Why You Should Monitor Your Social Media Marketing

Are you utilising social media marketing to promote your business?

Applications such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogging etc., are making it easier for businesses to build relationships with potential clients. Plus their marketing can how reach parts that traditional marketing simply couldn’t reach.

But blindly interacting through these applications without monitoring them is a bit like driving a Ferrari blind folded – your message is getting out there quickly but you could be about to hit a brick wall any second.

Once upon a time the only way you found out about a problem with your business was when you either received a letter of complaint or suddenly lost customers. By that time it was often too late to do anything about it. But with the advent of social media marketing you can now jump on problems and solve them before they get out of hand.

So why is monitoring a good idea?

• You can measure your effectiveness
• Find out what people are saying about you and your business
• Identify problems/opportunities and react quickly
• Discover who are the leaders in your industry and what they are saying

How to monitor what people are saying about you

I use two methods to find out what people are saying about me online.

Google Alerts

This is a great tool to find out what people are saying about you on the web. You can easily set these up to monitor any phrase – I use one on my name (Sally Ormond) and another on my business name (Briar Copywriting).

By simply completing the fields above, Google alerts will email you whenever your search terms are found on  the web. This is a brilliant way to find out who is talking about you and what they are saying. Then, should anything be derogatory, you can act immediately and make a potentially bad situation good.

Social Mention

Social mention offers you real time social media search and analysis. It’s a bit like Google Alerts but for social media. Basically if anyone mentions your sepcified search term within social media, you’ll receive an email alert. This will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, alert you to any comments being made about your brand or company or even about you.

Again, Social Mention is very easy to set up. Just complete the fields with the information you want to monitor and create your alerts.

Why do you need to know this?

If you are going to use social media marketing to boost your business, it pays to keep one eye open. Numerous large companies are utilising applications such as Twitter to find out what people are saying about them and their brand. As soon as someone uses twitter, forums, blogs etc to tell the world about the problem they have encountered, the company is alerted and can act immediately.

This proactiveness is what will make you stand out from the crowd and show your customers you really do care.