By Carly Stec
Jan 13, 2014
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Do you know what is more important than your business creating an active presence on social media?
Monitoring it.
The trouble is, with an overwhelming amount of conversations, opinions, and concepts flooding your newsfeed, it can seem close to impossible to find anything with meaning attached to it.
If your business is unclear about how to tackle social media, it's likely that your social media interactions are going to sound a lot like Charlie Brown's teacher (wah wah waah waaaah).
Rather than combat noise with more noise, businesses must first learn to take a step back if they wish to make sense of it all. When it comes down to it, sometimes less talking, and more listening is all it takes.
Through the implementation of effective social media monitoring strategy, your business will be able to better understand the customer conversations that matter most.
If you're having trouble wrapping your head around this whole social media monitoring thing, we've detailed how it can be done, along with three reasons why you should make it a priority starting today.
How to Find the Right Tool
While finding the right tool for social media monitoring can seem as frustrating as your experiences with social media chaos thus far, you're in the right place. When it comes to finding the right tool for monitoring your social presence, we've been around the block a time or two, which is why you can trust that we've uncovered the most effective tool worth implementing.
HubSpot's Social Inbox tool allows users to focus solely on the social interactions that will have an impact on your business. How? Well, Social Inbox utilizes customizable streams that make it easy for users to keep tabs on any and all activity surrounding your business.
Additionally, Social Inbox is synced up with your HubSpot contact database, which means that you can be notified instantly if a lead mentions you on social media. This gives your employees the heads up they need to begin crafting a relevant, timely response based off of the information they have available to them through the contact's profile.
Why You Need the Right Tool
Respond to Complaints
While you hope that everything being said about you online is positive, there will come a time when someone out there is less than pleased with your product or service (it happens).
Rather than sweep the comment under the rug, social media monitoring allows you to a) identify the problem, and b) potentially save the sale with a remarkable response.
The fact of that matter is, ignoring a negative comment does not make it disappear all together. To be clear, 25% of consumers who complain about products on Facebook or Twitter expect a response within 1 hour. (Source: American Express)
Social media monitoring makes it easy for your business to catch a complaint before it has time to snowball into something more detrimental to your reputation.
Answer Questions
92% of industry professionals have acquired a new customer through social media. (Source: American Express)
This should give you all the more reason to stay on top of your social media interactions.
If your customers, potential or existing, are asking questions about your product or service via social media, who better to answer them than you?
Not only will this type of interaction boost your credibility, but it has the ability to enhance user experience and cultivate customer retention.
The @HiltonSuggests account on Twitter does an excellent job prowling the Twittersphere for questions waiting to be answered. While they respond back to any and all mentions they receive, they also make an effort to respond to traveling people who may not be guests at their hotel, but are simply in need of advice.
Through strong social media monitoring, @HiltonSuggests is able to build powerful top-of-the-mind awareness for their brand, which will ultimately result in a steady stream of new customers, and satisfied returning customers.
Share Positive Feedback
If you're not effectively monitoring your social media accounts, it's likely that you are overlooking valuable customer feedback.
According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research, 90% percent of respondents claimed that positive online reviews influenced buying decisions.
If your customers are taking the time out of their day to give you positive feedback, take advantage of it! Not only should you be thanking them for their kind words, but you should be sharing their kind words.
When it comes down to it, people love to hear what other people have to say about a product or service. Starbucks, for example, has a ton of great customer feedback surround their new Caramel Flan Latte:
When it comes to feedback worth sharing, a social media monitoring tool make it easy to uncover the right interactions in real-time.
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