Ackura’s social monitoring tool, BuzzMonitor, is great at providing an insight into what your customers are talking about or identifies potential opportunities that you can use in future marketing. However taking the first steps into monitoring social media can be daunting so I thought I would provide 5 tips on how to start listening with BuzzMonitor.
1. Outline your objectives
It is vital to understand why you want to monitor social media. Some examples are:
- I want to see what people are saying about our company in order to act accordingly
- I want to identify the influential people in the industry
- I want to be able to react quickly to customer service queries
- I want to keep on top of the latest trends surrounding my company/brand
By defining your end goal first it will help in creating a clear plan of how to manage your social media monitoring activity.
2. Choose the best channels to monitor
The term Social Media covers a large number of channels such as micro-blogging, blogs, community sites, etc. For this reason it is important to discover where the conversations you want to monitor are taking place. Although Twitter is a popular social media site the conversations you are interested in might not be taking place on it, so it would be unproductive to spend time and resources monitoring it. Instead do some initial research to find out where best to invest your time.
3. Prioritize your monitoring
It is best practise to monitor a variety of keywords or terms in order to gain a greater understanding of the conversations going on across multiple channels. It is important to prioritize or focus your monitoring so that attention isn’t distracted from the more important topics. For example, listening out for developing trends should not distract from unhappy customers.
4. Listen – Don’t jump in
Sitting back and listening to a conversation rather than jumping straight in is vital. It will allow you time to understand the culture and language of the conversation or community your listening to, meaning that once you are ready to engage the people involved are more likely to then listen to what you have to say.
5. Build Relationships
Social media will allow you to foster relationships with your customers and industry influencers. Be prepared to embrace them because the people who will listen to what you have to say might become brand ambassadors and be influential about you to their peers
I hope these quick 5 points help you on your way to Social Media Monitoring. If you would like to discuss anything above in more depth then please get in touch.
