Social Media Monitoring Consultancy
Do you know what people are saying about your business right now? Do you know what the trending conversations are among your customers? Are you making the most of the many social media monitoring tools and services available? If not – you are almost certainly missing a trick.
Using various free or paid-for tools, it’s now possible to monitor (in real-time, if you like) what people are saying about your company online. There are some clear and obvious benefits of the insights this can provide.
Social media monitoring can help you to:
- Listen to online conversations on Twitter, blogs, forums and social networks
- Engage with customers and potential customers in real-time
- Resolve problems and correct misconceptions as they occur
- Gauge the sentiment of comments about your services
- Identify and engage with influential people in your industry
- Monitor the online reputation of your brand and senior staff
- Gather valuable product information, feedback and research
- Generate return on investment (ROI)
Social Media Monitoring Tools and Services
Visible Technologies' TruPULSE dashboard
There are now a vast array of social media monitoring tools and services available online, ranging from free services like Google Alerts, TweetDeck and Ubervu, to paid for solutions such as Brandwatch, Radian6, TruCAST, Scoutlabs and Sysomos. Each of these services has pro’s and con’s and some are better than others at specific tasks. Working out what you need and what each of these can deliver can be a major task.
Most of the paid-for services enable you to input keywords, such as your company name, industry and product names, then track online interactions, such as comments, blog posts, Tweets, forum posts and (some) social network posts, that mention these words. You get to view these via a secure interface with options such as ratings and notes. You can generally assign posts for colleagues to deal with, or respond to them yourself.
You can also gauge the mood, or sentiment, or each post. Some services offer automated sentiment detection, others require you to manually decide whether the post is positive, negative or neutral. Some services also let you see more information about the people making the comments, giving some indication of their “influence” (by checking how how many subscribers their blog has, or how many Twitter followers they have).
Over time social media monitoring tools let you view trends and see what impact your interventions are having on the general flow of discussion.
How can we help?
We can help you to identify, evaluate and use the best social media monitoring tools and services for your needs. This might be a suite of free tools with a simple web interface or an off-the-shelf monitoring and engagement solution, configured to your specific industry, keywords and preferences. We have tried out most of the solutions on the market – so we can save you a lot of time and energy. We also know what works, so we can help you get results faster.
We can also train you and your staff on how to engage with your customers online. We have helped some of the biggest brands in the UK to create online communities. It’s not rocket science – but it is something you need to learn.
For more information call 0845 463 1435 or email info@oursocialtimes.com
