In this age of increasing business competitiveness, digital marketers would do well to adopt social media monitoring as a daily routine for maintaining marketplace awareness and extracting business intelligence. Far too many businesses fail because they don't know where they are and where they should be heading. With the existing statistics or data from social media analytics at hand, marketers can begin to interpret and take necessary actions for improvement.
Social media monitoring can help digital marketers achieve the following objectives:
1) Generate leads: After you had published a prospecting message, track who respond with interest or inquiring questions and follow up with them. Alternatively, you can search for ongoing chatter which seems to reflect a need for your products or services and take part in them. Keep these questions in mind: What trending topics are they following most closely? Whom do they usually interact with, and why?
2) Re-evaluate your positioning or pitch: Don't be surprised if, through monitoring conversations, you find that there seems to be a mismatch between how you market your products/services and what other people are expecting. Your continual response in these conversations helps them understand how you can serve prospects better and also helps you fine-tune your marketing pitch.
3) Service customers: It used to be that the only customer service channel is one in which customers submit a support ticket through a helpdesk module on the corporate website. Now they can say anything they like on social media. Marketers have no choice but to adapt by bringing "customer service" to these 3rd-party websites, resolving complaints wherever they are and turning negative experiences into positive ones.
The next action point is to create a community page and invite customers to voice out their feedback, complaints or questions in there. At least this page becomes an outlet which you can control as an administrator.
4) Identify core influencers or advocates: Within your customer base, there is probably a core group of satisfied customers who may have already publish recommendations to their connections. Try to identify them from repeat purchase records, given testimonials and your search for 'positive' or endorsing keywords about your products/services, then keep them in an exclusive list of people that you would like to incentivize for their word-of-mouth efforts.
5) Snoop on competitors: Nothing unethical about it. It's just a way of finding out how they are promoting their business online and where they did well so you can emulate their strategies. You can also discover what others say about them.
6) Optimize your marketing efforts: Your social media metrics give you a means of understanding where you should focus your social media marketing efforts to yield better results.
As you can see, with social media monitoring your social profile will no longer be in isolation from your target audience. Your consistent communication with your prospects and customers helps to establish a brand that cares. Companies of all sizes can benefit from making the most of online resources to monitor their reputation.
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