Social Media monitoring, though a growing industry, is a rather complex one since it is supported by a number of tools that are used by organizations to make logical interpretations on almost any data types. The complexity arises because there has been a proliferation of different tools that seek to resolve different objectives, and for the end- user it’s hard to determine which tool would be the best for the purpose. While this may seem to be a rather difficult task to achieve, it is not impossible and with some training, you can find a way through the maze and select a social media monitoring tool that will be most suited to your business.
To do this, let us assume that you have a product or a service and are using the social media network to gauge its effectiveness. Gone are the days when you needed to do market research and then do an analysis to reach a conclusion. Now with social media tools it is possible to get access to millions of records and have several touch points in the customer journey. But how do we get this data and how do we use it?
The first question arises – Why do we need market research? Possible answers are:
– We are interested to know how visible our brand is in comparison to our competitors.
– What are the gaps in our products/ services that are being fulfilled by our customers?
– What do our customers like/ dislike about our products and services?
– What do specific target groups think about our products and services.
With social media monitoring tools, you can quickly go through thousands of conversations and find data related to your product/ service or your brand. These conversations can be stored and processed as required and made available in the required format for decision making.
Some people argue that this can be achieved through traditional market research as well. Well, this was true some years back but now with the advent of newer technology, it is now possible to fetch data with the click of a few buttons and one doesn’t needs to send questionnaires to a select sample size and then wait for responses and then analyze them. Therefore, we can use social media monitoring tools not only to complement market research, but also uncover trends in social media marketing that were hitherto not available.
Determining the competition:
Social media marketing with give you an inside-out view of your competitors and their business tactics – both in an online and an offline mode. You will be able to observe closely what your competitors are doing and whether their activities are yielding them any benefits or not.
You will also be able to determine any gaps or deficiencies in their products or service offerings and can use that analysis to fill in the gap in the market.
For example, you can help find answers to questions like:
– How do your competitors interact with their prospects and customers?
– What kind of marketing campaigns do they run?
– What is their PR strategy?
– What is their brand messaging?
– How often do people talk about them and what are the key topics?
– What causes for the increase or decrease in conversation?
– Why do your target customers like them?
– How do your customers perceive you and them?
– On what new products and services are your competitors focusing?
– What is their product development goal-plan?
The key to successful social media monitoring is regularity and consistency. In other words, monitoring should be done on an ongoing basis, and this should not be a problem for you, once you have a social media setup done.
Knowing more about your consumers:
Social media monitoring enables you to keep a tab on what your customers are talking about you and your products and services, particularly the feedback about the features and quality, prices and their experience of using them. You can have access to:
– Independent and frank opinions
– Big interactions and conversations
– Results of experiments
– Going through records of interactions
– Doing an analysis of what the conversations are about.
Where are the people that you communicate to?
Make a determined effort to find out where your consumers are and how you could reach them. For certain products and services the consumers are on select forums and groups and subtle communication to them can be very effective. On other forums, when you can find them, make a planned and systematic effort to reach out to them consistently.
For this it is important to know:
– What are their interests?
– What do they like to communicate on?
– How do they communicate?
– What are the topics on which they seek help?
– Are reviews and comments important in their decision-making process?
By familiarizing yourself with the group, you would be able to reach out to them more quickly by putting together strategies to communicate with them.
Try and do this from today onwards, and you will see a marked difference in your knowledge of your competition and your customers over the next few weeks and months. Social media monitoring is not expensive. Rather it is very cost effective and leads to success. But one has to be patient.