What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 1

Published in

Inside Revenue

9 min readAug 27, 2018

The Beginner’s Guide

Social Media are network technologies that help you to create and share information, ideas, career interests and many other forms of information with other web users. Social Media has changed the way individuals and large organizations communicate. For this reason it is imperative that we can monitor, track and analyze how we use Social Media in our business.

In this set of articles, I will go over some of the common free and paid tools that you can use to monitor your company’s Social Media efforts. This is to give your brand the best chance at achieving Social Media success.

“Sales and marketing must be in concert with regards to social selling.” — Koka Sexton (Content at @slackhq, Tech advisor) @kokasexton

In this article I will cover:
#1 What Are Tools To Monitor Social Media?
#2 Why Should I Care About Monitoring Social Media?
#3 How Can Social Media Tools Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?
#4 What Should I Watch Out For When Using Social Media Tools?

Let’s dive in…

#1 What Are Tools To Monitor Social Media?

Firstly, what is Social Media monitoring?

In basic terms, Social Media monitoring is the act of using a tool to listen to what is being said across the internet; monitoring media, not just from traditional publishers, but on millions of social sites too.

This means that you are monitoring what your potential customers might be saying about your brand, as well as monitoring how they interact with you business. This is important as you want your potential customers to have a positive image of your brand. If there are negative posts online about your business, this can affect the way people see you and in turn can lead to them not trust or want to work with you.

So why then should you use tools to monitor your Social Media?

Well, you could simply go onto each Social Media site that you are on and look to see if your posts are being interacted with, search for comments and post everyday. This will be very time consuming. This is the reason you should look at a tool which can do this for you. There are a lot of tools that can post content for you and will search the web for any mentions of your company, which will allow you as a marketer, more time to create beautiful content to post and perform all your other tasks during the day.

The different tools we will be looking at during the next article in this series will cover various uses from analytics, to scheduling as well as monitoring of your Social Media accounts. Some will be freemium platforms (where they have a free platform option, but for access to the more advanced features you will need to pay) and some will be paid platforms.

#2 Why Should I Care About Monitoring Social Media?

Your customers have a voice and more likely than not, they’re trying to communicate with you via Social Media. Handling all the individual messages across your social channels is a complex task that often requires help from Social Media monitoring tools.

And if your brand wants to improve customer relations and communication, you have to respond to the incoming messages in a professional and timely manner. In fact, the Sprout Social Q1 2016 Index discovered the average brand response rate is less than 12% on Twitter. And that number drops to less than 9% on Facebook.

This is why you have to invest in Social Media monitoring tools. When implemented effectively, monitoring helps you boost your brand’s communication pipeline.

Below Are 8 Benefits Of Social Media Monitoring

1. Better Understanding of Listening & Monitoring
Another way Social Media monitoring can benefit your business is by learning the difference between monitoring and social listening. Far too often, the terms Social Media monitoring and Social Media listening are considered one in the same.

While it’s easy to see why they’re mixed together, monitoring and listening are both unique methods to view, measure and analyze your audience. Here’s how we break down the difference between monitoring and listening:

Social Media monitoring is more so the process of collecting social messages into a single stream and to take a specific action in response to each message (via a like, comment or tasked message).
Social Media listening queries large volumes of social messages from specific keywords or topics that then requires your brand to reflect and draw analysis from the these actions (via sentiment analysis or topic affinity).

Understanding the difference between Social Media monitoring and Social Media listening is critical to any social strategy. It’s also important to know one is not more important than the other.

2. Become More Approachable to Your Customers
Providing excellent customer service is at the forefront of most brand’s initiatives. Being an approachable organization means you have to consider every avenue of communication. And this most certainly includes Social Media.

Social Media monitoring tools allow brands to become more approachable by finding customer inquiries and interactions faster. Your brand receives incoming messages on Social Media all the time. But what about the messages that misspell your brand name or don’t tag you in Instagram comments?

Positive brand experiences can truly have an effect on customers in your sales funnel. It’s always best to think of building strong communication with your customers as a long-term relationship. And what’s the best way to open that line of communication? It starts with monitoring your social messages and providing the best customer experience.

3. Never Miss a Brand-Relevant Message
Like we mentioned above, one of the best benefits to Social Media monitoring is discovering more opportunities to engage with customers. For organizations on social, this means you need to focus on incoming brand-related messages, whether you’re directly mentioned or not.

These type of messages are customer experience gold. Directly answering a product question could mean the difference between a purchase and an abandoned cart.

And for a lot of brands, there are so many messages, it’s easy to miss important questions because they didn’t tag, @mention or use your hashtag. However, identifying your brand keywords in a Social Media monitoring platform makes it simple.

4. Stay Organized With Marketing Campaigns Tags
An essential benefit of Social Media monitoring tools is the ability to organize campaigns. When incoming messages related to an important campaign come in, you need to be able to respond or engage in a timely manner.

Not only that, but it also guarantees that important messages don’t get overlooked.

5. Interact With Your Top Brand Advocates & Key Customers
Brand advocates are essential to promoting your product and driving more engagement in smaller pockets of the market.

With the help of Social Media monitoring tools, you easily interact with influencers and brand advocates to truly move the engagement needle. On top of that, monitoring interactions and conversations from key customers can provide valuable instances of ways to include them in your marketing efforts.

Finding places to interact with key customers can make the difference between a small sale and a major win for your business. With monitoring tools, you can find and reply to those customers on the edge to make a purchase from you.

6. Enabling Your Best Brand Advocates
Understand that brand advocates are those who are sold on your product and stay loyal to your brand. Sometimes these folks are the best champions for your brand because they’re in your industry, know the ins and outs of your product and provide great reasons to why they stay with you.

Brand advocates help further educate potential customers and sometimes work as a customer care ambassadors. On the other hand, it’s difficult to track their influence, industry pull and engagement (surrounding your brand) without a Social Media monitoring tool.

Word-of-mouth marketing has shown to influence 74% of buyers in their purchasing decisions. Enabling and interacting with your biggest advocates will only push your social presence with positive experiences.

7. Understand What’s Working (and Not Working) For Competitors
Social Media monitoring isn’t strictly limited to your brand. It also pays to understand what your competitors are doing and how they engage with their own fans.

Consider monitoring conversations that contain the names of your top competitors on social. For instance, T-Mobile might want to track conversations about Verizon. It could help them understand some of the pain points of Verizon customers. Then T-Mobile could use these Verizon customer issues in its own marketing messaging to speak more directly to the audience.

8. Win Back Lost Customers
As we mentioned earlier, quickly replying to customers can mean all the difference on Social Media. When an upset customers Tweets a complaint about your brand, you need to jump on it quickly to resolve the issue. Even if you can’t fix their current situation, you could restore your chances of doing business with them in the future.

Don’t let negative customer experiences go unnoticed on Social Media. While some bigger brands receive hundreds or thousands of messages a day, the right monitoring tool helps you dig through the noise and find the biggest issues to address.

#3 How Can Social Media Tools Help Me Hit My Company’s Revenue Targets?

Social Media has transformed the way we market our businesses. But regardless of what we have to say about our products and services, people are going to have their own take on them, and they may be turning to Social Media to express that. This is why it is important to have a Social Media tool to help you keep track of all the interactions. In the article “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”, I will be covering the following topics to help you hit your revenue targets using a Social Media tool:

Freemium Social Media Tools
Choosing The Social Media Tool For You

“You can position your ads so people are more likely to click on them, but it’s positioning yourself as the expert that really matters.” — Melonie Dodaro (Keynote Speaker | #1 Bestselling Author, LinkedIn Unlocked and The LinkedIn Code) @MelonieDodaro

#4 What Should I Watch Out For When Using Social Media Tools?

Numerous tools are available to help you listen in on Social Media. However, if you do not have a Social Media listening strategy they are pointless. Listening in on Social Media is a great way to get ahead of your competitors and keep your customers coming back for more. For this reason in our article, “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)” I will be giving you a couple of tips and best practices to keep in mind when using Social Media tools to monitor and listen to your customers. I will be covering the following topics:

Best Practices For Working With Social Media Monitoring Tools
Social Listening Tips For A Social Media Monitoring Tool

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There’s a great deal of wonderful Social Media tools out there. Among them are tools built specifically to help you pick out relevant conversations on Social Media — Social Media monitoring tools. Some of these tools allow you to monitor multiple Social Media profiles on the different Social Media platforms from a single place. There are even some that let you monitor Social Media trends and keywords.

All of these options are amazing for your Social Media strategy and should be looked at for your company. In our next article I will go over a couple of these tools as well as give you some tips on choosing the right one for you.

Read our article — “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)” here.