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Help Your Brand Stay Informed and Engaged with These Social Media Monitoring Tools
Author: Heather Timmerman Moller
Consumer use of social media is at an all-time high, and where consumers go, smart businesses follow. Nearly half of users report that they utilize social media to discover new brands, with over a third making purchases directly from social media.
As user participation in these platforms grows, so does the volume of information available to help brands create more effective marketing strategies. Due to the virtually instant feedback loop that is built into social media functionality, it has never been easier to tailor your marketing to your desired audience.
Savvy brand strategists know, however, that this level of reach and engagement is a double-edged sword. Social media is where folks go to talk, and they will talk about your brand — the good and the bad. You can’t necessarily control these conversations but it’s critical to be aware of them.
While users can tag your business @mentions or use a brand hashtag to get your attention, what about the chatter that doesn’t pop up in your notifications? It is hard to effectively manage brand reputation when you don’t know what is being said!
The answer to this problem: social media monitoring.
How Social Media Monitoring Works
At its most basic, social media monitoring is a service used to manage social media content and track mentions of your brands, products, relevant keywords and phrases across a number of platforms.
The way the monitoring aspect works is a tool will crawl and index social media platforms and — in some cases — websites on a continuous basis. This data is then compiled and made searchable, enabling users to seek out mentions, discover trends, and address customer concerns.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
To really appreciate the power of social media monitoring services, it helps to look at the capabilities they offer. The specific tools vary among providers, but they do tend to fall into common categories.
Publishing
Publishing content across multiple platforms can be a hassle. Fortunately, one of the abilities social media monitoring services offer is centralized content publishing. This lets you schedule and send your content out to several platforms at once. For example, Khoros has built-in publishing tools that allow you to tailor posts to the individual platform.
Additionally, most social media monitoring services allow for collaboration in their publishing tools, empowering your teams to work together in one space to deliver a consistent content voice and customer experience. The HubSpot integration enables marketers to manage the day-to-day and plan, all from one central location.
Monitoring and Analytics
It’s right there in the name: social media monitoring. This key functionality collects and analyzes content shared across social media platforms and, in some cases, the web. This data is then compiled so it can be analyzed, either through dashboard widgets or specified queries. HootSuite has a powerful monitoring dashboard that shows you what’s trending in key topics, tracks your post performance and brand mentions, and keeps tabs on what your competitors are up to.
The more you know about how your customers are reacting to your brand, the better you can align your marketing strategy. SocialBakers’ analytics tools offer customizable query-based searches that crawl social media platforms and deliver insights into what is happening with your competition, as well as what trends are starting in targeted markets and demographics.
Engagement
Brands want nothing more than to engage with customers one-on-one and create positive experiences that will translate into word-of-mouth marketing and sales. But the volume of mentions, emails, DMs, and comments can seem like a roadblock to that individualized engagement.
Sprout Social has taken a lot of the struggle out of customer engagement with their suite of tools. Their Smart Inbox flows all messages for connected profiles into a single inbox for a faster response time. The Task Assignment tool allows messages to be assigned to specific team members, eliminating confusion and allowing team leaders to track team performance.
This brief overview is only scratching the surface of what social media monitoring can do for your business and for your LinkedIn strategy. Put simply, it’s a way to gain competitive advantage and stay confident that when your brand’s being
Stay in the Loop with Help from LinkedIn Marketing Partners
LinkedIn marketing partners have some of the best social media monitoring platforms in the space, which makes it easy for you to streamline your marketing on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. As noted earlier, the capabilities and tools available will vary from partner to partner, so it is best to know what your business needs are, then take a look at our full list of partners to find the one that’s right for you.
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