Why and how to step up your social media monitoring

Social media monitoring—sometimes referred to as “social media listening”—can be a vital tactic for gathering intelligence from your customers so you can improve your content, business development, R&D, customer service and real-time marketing campaigns.

Social media monitoring is more than simply setting up a Google Alert to see what people are saying about you on their platforms. It’s about finding out where those conversations are taking place and engaging with the people involved.

It’s also about responding, delivering content to them once they’ve shown interest, and helping them solve problems whenever you can.

The way to reach a targeted group of consumers is through relevant, personalized, engaging content. When you focus on social media monitoring, you can find out what they want to talk about—and avoid getting tuned out.

Here are four key ways that social media monitoring can benefit your business:

1. Get an edge on your competition.

Set up keyword tracking to monitor all mentions that relate to your products and services. (Make sure you list variations of your product name, as well as any common misspellings.)