Social media monitoring is more than a new buzzword for a product some techie wants to sell you. It’s a vital reputation management tool that can help you boost your company’s reputation, take advantage of social media marketing opportunities and, frankly, save your business from embarrassment or worse.
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
Today, your online presence extends far beyond posting your catalog or menu online and optimizing it for search engines. Social media tools have given your customers the means and the ability to affect your business’ bottom line in ways that were impossible as little as five years ago. Your customers have blogs, they visit blogs, they comment on blogs. They post reviews about your company on social media sites like Yelp and on review sites like TravelInsider and tweet about their experiences with your business. Just as you used to have to keep your eye out for mentions of your business in the local newspaper, now you have to watch what they’re saying about you online. The problem is, online is a huge place. You could assign two full-time workers to do nothing but look for mentions of your company online and still miss some of the most important messages being posted.
Social media agencies such as Ianalyst.com offer a wide variety of services, including social media monitoring. The companies use specialized software to monitor various social media sites for mentions of your products, your company and your services. In a world where a video review of your product can go viral overnight, social media monitoring gives you early warning about possible controversies and bad publicity and allows you to capitalize on good publicity quickly.
Who Needs Social Media Monitoring?
If you think social media monitoring is only for the big guys, you could be in for a big – and too often unpleasant – surprise. All it takes is a single viral video to cause publicity damage your company may be dealing with for months. A social media marketing agency can monitor Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other social media sites for mentions of your business, give you a heads up about anything negative and help you device a plan to combat it.
Social media monitoring can have positive effects as well – it’s a great way to judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, for example, and can give you an early heads up about ways your customers use your product or service so that you can promote them better. For more information about the benefits of social media monitoring, contact a social media marketing agency.
