The Internet is a powerful space. You can’t afford to lose focus on the social media marketing front if you wish your brand to be a frontrunner. And while managing a social media presence is not the easiest of tasks, thanks to social listening tools, we can say that social media monitoring is practically the easiest of them all. You aren’t much likely to make many mistakes. All you need to do is set up the tool and engage with the mentions. Having said that, I want to discuss some very common social media monitoring mistakes which still tend to creep in. This could be because this is the first time you are using a social listening tool or because you switched to a new tool and the interface is different. Whatever might be the reason, we are here to alert you to some general issues you might face and help you to avoid them.
Not paying attention to Competitors
Competitor analysis is a vital part of your marketing strategy. Social listening tools are designed to meet this purpose yet many brands fail to take advantage of this feature. We understand if you want to avoid competitive analysis and focus only on your personal brand mentions. However, tracking your competition and your share of the market when compared to them is important to ensure your growth. It helps you find out their influencers, their pain points et cetera. There is a chance you could gain more customers by resolving the competition’s customer pain points with your offer.
Not Setting up Search Filters
The aim of any social listening tool is to gather all the data relevant to you, off the Internet and present it to you. Yet sometimes it is difficult to do so. Imagine if a company has a common name. Let’s say Apple Inc. is trying to listen to the social chatter to evaluate their social presence. If they use “apple” as a keyword, they are likely to receive alerts for thousands of irrelevant mentions.
To reduce the huge number of irrelevant alerts, the company can spell its name in capital letters “APPLE” and also add the website URL. To filter the mentions further, it is possible to add negative keywords. So the company can perhaps add words like “pie”, “cider”, “sauce” and so on as negative keywords helping them avoid common posts mentioning food items using apples, like apple cider or apple pie!
Not including all Brand Names
In the previous example, we saw how troublesome it can get for a company with a generic name to track mentions. Most times managers forget to mention all the relevant keywords. The addition of such keywords helps the tool to understand the premise better and narrow down the data furthermore.
Like in the case of the previous example, it would help to add keywords like “Apple iPhone”, “Apple Inc.”, “iPhone”, “iPad” et cetera.
Another very common mistake that occurs is a typo or two while putting in the brand name. It is essential that you be careful with this and add all possible keywords. First of all, you also need to choose a tool that allows you to add and track an unlimited number of mentions.
Not Tracking Industry News
It goes without saying that the health of your business depends somewhat on the external environment too. What is happening in your industry could easily affect your business prospects. A little preparedness can never hurt. And as we mentioned earlier, sometimes marketers fail to track their competitors, similarly, they fail to track the industry trends.
Keeping an eye on industry keywords, the niche market and the influencers within can be of help in many ways. Finding influencers for your next marketing campaign gets easier, tracking trends helps you advertise judiciously and to boost your brand’s image.
This list might not be comprehensive as we have tried to discuss only the most common social media monitoring mistakes made by a majority of marketers. If you are facing any other issues, you can always reach out to us.