Benefits and Advantages of Social Media Monitoring in 2024

Nowadays, companies recognize how crucial it is to have a social media presence. However, as their following grows, the next hurdle is to keep a positive brand image on social media. This challenge is compounded by the fact that social media platforms host a sea of content that makes it difficult for brands to know what content works and what does not. But with a powerful social media monitoring software, they can drown out the noise and get the data they need to act with clarity.

In this article, you’ll learn all about the benefits of social media monitoring. If you are on the fence about what you can get out of using a dedicated tool for this task, then reading about what features can help you achieve this purpose will be eye-opening. With this, you can better decide whether or not to invest in a social media monitoring tool.

Social media has become part of people’s day-to-day life. As such, an excellent social media strategy should be top of mind for any marketing professional. The decision on which channel to use would largely depend on the marketer’s strategies. Still, it pays to factor in the most used social media channels. In a survey, 90.13% of professionals said they use Facebook as part of their social media strategy. This is followed by LinkedIn (88.54%), Instagram (81.52%), and YouTube (74.36%).

With all the noise that social media generates through viral posts and trending hashtags, it has become increasingly challenging for brands to sift through content that could positively or negatively impact their brand. In a world of increasing customer demands, giving a well-thought-out yet speedy response on social media to a query or complaint will help you capture their trust. In fact, 40% of consumers expect brands to reply within one hour of contact on social media. On the other hand, 79% expect a response in the first 24 hours.

This is where social media monitoring comes in. It offers a variety of advantages that allow brands to make the most out of their social media campaigns as well as online interactions with customers.

How can social media monitoring enhance crisis management?

In today’s fast-paced online environment, brands can face crises quickly, often stemming from viral complaints, negative reviews, or brand missteps that gain widespread attention. Social media monitoring offers invaluable tools to detect, manage, and respond to these situations effectively, helping brands maintain control over their reputation and respond proactively.

• Early Detection of Potential Crises: Social media monitoring tools can track mentions, keywords, and trending topics in real-time, allowing brands to catch negative sentiment spikes or problematic posts as soon as they arise. By identifying potential issues early, brands can address concerns before they escalate into larger crises.
• Real-Time Alerts: Most monitoring tools allow for customizable alerts that notify teams immediately of significant changes in brand mentions, sentiment shifts, or high-profile complaints. This enables the brand to mobilize response teams without delay, ensuring timely and consistent messaging.
• Sentiment Analysis for Context: During a crisis, it’s critical to understand the emotions driving public responses. Social media monitoring tools with sentiment analysis help teams gauge the intensity and type of sentiment, whether frustration, disappointment, or anger, allowing for tailored and empathetic responses.
• Tracking Crisis Spread Across Platforms: A brand crisis can quickly spread across various social media channels, forums, and news sites. Monitoring tools provide a centralized dashboard to track the reach and spread of the issue, helping brands understand the crisis’s scope and prioritize responses accordingly.
• Crisis Response Analytics: After addressing the immediate crisis, monitoring tools allow brands to evaluate the impact of their response efforts. Brands can analyze metrics like response times, sentiment changes, and customer engagement post-crisis, helping refine future crisis management strategies.
• Competitor Comparison: Monitoring not only helps manage a brand’s crisis but also enables teams to observe how competitors handle similar issues. Insights from competitor crisis responses can help guide best practices and avoid similar pitfalls.
• Informed Post-Crisis Strategy: With the insights gathered during and after the crisis, brands can formulate post-crisis communication strategies, rebuild customer trust, and reinforce brand credibility. Monitoring tools enable brands to adjust their content strategy, emphasizing transparency and customer-focused initiatives that resonate with their audience.

Benefits and Advantages of Social Media Monitoring

1. Identify Social Media Sentiment

Social media sentiment allows brands to identify how people feel about their products or services online. A social media sentiment analysis is more than a quantitative study of how many mentions you get online. It also looks at the emotions and opinions behind those mentions.

One of the advantages of social media monitoring is gaining an understanding of your audience. With such knowledge, you know how they feel about your brand, the posts you create, and the campaigns you launch. You can also detect when customer preferences change so you can adjust your communications accordingly.

To conduct a social media sentiment analysis, first, monitor your mentions. A social media listening tool usually has a dashboard where you can track your social mentions from your different social media accounts. You can also set up the app to monitor for your brand name, product name, or hashtags related to these so you can track them even if there is no mention of your brand. Next, break down customer sentiments into positive, negative, or neutral mentions. When you have this data, you can have a social sentiment report. At a minimum, the report should include the following:

• Total brand mentions
• Number of positive mentions
• Number of negative mentions
• Total brand engagements for a particular period
• Social sentiment score
• Social media sentiment score over time

2. Speed Up Response Times

Nowadays, brands use social media as a support channel for their customers. Because of this, customers have expected quick response times from companies when they have questions or concerns. Yet, data shows that brands struggle with responding to customers in a timely manner. For example, the highest social response rate belongs to the legal and real estate industries: both at 29%. This is followed by finance and banking, and recruiting and staffing, both at 28% while healthcare and travel and tourism are both at 27%.

One of the benefits of social media monitoring tools is that they help you cut down on your response times. This is due to features like rules, alerts, and real-time notifications that take into account the number of mentions and customer sentiment to prevent a possible public relations crisis. Social listening can also be done on multiple channels simultaneously and in various geographical regions so you are sure to cover all your important bases.

3. Use Feedback for Improvement

Brands can cultivate customer loyalty by showing that they actively listen to their customers and act on their feedback. By doing so, brands know customer expectations and frustrations as well as their satisfaction points. This data can help them tweak the way they respond on social media and to improve their product or service.

As a business owner, it can be disheartening when you receive a negative comment on social media. Yet, one should see it as an opportunity to show customers that they care about what customers think so much that they want to make amends for any shortcomings. It also shows that they want to take time to turn negative feedback into positive customer relationships.

In the same vein, you can use social media monitoring to discover positive reactions on social media. With this information, you can highlight the things about your brand that garnered positive feedback from customers. This also shows that your company is receptive to customer feedback and that you value your customers’ opinions. In turn, this can help you gain customer loyalty, based on recent social media statistics saying that 60% of marketers think that gaining loyal fans is one of the benefits of using social media.

4. Build Brand Credibility and Authenticity

Today, people feel distrust towards the government and media. Nearly one out of two respondents think that the government and the media are divisive forces in society. On the part of businesses, people also don’t think that they are doing enough to address societal problems such as climate change (52%), economic inequality (49%), and workforce reskilling (46%). To win the trust of the people, stakeholders must hold businesses accountable. In fact, 58% of people said that they will buy or advocate for brands based on their beliefs and values.

Among the many benefits of social media monitoring is that it can help you strengthen brand credibility, which is crucial to gaining the trust of your audience. Social media monitoring tools can help you uncover the reasons behind brand engagement by finding important conversations about your brand, your competitors, and the industry in general. Conducting sentiment analysis on these conversations will make it easier for you to know what areas to improve or avoid for you to receive positive press. With this information, you can find a journalist or influencer that can help enhance your brand perception.

5. Tweak Your Marketing Plan

A good content marketing plan helps your content stand out from those of other creators. In a sea of information on social media, creating content that is relevant to your audience means that you will be able to capture their interest. This is why 90% of marketers who use a content marketing plan say they will continue to invest the same amount in their channels this 2022.

Social media monitoring tools have features that help you gauge what will make your target audience sit up and listen. For example, they have a Boolean search feature that supports complex searches to ensure you can monitor relevant mentions of keywords or groups of keywords. Once you get this kind of information, you should be able to figure out what topics interest your audience and what topics they talk about the most. It also helps you identify the types of headlines that get clicks and get shared on social media and the types of formats your audience prefers. One example of this is leveraging the fear of missing out (FOMO) on your social media plan, which according to FOMO statistics, is most felt by users on Facebook.

What are examples of social media monitoring software?

HubSpotVISIT WEBSITE

HubSpot Marketing is an all-in-one marketing software that helps businesses convert leads, create noteworthy content, and analyze campaign data. One of its components is a social media monitoring software that allows you to configure keyword monitoring so they can stay on top of crucial interactions. The software likewise pushes email alerts when your prospect mentions a particular keyword.

Semrush

Semrush is an online marketing software that combines SEO, advertising, social media, marketing research, and agency solutions in one platform. Semrush features a brand monitoring tool that tracks your brand mentions online, identifies the sentiment behind the mentions, and analyzes the resource authority of the one mentioning your brand. Aside from this, the tool also tracks brand mentions of your competitors as well as industry trends mentioned online to spot trends.

Mayple

Mayple is a digital marketing services provider that helps brands hire top marketing talent to achieve their business goals. It offers a full suite of services, including pay-per-click, email marketing, CRO, social media management, and SEO so you don’t have to pay for dedicated SEO software. Mayple’s social media component allows brands to schedule posts, manage their online communities, and conduct competitor analysis.

Lucidya

Lucidya is a social media analytics software that tracks and analyzes conversations in the English and Arabic languages for more engaging marketing campaigns. It has the capability to monitor more than 200 million blogs, websites, and forums so that your brand has the data you need to make smart decisions. This AI-powered app also allows you to conduct brand reputation auditing so you know how your audience feels about your brand.

InflueNex

InflueNex is a free influencer marketing platform that allows you to find the right YouTube content creator to grow your brand. The solution encompasses YouTuber Discovery, YouTuber Insight, YouTuber Management, team collaboration, intelligent recommendation, and influencer outreach. It features YouTube Listening, a tool for evaluating brand image through analysis of YouTube videos delivered straight through your InflueNex dashboard. This helps you engage effectively with influencers, which according to recent influencer marketing statistics, is only expected to grow in terms of market size.

Reap the Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

The benefits of social media monitoring are manifold. It helps you embark on the crucial step of identifying social media sentiment so you know how your audience feels about your brand. Once you know this, you can use customer feedback to improve your product or service, enhance the credibility of your brand, and modify your content marketing plan. It also helps you amp up your response times so that customer expectations around support are met.

If you are looking to up your social media game, then you must know what social media analytics is. Doing so goes hand-in-hand with social media monitoring. By implementing both for your organization, you can better represent your brand in the often chaotic space of social media.

Key Insights

• Identify Social Media Sentiment: Understanding how your audience feels about your brand helps in crafting appropriate responses and strategies.
• Speed Up Response Times: Social media monitoring tools enable quicker responses to customer inquiries and complaints, improving customer satisfaction.
• Use Feedback for Improvement: Customer feedback gathered from social media can guide product or service improvements, enhancing overall customer experience.
• Build Brand Credibility and Authenticity: Engaging with customers and responding to their concerns transparently builds trust and strengthens brand credibility.
• Tweak Your Marketing Plan: Monitoring tools provide insights into what content resonates with your audience, allowing for more effective marketing strategies.

FAQ

1. What is social media monitoring? Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing online conversations about your brand, competitors, and the industry. This helps in understanding public sentiment, managing your brand’s reputation, and gaining insights for improving your marketing strategies.
2. Why is social media sentiment analysis important? Social media sentiment analysis is crucial because it goes beyond counting mentions to understanding the emotions and opinions behind those mentions. This knowledge helps in making informed decisions about how to engage with your audience and adjust your strategies.
3. How can social media monitoring improve response times? Social media monitoring tools often come with features like real-time notifications and alerts, enabling brands to respond quickly to customer inquiries and complaints. Faster response times lead to higher customer satisfaction and better brand reputation.
4. What are the benefits of using customer feedback from social media? Using customer feedback from social media allows brands to identify areas for improvement, show customers that their opinions are valued, and turn negative experiences into positive ones. This helps in building stronger customer relationships and loyalty.
5. How does social media monitoring help build brand credibility? By actively monitoring and engaging with social media conversations, brands can address customer concerns transparently, showcase their values, and build trust with their audience. This credibility is essential for gaining and maintaining customer loyalty.
6. Can social media monitoring tools help with competitor analysis? Yes, social media monitoring tools can track mentions of competitors and industry trends, providing valuable insights into what works for others in the market. This information can help in refining your own strategies and staying competitive.
7. What should be included in a social media sentiment report? A social media sentiment report should include total brand mentions, the number of positive and negative mentions, total brand engagements, a social sentiment score, and trends over time. This comprehensive data helps in understanding overall brand perception.
8. How can social media monitoring enhance a marketing plan? Social media monitoring provides insights into what content and strategies resonate with your audience. By understanding these preferences, brands can create more relevant and engaging content, leading to better marketing outcomes.

By Louie Andre

B2B & SaaS market analyst and senior writer for FinancesOnline. He is most interested in project management solutions, believing all businesses are a work in progress. From pitch deck to exit strategy, he is no stranger to project business hiccups and essentials. He has been involved in a few internet startups including a digital route planner for a triple A affiliate. His advice to vendors and users alike? "Think of benefits, not features."