Do you know what your target customers want and expect from your brand? Marketers often get confused about how to effectively use social media analytics or retrieve insights and put them to use. Social media scanners like social listening tools allow you to track and analyze the conversations which happen online. Social media marketing comes in many layers and strategizing your social media listening efforts can help you understand your customers better and stay ahead of your competitors. Social media scanners can include social media monitoring and/or social listening tools.
What is Social Media Scanning?
As the name suggests, social media scanning includes scanning mentions, comments, and reviews over the Internet to get a sense of what the audience thinks about you. This can typically be take two approaches – social media monitoring and social listening. The most common misconception today is the belief that social media monitoring and social listening are the same. Though both act as social media scanners, they have distinctly different jobs to do.
Social monitoring is scans social media mentions on the surface. It alerts you about the mentions, comments, and reviews involving your brand name or tracks a keyword which you wish to monitor. This helps you stay alert in case there is a bad review or even a positive one. Acting immediately can help save a crisis moment and/or gain you a brand advocate.
Social Listening builds upon the data monitored. It dives deep into analysis. Social listening helps you derive insights from the gathered data, for instance, the overall sentiment, consumer interests, trending topics and campaigns, competitor analysis et cetera.
Does Social Media Scanning Benefit all Businesses?
In the digital age, social media presence is as crucial as breathing for a living being, provided they have a business that has an online presence and wishes to grow it through online marketing. Social media marketing involves an intricate level of strategizing too. Before you post any content, you should know what your customers are interested in. Social media is a place that can earn your brand name overnight fame or destroy it with one negative comment or review which could go viral. Examples of such debacles include names like Starbucks. Starbucks faced public backlash over a racially charged incident. They had to shut down 8000 U.S stores in an attempt to restore the community’s faith in them after a video went viral.
J.W. Marriott at Chandigarh India recently got smothered by Twitter comments after actor Rahul Bose commented on the overpriced bananas they served him.
Research your target audience and their persona a little before you launch your social media profile and campaigns. Monitoring them diligently thereafter can be your mantra to successful social media marketing.
Benefits of Social Media Scanning
Social media scanning is crucial to the health of your brand. But how exactly does it help? Imagine knowing everything each of your customers or prospects thinks of or wants from your brand. Once you know what they require, you would know whether you meet expectations or not. You would know what to improve, or how to convince them that your product can meet their needs. Well, with social media scanners you would no longer have to estimate or guess your consumers’ thoughts and reactions. People today are active social media users and they express their opinions and thoughts quite openly on the Internet. Tracking such relevant comments and drawing insights from the data is the job of a social media scanner.
Real-Time Consumer Feedback
Social media scanners keep a check on every mention or comment that is made online and keeps you alerted through real-time notifications. This helps you prevent a crisis moment in case of a negative review or to engage actively with customers looking for or appreciating your service. Real-time feedback helps you improve your audience engagement and can easily earn you loyal customers.
Consumer Insights
Listening to online reviews can help you zero in on the problems your teams might be facing. It might be a tactical or an operational issue. Social media scanners can really help here in the case of franchisee chains where it becomes mandatory for all the establishments to maintain a specific standard in customer service. Social listening can interpret any glitches based on locations. Pinpointing the problem becomes much easier as does solving the issue.
Understanding the Industry and your Competition
Keep your friends close, your enemies closer. Social media scanners help you notice the changes, trends, and innovations happening within your industry thus helping you adapt to them in time. Also, keeping an eye on your competitors gets easier. Social listening can help you understand the demographics, the specific audience your competitors are targeting, and what exactly they are pitching and how. Are their customers happy, why or why not? It can become easy to take inspiration and adapt your business model based on the intelligence gained.
Whether you own a small business or a large one, social media and digital marketing need to be managed correctly. Homegrown businesses have become popular thanks to the power of social media. But the same platform can ruin businesses, so it is important that we dedicate the required time and ongoing efforts needed to manage the perception we created online and the reputation we established.