Social media is still a buzz word and many people are still unsure if it will work for their business. Believe me it can. If you ready to start your social media marketing campaign, where do you start? Should you start with a blogging campaign? LinkedIn? Twitter? Facebook? Maybe you should start with Google+ and start building your Author rank profile?
This might seem like the obvious questions when starting out, but in reality you should start setting up monitoring process so that you can listen what is being said about your business, your employees, and about your brand. Never start engaging with your customers and target audience if you don’t know how people are talking about your brand online. Knowing this can also give you a clear understanding on which channels you should focus your strategy on and start engaging with the conversation already happening.
Having a good listening process allows your business to be able to respond to any queries and complaints as soon as they are posted. It will also help you to take a pro active approach to your campaign. If you are actively listening to the conversation online, your business can develop a strong reputation and trust with your target audience. When you take the pro active approach, you will also be able to convert anyone with negative feelings about your company into brand ambassadors.
There are many tools that you can use to start your listening process. Find a couple of tips below.
Online monitoring tools
- Google Alerts: This is one of the easiest tools to setup where you simply use keywords to be tracked. As soon as those keywords are found in blog posts or mentions online, you will receive an alert. This is a free tool
- Brandseye: This is a comprehensive ORM (online reptuation management) tool that you can use to monitor and track your brand reputation online and also your competitors. This can provide you with powerful information on what your competitors are doing and help you to find opportunities to better your brand.
