Social Media Monitoring Software
Social media monitoring software provides businesses and marketers the ability to listen, track, and collect relevant content across various social media platforms. These monitoring tools are generally used by marketing teams, communications specialists, and social media managers to find and identify useful trends, keep track of the competition, as well as figure out the consensus of their target market, as far as customer satisfaction and overall sentiments are concerned.
Social media monitoring tools can also be used in marketing research to help find useful information faster and more efficiently, especially when it comes to social trends. Media outlets may also use such products to facilitate the gathering of breaking news.
Social media monitoring software enables marketers to easily personalize content to specific demographics or a particular group of social media users. It can help them clearly identify what is referred to as social media influencers or thought leaders. These products may also be used to help companies respond more effectively whenever their brand/product is mentioned on social media posts, regardless of whether it’s in a positive or negative context.
The majority of these social media monitoring products support multiple languages, which means they can track and monitor posts in various languages across different countries. Such capabilities will also allow brands to localize their marketing campaigns, strategies, and advertisements. Moreover, these tools are capable of providing demographic data, they can help marketers engage users more effectively, get a better understanding of social media presence, and improve a brand’s reputation across the vast social media landscape.
Rival IQ is a powerful social media monitoring tool that enables its users to track social trends and their competition. Rival IQ helps marketers identify the best performing content, what drives engagement and improve their posting schedule based on time/impact metrics.
Social media monitoring is a process of listening and keeping track of the goings-on in the social media landscape, specifically information related to your business and/or industry. Social media monitoring software can help you gather all the relevant data you need for an effective marketing campaign.
A good way to use these types of products is for when you want to monitor brand mentions, particularly whenever social media users mentions your brand, with or without direct tagging. Whether it’s a positive or negative mention, it’s important to the marketing process of any business to figure out how many people are actively talking about their brand and/or product, and how often.
Say you’ve found out that there’s very little mention regarding your brand on Facebook, for example. With that information, you can come up with a target marketing campaign that promotes your brand and increases visibility on the said social network. Perhaps you can use specific hashtags that relate to your brand and/or product. This will greatly improve your social media presence and your relevance as a company when it comes to your target audience.
Speaking of hashtags, social media monitoring software is also a great tool for identifying relevant hashtags, branded or otherwise. Hashtags group similar content together, making it easier for people to get the information they want in one location. The problem for marketers is figuring out which hashtags are currently popular and widely used.
If there are around two million posts that contain the hashtag #justdoit, for example, you can assume the majority of those posts are talking about the Nike brand, given that it’s their slogan. This can help push the brand up the trending list. If your brand is at the bottom end of the list, using social media monitoring tools to find relevant hashtags will certainly help improve customer engagement as well as brand visibility.
Social media monitoring software solutions may also help marketers monitor social media mentions of competitors and general trends that apply to their specific industry.
Many different social media monitoring software solutions are available, including Rival IQ, Brand24, and CrowdTangle. These three examples have their own strengths and weaknesses when it comes to available features, capabilities, pricing, and so on. CrowdTangle, for instance, is a great tool for monitoring news content in social media. It can help users gather relevant news based on specific keywords and mentions.
Brand24 is equipped with a wide range of features like the mentions feed, which allows for faster interactions and engagement through an organized stream of brand mentions. There’s also a discussion volume chart, which enables you to get a better view of how much people are talking about your brand. This will allow you to quickly spot abrupt changes in the discussion volume of your brand, helping to protect your company’s image. It will also help identify potential problems before they escalate, thus maximize the potential for positive publicity.
Data exploring, alerts, and filtering capabilities are the remaining key features of Brand24. These will help you refine your social media monitoring process by gathering only relevant data, receiving all the necessary notifications, and maintaining focus on what is more crucial to your business.
Of the three examples of social media monitoring software, Rival IQ can be considered the most comprehensive. Rival IQ is ideal for businesses in highly competitive markets, as it provides complete competitive analysis, alerts and insights, hashtag analytics, and social listening capabilities. Competitive benchmarking allows brands to keep a close eye on the performance of competitors, thus helping them to develop context and measure their own social success.
Rival IQ provides machine learning capabilities for boosted post detection. If a competitor boosts a Facebook post, for example, the software will be able to show you this action so you can react appropriately. You may even copy the strategy they have employed if it’s proven to be successful. The platform also supports all major channels, allowing you to compare every like, share, comment, and post from all major social networks in one location, including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
Regardless of what kind of social media monitoring software you’re using, there are a number of benefits that such tools can provide when it comes to social media visibility, brand awareness, customer engagement, PR management, and brand marketing as a whole. Here are a few benefits to help you decide whether you should invest in social media monitoring tools:
In a highly competitive market, information is crucial. Social media monitoring tools can help you obtain competitive intelligence, meaning you can effectively monitor your competitors. Simply checking the competition’s website doesn’t really provide you with enough data as to the marketing strategies and PR tactics your competitor is using. Businesses can obtain a wealth of useful competitive intelligence by utilizing social media monitoring tools.
There have been many companies that have fallen behind due to the rapidly changing market and their failure to catch up with competitors. Traditional market research methods just won’t cut it anymore, especially with the prominence of social media. A good social media monitoring solution can supplement traditional market research processes, perhaps even replace it with the right product.
There is certain information that can’t be obtained accurately through traditional market research like surveys, focus groups, and interviews. More often than not, the data collected from these methods are time-constrained, generally selective, and somewhat skewed. The analytics provided by most social media monitoring software is obtained shortly after the information becomes available so you will be able to react and/or change your strategy more efficiently.
Successful marketing, nowadays, means connecting to your audience on a more personal level. The goal is for the brand to become more approachable to its customers, so proper customer service can be provided, which results in higher customer satisfaction. Excellent customer satisfaction breeds loyal customers and brand ambassadors.
Good social media monitoring tools can help businesses get a better understanding of their target audience. And with a good understanding of the customer base comes more effective and personalized marketing strategies. You see, customers today prefer reaching out to brands through social media. Based on a study by Sprout Social, 34.5% of consumers prefer the social media approach for customer care, beating out live chat with 24.7%, email with 19.4%, and voice calls (1-800 numbers) with 16.1%.
The bottom line is social media monitoring software is an extremely useful tool for SMBs, sole entrepreneurs, and marketers in terms of acquiring relevant customer data on various social media platforms. It can help identify trends, competitor strategies and performance, useful viral content, and keep track of how customers feel about your brand.
Businesses can gain marketing and PR benefits, as well as improve their products and/or services, enhance PR and marketing campaigns, collect relevant data through effective market research, and find new leads to convert into customers.
