Every single second, over 50,000 Facebook posts are created. At the same time, over 6,000 tweets are tweeted, more than 750,000 WhatsApp and Facebook messages are sent, and nearly 4 million emails are emailed.
In light of this colossal amount of user-generated content, do you know the who, when, and why of the people talking about your company? How can you keep tabs on what people are saying about your brand if you only check metrics such as conversion rates and turnover?
Look, You?re Trending ? but for All the Wrong Reasons!
Consider an example of a customer becoming aggrieved by the service of your company. Perhaps they came into your store and tried to return a product that was out of warranty. Angry that they were refused a refund, they post a number of scathing videos on social media disparaging your company and making exaggerated claims about you.
If you knew these posts had been made, you could have stepped in immediately and diffused the situation early by trying to resolve the issue and put across your side of the story. With the real facts evident, the user?s posts dissipate and no longer get the traction they were seeing. Your company?s reputation is secure, and you?re shown to be a company that cares about customer service and righting wrongs.
Unfortunately, as you had no way to know the person was posting negatively about your company on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or their own blog, the story goes viral, with thousands of people forwarding the videos and negatively commenting. It?s too late to come in and retroactively fix things. The damage is done, and even setting the record straight can look like you trying to cover yourself.
Getting the Pulse of the Web
To get in front of user opinion online, you?ll want to keep strong tabs on how your company is being discussed online. This is where listening tools come in. These services monitor your brand name mentions on the web and social media, flagging important data so you can react promptly and correctly. In their simplest form, they listen for certain words (such as your company name) and list where you?re being mentioned and in what manner.
Popular listening tools include AgoraPulse, Hootsuite, Buffer, Google Alerts, and Awario. While some of these only monitor social media mentions as part of a larger suite of functions, others also monitor mentions on websites as they go live.
Without listening tools, you?re failing to keep an eye on what people really think about your brand, your marketing efforts, and your service performance.
Positive and Negative Uses of Listening Software
The example above shows how listening software can be used as a jumpstart to protecting your reputation when a customer feels unhappy with the service.
Some companies have gone further by controversially using listening software to monitor their own employees on the internet. GM fired employees for mentioning the recent strike in their social media posts.
Monitoring the web doesn?t need to be covering your back. If you see positive mentions of your company on a high-profile website, you can use these in a future marketing campaign. If an influential blogger mentions they?re planning on using your product, you can reach out to them and offer assistance. Just being aware that they will be contacting your business can get you the jump to inform your employees beforehand.
You can use listening software to identify trends in how people view and use your products and services. It can be used to recognize key demographics and potential new openings. You may notice certain issues that customers are mentioning about your products and add solutions to these problems to your product FAQs, having reached out to the customers directly. You can find new ideas for marketing materials and potential new hashtags to boost.
Monitoring the conversations about your business is definitely something that you (or your digital marketing partner) should be doing. Get in touch with us today and we can discuss how we can incorporate brand mention monitoring into our digital marketing service for you.
