A common postulation amongst current generations is that “everyone should have a social presence”.

Social media is swiftly becoming one of the most important aspects of the marketing and advertising industry and provides magnificent benefits that help reach millions of customers worldwide. Social media has both free and paid campaign options, which makes it easier to spread the word about your product in real-time depending on the available budget.

Social media falls under one of the most profitable digital marketing platforms that help increase business visibility. Brand visibility would generate brand awareness. This requires the creation of social media profiles for the business to initiate social media networking. Social media strategy then helps increase brand recognition significantly. Having a social media page can help build a wider audience for the business.

Another advantage of using social media is consumer targeting. Observing consumer activities on social media enables brands to draw a significant understanding of their preferences, and otherwise arduous job in the absence of social presence. Social media also plays an adhering role between the brand and its consumers, becoming the perfect communication platform for that much-needed customer connection. By connecting to customers, brands are also more likely to improve customer retention and loyalty. 

As we know, social media is a great way to engage and interact with customers. The more communication from the brand, the better the chances of conversation with customers. This may also help in understanding the interests and expectations of the target audience. Higher engagement from the brand could lead to more attention from customers and could properly convey the brand’s message.

According to Digital Doughnut, apart from being profitable, social media is possibly one of the most cost-effective marketing techniques. Social media sign-up is mostly free for everyone. With paid services, it’s always recommended to start small. A cost-effective strategy is necessary to ensure greater ROI. With a social presence, brands can take advertising to a smart level by understating the needs and presence of their consumers and then invest in campaigns wisely with flexible transactions of funds depending on their needs.

 Social media channels and goals

The most important thing to do for a brand is to set up achievable goals and utilize social media channels that best suit the business’ needs. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn are the common social media channels for any brand. 

Facebook, with over 2.3 billion active users, offers a massive business opportunity if planned and utilized properly. Any business can use Facebook to build brand value and develop an online community that understands their consumer’s mindset and their needs better. YouTube, on the other hand, has over two billion followers and is the second most successful social media platform. YouTube is best for brands that want to promote a new product launch, give how-to videos or even launch new campaign ideas.

Instagram, with over 1 billion followers, is perfect for showcasing pictures or short video clips. This social media platform requires more creative skills and is beneficial to brands with interesting, colorful, and eye-catching products and services.

LinkedIn, with 590 million users, is a more useful tool for B2B lead generation and recruiting professionals. There is still an opportunity to increase the active user base for this platform. Brands with some interesting ideas can generate their user base and use it to their benefit. Twitter, on the other hand, has 326 million users and is better for news circulations, PR, and identifying and connecting with influencers. Due to the short lifespan of posts on Twitter, it is heavily used to identify influencers, as posts from an influencer reach more people in a shorter timespan compared with posts from less popular social media users. 

What is Social Media Listening? 

Social media listening is also known as “social media monitoring”. This refers to a process of finding out what’s talked about your company, products, brands on Social media platforms. Later, this data is analyzed. Social media monitoring has become one of the strongest tools to gather intelligence from customers if used correctly. It allows the company/brand to gather insights from their content and then act upon its basis the needs. Social media monitoring is often mistaken for its use just as an alert as to what are the customers saying. In reality, it’s much more than that. It also helps to find out the specific platforms where these conversations take place, engagement with people, response, etc.

Every company has a set of specific goals and needs that they want to achieve. Our social media specialists can help in developing the right strategy to match your company’s needs. Below mentioned are top monitoring tools that will help your company in meeting these goals and achieve success.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. Hootsuite:

It’s one of the most popular tools that do social media monitoring to track activities across various social networks and platforms namely LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, and WordPress. It offers both free and premium versions. It also allows forming a delegation of tasks if more than one person handles the social media account.

2. Brandwatch:

Some tools can support selected social media platforms. Generally, it is an amalgamation of different management tools for all key tasks related to social media assessment. However, it is always better to use a single tool that could support a business’ needs. Brandwatch offers monitoring capabilities from most of the social media platforms, namely Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. The results are better when compared with the analysis done on other tools. Aside from mentions on big social media channels, Brandwatch can also capture mentions from blogs, news sites, and forums.

3. Falcon.io:

Another marketing platform that generally aims at helping social media marketers with metrics like listening, customer engagement, content marketing, and audience management. It helps to monitor the brand, popular topics and engage influencers.

4. Simply Measured:

This tool allows you to track multiple metrics at the same time. It gathers data, analyzes earned, owned and paid activities for a company/brand. You can create free reports on this tool with specific granularity and have a paid version for full use. 

5. Talkwalker:

Talkwalker is considered to be one of the most powerful media monitoring tools. Apart from its ability to monitor social media platforms and websites, it can also monitor print, TV and radio broadcasts. This also has an image recognition technology that helps in selecting the social media posts of the company/brand even in the absence of its mention.

6. Tailwind:

This one is built specifically for Pinterest and Instagram, the most popular visual social media platform. Apart from its scheduling and analytics features, Tailwind enables you to monitor your content and your competitors with information about emerging trends.

7. TweetDeck:

This one is the official Twitter management dashboard which allows you to manage multiple twitter accounts and monitor mentions, keywords & Twitter lists.

Apart from these social media monitoring tools, brands also focus on attracting consumers to their websites and understand the segment of consumers they need to focus on. Below mentioned are the tools which help in consumer profiling and website monitoring for company/brands:

Global Web Index: To Understand Your Audience

The first and foremost thing for any brand is to understand its target audience and develop an in-depth comprehension of their interests and preference. Global Web Index can help a company make informed decisions using deeper insights into their target audience. GWI is the world’s largest market research that helps companies build customer profiles.

Google Analytics: To Monitor Website Performance

Tracking the performance of social media pages is important, but not in isolation of a reliable method of monitoring a brand’s website. Google Analytics is a tool that monitors a website’s performance, including keywords and the amount of time a visitor spends on the website. 

Regarding social media listening and engagement, a company/brand must consider above-mentioned factors while choosing a suitable social media tool. This would show productive results that will benefit your business and help in achieving the goals. Using the right management tool can help a brand better connect with its current and target audience and will ensure higher lead conversion. A company/brand should also keep in mind that before deciding on the tools, it is always optional to utilize a trial to gauge whether the tool matches your business needs.

Praxidia, a Teleperformance company, evaluates customer experience for clients and offers expertise in strategy formulation to meet the goals and objectives of the company/brand with the help in-depth social media performance analysis. Connect with us today.