influencers
This year, influencer marketing is predicted to see large-scale growth as more brands become, not only receptive to the idea, but educated on how a successful influencer marketing strategy can aid business growth. Social media monitoring comes into the fray at the initial discovery phase with the ability to identify who the right influencer(s) are for your business. Furthermore, monitoring software takes a holistic approach to influencer marketing, making it possible for you to monitor the successfulness of your influencers using key metrics such as reach, impressions, likes, comments etc.
Influencer identification from within Linkfluence’s Radarly Platform
Don’t neglect micro-influencers either – across the board they drive a higher engagement rate due to their perceived authenticity, due to their lower follower volumes.
Competitors
We’ve already touched on stealing a march on your competitors with content and trend identification, but here’s a few more gems to wet the appetite.
Yesterday’s news is today’s fish and chips paper. Social media monitoring provides real-time intelligence on your competitors so that you can react in real-time. Create a feed from within your platform that updates instantaneously as your competitors push out posts and run campaigns, meaning you don’t miss a trick. Or leverage an idea they’re promoting and use your superior social data intelligence to create something better.
Offer solutions to competitor’s disgruntled customers. You could spend hours trying to unearth posts like the one below; once the issue’s been resolved, the opportunity is gone. From your competitor’s feed within your monitoring tool you can track mentions of their brand, handles, keywords etc and apply a negative sentiment filter to the posts. Jump on the problem before they do and you’ve just generated yourself a lead with a need, my friend.
Lastly, understanding what your competitors are saying throughout the social web and the intricacies of their footprint will also give you an overview of their positioning within your market. Once you paint a picture of their brand and tactics you can easily identify gaps in positioning, or weaknesses in their strategy where you can exploit penetrable customer segments with your marketing.
There you have it, a top 3 in how to add value to your business using social media monitoring. If you’d like to know more about how social media monitoring can help your business understand its audience, discover more about functionality here.
About the Author: James Waite is the UK Marketing Manager at Linkfluence