Why Perform Social Media Monitoring?

Meta Description: Social media monitoring helps businesses understand the likes and dislikes of their target demographic and the latest content trends. Here’s why you must invest in it. 

Introduction 

Social media platforms have become the preferred medium for businesses to reach their audiences. The result is that many companies are now using social media to build their brand and connect with their customers. Over 72% of marketers have reported that social media is essential for driving brand awareness and product visibility among target audiences. 

Efficient social media monitoring can help you understand what works on platforms like Instagram and what doesn’t and give you actionable insights to enhance your social media content strategy. This blog will briefly discuss what social media monitoring is and explain why performing social media monitoring is essential for your business.

What is Social Media Monitoring? 

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking what people are saying about your brand, product, or service on social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. By monitoring social media, you can also keep up with trends in your industry, apart from gauging customer sentiments, and respond to customer issues quickly.

Five Reasons Why You Must Perform Social Media Monitoring 

1) Track the most effective platforms

Social media monitoring will help you keep track of your campaigns’ progress, allowing you to understand what works best and which social media platforms drive the most engagement. This data will also determine whether a particular medium fits your business better than others. It can be essential if you’re looking to focus your efforts on a few core platforms. With social media monitoring, you can track key metrics such as the number of likes, shares, comments, and retweets, along with the overall reach of your posts. It will also allow you to track each post’s impressions and the average time spent on each post. These metrics will allow you to clearly understand which social media platforms drive the most engagement for your brand.

However, businesses are often not equipped with the tools and skills to interpret the data they receive from their social media monitoring operation. The lack of these skills and tools, which are essential to gain actionable insights — or separating grain from the chaff — renders the data worthless. While developing the skills and buying the tools is one option for dealing with this situation, it is not always profitable and, in any case, takes very long. The other option is to employ professional social media monitoring services, which have all the tools and skills required for efficient social media monitoring at their disposal. 

2) Gain actionable insights 

Social media monitoring will also allow you to learn more about your audience by tracking user-generated content and sentiment. This data will enable you to understand which topics and issues are most important to your audience and which topics they engage with the most. This insight can help you create more relevant and compelling content that resonates with your audience and drives more engagement. 

Social media monitoring enables you to track the various conversations in your industry and stay informed about emerging topics and issues that may be relevant to your brand. This data may also contain valuable insights into your competitors. You may be able to identify your competitors’ most commonly used terms and topics, helping you understand how best to position yourself against them.

3) Identify which type of content works

Another great benefit of social media monitoring is that it will allow you to identify which content is most engaging with your audience. For example, do you notice that your audience loves GIFs? Or do they prefer longer status updates? By tracking the content your audience engages with, you can better tailor your social media posts to meet their needs. It will aid you in reaching a wider audience, increasing brand visibility, and driving more engagement. 

Social media monitoring will also track the level of attention each type of content receives. It will help you tailor your content to better meet your audience’s needs.

4) Spot opportunities and threats

Social media monitoring will also allow you to track the various social media campaigns being run by your competitors. With such data, you will better understand which type of content is resonating best with your audience and what kinds of posts are receiving the most engagement. This information can help you identify opportunities to take advantage of what your competitors are doing, while also helping you identify threats in the market. For example, consider that your competitors are using videos as part of their social media strategy, and it’s working out well for them in terms of engagement. Will you not want to leverage the popularity of videos to enhance your social media presence? 

5) Continuous brand monitoring and engagement 

Social media monitoring will also allow you to track conversations and posts across your social media accounts and your competitor’s accounts. It will enable you to stay engaged with your audience across all channels, even when you’re not posting. It will help you respond to brand mentions or comments and participate in relevant social media discussions across your social media accounts. 

But reading comments and posts and responding to them is a highly time-intensive job and requires a unique set of skills that only professional social media managers have. If you’re not up for hiring a social media manager, you could look at business process outsourcing services with professionals with the right skills to do the job for you. With constant monitoring, such an agency will help you build a more substantial brand presence, reach more of your audience and drive more engagement across all social media accounts. 

Conclusion 

Social media monitoring is an essential tool that every business owner should use. Not only will you be able to keep track of the progress of your campaigns, but you will also gain actionable insights into what drives audience behaviour and which type of content your audience loves most. With social media monitoring, you will also be able to track the most effective platforms for your business and enable you to spot opportunities and threats based on competitor behaviour. You can consider outsourcing the job to professional agencies if you do not have the in-house capacity to run an efficient social media monitoring operation. Professional monitoring agencies perform the task with industry-grade tools and deliver insights in a processed form.