There are over 5.07 billion active social media users, and over 3 billion are on Facebook. That’s a large pool of audience, potential customers, and unexplored opportunities for businesses to grow their reputation and revenue.
💡Read Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide
However, while social media can help scale your ROI, it can also ruin it if you don’t monitor it properly. A single negative comment from an aggrieved customer is sufficient to put you in an unpleasant corner.
And that’s what a social tracker helps prevent.
In this article, we’ll see how social trackers make monitoring easy and how to take advantage of their various benefits.
Everything Is Automated
A decade ago, traditional social media marketers had to surf through social media comments, account profiles, and feeds, looking for relevant brand mentions and social sentiments. That’s manual and inefficient, coupled with the fact that you could easily miss out on vital information.
Let’s say you’re Starbucks’ social media manager. Imagine having to find tens of thousands of mentions, according to the chart above, daily.
Social tracker eliminates this mundane process and crawls millions of public social pages in seconds, tracking any discussion that mentions your brand, analyzing the sentiment of each mention, and helping you make informed decisions in a finger snap.
Fast Response To Crisis
Anything goes on social media. For instance, it takes barely the time to make a coffee to garner hundreds of thousands of impressions for a post. That’s also how fast a negative review or comment from a random social media user can damage your brand.
Take Marques Brownlee’s review of Humane Pin as an example. The YouTube post has so far gotten more than 7 million views, 233k likes, and almost 20,000 comments in just two months. In less than a day, the review became Humane AI’s worst nightmare, and the company recorded only 10% of projected sales after launch.
While there’s no foolproof way to ensure customers and social followers only say good things about your product on social media, you can always track such reviews or negative comments the moment they are out with a social tracker.
According to Leigh McKenzie, Community Advocate at Traffic Think Tank, “One hour is enough time for a negative comment or review to severely impact your social presence. So, there’s no time to sit around. The earlier you know, the faster you can respond to issues that could potentially damage your brand reputation on social media.”
Easily Find Out What People Think About Your Brand
Whatever product you’re marketing on social media is valuable, at least for a sales-oriented company. But what your audience and the general public think about your company or social profile is even more important.
- How do users feel about our brand and social presence?
- Are there any common complaints or praises about our offerings or brand?
- How do users compare our brand to our competitors?
- Are there any social media influencers or advocates talking about our brand?
- What do users say when they recommend our brand to others?
Social trackers provide features to collect these data and portray audience sentiment in an easily understandable format, allowing you to determine whether you’re doing something wrong or right.
The overall response to these questions could be positive, negative, or rarely neutral. Positive means your audience is satisfied with whatever you’re doing. If negative, it means people are dissatisfied with your brand as a whole or how you handle your social presence.
Identify Market Trends With Social Tags
Social media feeds off microtrends – what are people doing right now on Twitter? Is there a buzz news viral, breaking events, social apocalypse, etc? They are micro because they only last for as long as a few weeks or even hours.
You can’t possibly keep up with every trend, but social listening tools can let you know what discussions are at their peak, depending on your location and brand interest.
Some trackers also allow you to set up leads for certain keywords and hashtags—not necessarily your brand name but relevant to your offerings.
Let’s say you’re in the food industry, like KFC. You can put general hashtags like #yummy and #foodie on your radar. This will help you listen to a tag’s activity, engagement, recurrence, and sentiments around it, which are useful for your content efforts.
Monitor Media Coverage
Your followers are not the only ones likely to talk about your brand. Think news outlets and media agencies.
These companies have a huge audience and are often people’s go-to sources for news. In fact, over 70% of adults in Nigeria, South Africa, Thailand, and Malaysia regard social media platforms, such as Twitter, as their preferred news source.
Interestingly, a media outlet’s audience size has a direct impact on your business. If a large outlet posts positive or negative reviews about your brand on any social network, it takes just a few hours for almost everyone concerned to know about it.
So, it’s a must to keep relevant media channels on your radar and set up alerts or notifications with an effective social tracker like Determ. Monitor press hits about your brand and get into action as soon as any is out.
Grant Aldrich, Founder of Online Degree, believes, “Media coverage is often good than bad. News outlets might create content around your new product releases, branding, and so on. It could also be from your audience — user-generated content (UGC). All these boost your visibility and help more people hear about you.”
Benchmark Performance Against Competitors
Another benefit of a social tracker is that you can use it to see what your competitors are doing, the type of content they publish, their engagement metrics, post sentiment, and what’s working and what’s not.
You can then benchmark this analytical data against your performance to:
- dig out potential opportunities,
- leverage the missing spots in your competitors’ social media strategy.
Most importantly, competitor analysis and benchmarking save you time that would have otherwise been spent reinventing old wheels when you can just copy, modify for better results, and rebrand the approaches working for competitors.
Optimize Content With Real-time Analysis
Axel Lavergne, Founder at ReviewFlowz, says, “Whether you’re analyzing audience sentiment or market trend, the down-to-earth goal is to improve engagement with your followers through good content. Good content is relevant, fits into the current trend, and resonates with your audience on a personal level.”
- Your competitors are talking about AI – artificial intelligence – and they’re getting a nine out of ten engagement for it? Dig deeper with a social tracker, analyze their posts, and produce something better.
- The current lead-generating trend in your industry is illustrative carousels? Hop on.
The more advanced trackers like Determ help you analyze possible audience sentiment toward content—let’s say, long-form articles, illustrations, or carousel images—even before they go live. That’s a more efficient way to engage your potential customers with content that only moves the needle and connects deeper.
Create Comprehensive Social Reports In Seconds
“It’s not monitoring if you can’t access analytic reports as soon as you request for it. And that’s why the traditional method of manually collating social reports is error-prone and inefficient. Often takes days, especially if you’re handling multiple social platforms for your brand”, says Jerry Han, CMO at PrizeRebel.
In contrast, sophisticated social tracking tools provide a detailed and easily understood report in minutes. The likes of Determ centralize all your social profiles from different platforms into one dashboard and help you know what’s up from one place. No more juggling from here to there.
Wrapping Up
Social media is a game changer for small, medium, or large organizations, so long as you wish to boost your audience base and ROI. But your strategy is incomplete if you don’t even know what people think about your brand or what’s helping competitors gain traction.
By using a social tracker, you can get into the heads of your followers, identify market trends in seconds, monitor media coverage, and track and benchmark performance against notable competitors. Most importantly, you can proactively react to crises from negative reviews and comments while using analytical reports to create better content.
