The key to making the most out of social media for your brand is listening to what your audience is saying, breaking this down and developing strategies based on actionable insights. Doing this may be tricky, but will help to drive business growth, get a better ROI and truly leverage the power of social media marketing for your brand or business.
There are plenty of tools on the market that allow brands to track, listen, monitor and engage with their audiences, but finding the right one that works best for your business is never easy. That’s why we’ve put together this list of features to look for and identify when selecting a social media monitoring tool.
1. Online Reputation Management
Tracking the volume and size of conversation relating to your brand is easy enough using free tools available online. However, identifying whether or not that conversation is good or bad for your brand is not as easy, yet essential. Social media monitoring tools that include reputation management features allow you to understand the sentiment (good, bad, neutral) of the conversation happening around your brand, which can be extremely valuable to unlocking success or finding your strategic weak areas.
2. Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring has become a complicated process, considering the bulk and variety of social traffic across different platforms. The most appropriate social media monitoring tool will allow you to monitor and track the conversation across different countries, languages, dialects and networks. Furthermore, it will help you to monitor conversations about your brand in real-time, filter it appropriately and provide historical backlogs of information to give you all the data you may need to access.
3. Social Media Listening Tools
Tracking conversation specifically about your brand is definitely important (especially when measuring the success of your campaign) but it’s also just as important to be able to capture the conversation happening around your brand as well as industry trends. A good social listening tool allows you to see your brand’s performance against competitors or its relevance in the market based on risk profile, sentiment and share-of-voice.
4. Social Media Analysis
Social media metrics come in a variety of different shapes, sizes and formats. Finding what works best for your brand is key. From volume to share-of-voice/engagement, audience analysis, credibility, reach, opportunities-to-see, reputation and influencer profiling are all areas in which having in-depth analysis tools are useful. Customisable dashboards that update in real-time are vital for consistent success and will help to keep you on top of the areas that require your attention the most. It’s also advisable to choose a partner that can help you digest this detailed analysis and help to draw insights and develop actionable tactics from it.
5. Engagement tracking
While monitoring, listening and analysing social media data is becoming incredibly thorough and intricate, being able to develop these insights into actionable tasks that can be applied quickly and effectively is trickier. This is why it may be important to select a tool that allows you to integrate social media listening and monitoring with direct engagement tools to allow analytics, community management and content strategy to work hand-in-hand.
6. News Monitoring Tools
Keeping up-to-date with conversation, news and updates around your brand or industry is also an important part of online reputation management. Being the first-to-know developments that affect your brand is crucial to ensuring your campaigns and communities thrive. A good news monitoring tool will allow you to receive threshold alerts delivered via email and SMS immediately on areas of concern, including strong sentiment, particular types of content and influential authors.
7. 360 Degree Media Monitoring
With more brands and companies investing larger budgets into their digital media spend yearly, it is important to select a tool that is able to offer a full 360 degree view of spend, earned/owned media, AVE and ROI on your marketing campaigns in order to know whether your investments are really making the impact they should be. While most tools only specialise in social media, DataEQ offers a 360 degree view on your brand’s digital marketing efforts which gives it an important advantage over other tools.
In summary, there are multiple features that are important to look out for when selecting the right social media monitoring tool for your brand or business. Each feature will assist your marketing strategies in different ways, which is why it is vital to first understand what exactly it is you want to achieve from social media and then find the best way to accomplish it effectively.
Listening to your audience is becoming an increasingly intricate, yet vital task to succeed, as is tracking relevant topics and conversations. As the world’s first crowd integrated media intelligence platform, DataEQ enables effective media monitoring and online reputation management by providing clients with real time data insights and accurate, sentiment-driven media analytics.