How Can Social Media Monitoring Affect Customer Relationships?

1. Keeps one-step ahead with industry data

2. Offers spot-on customer support

3. Helps to learn consumer behavior

4. Improves sales growth by retaining customers

Social media platforms help improve marketing efforts by connecting businesses to a broad set of audience. Social Media Monitoring. 

1. Keeps one-step ahead with industry data

Before the inception of social media, businesses used traditional marketing techniques to promote themselves or stay updated with industry trends. However, in current times it is very difficult to upscale your brand’s presence if not through social media.

The social network has provided immense opportunities for businesses to leverage the reach of these platforms and maximize their brand’s awareness. From kids to adults, entrepreneurs to investors, beginners to professionals, this gigantic network masses users of all kinds.

A diverse community generates diverse ideas. With the help of social media monitoring tools, megabrands and businesses or companies monitor what is being said about them and their competitors.

For instance, by knowing which platform is widely popular among your audience base, you can actively participate and target those platforms to improve your marketing efforts.

You can keep up with the constant changes in the industry by tracking keywords specific to your industry. The keywords can be your brand name, industry name, competitor’s brand name, competitor’s keywords, etc.

Discovering an insight into your industry also helps you to realize a gap in your marketing efforts. For example, it can help you keep track of your and your competitors’ readiness towards a new trend or any market update.  

By determining popular platforms, industry-related mentions, competitor keywords, social media monitoring tools have enabled businesses to deploy flexible and customer-resonating ideas.

However, sometimes every information gathered by the companies is not very useful. An article published by TechCrunch indicated how data scientists at smart companies are using AI to analyze essential data. 

Smart companies now gather a minimal amount of data required for providing their services to alleviate privacy concerns among consumers.  

2. Offers spot-on customer support 

Gone are those days when brands used social media just for advertising purposes and to qualify leads. At present time, social media is one of the most powerful sources of connecting with your customers or audiences.

With a pool of audiences available on these networks, you can keep track of the consumer’s sentiment towards your industry or brands. Alongside providing sentiment analysis, social media monitoring can help you discover the complaints or grievances of your customers.

In recent years, social media has proven to be a great tool for customer service, as its reach and accessibility provide mutual benefits.

Personalized responses and better interaction indicate how much you care about your customers and want them to feel heard.

Along with providing quick responses, it is essential to remember and understand the universal fact – “customer is always right”.

The audience’s impression changes towards the brands who defend themselves instead of providing valid solutions to the customer. Answering your customers concisely and friendlily not just creates a positive impression of your brand among your customers, but also among prospects.

Snapshot from Twitter 

For example, the above image explains how Amazon Web Services (AWS) provided the customer with concise and instant solutions, leaving the customer – satisfied.

Positive responding does not just help leave a good impression, but it also concealingly helps turn the customer into a brand advocate.

Tracking mentions can be overwhelming if you are a popular brand and provide service to a larger audience. So, how are big companies and brands able to handle such a hectic task?

It is all possible with social listening and social monitoring tools. Big companies and brands utilize such tools to monitor their audiences by tracking industry-specific keywords and hashtags.

Snapshot from Twitter 

In the above image, you can see how the customer didn’t use the direct mention of AWS (Amazon Web Services), so how was the company able to respond in such less time? The answer to that is – they were listening!! They kept track of their mention and keywords to provide quick response.

Using keywords provides two other essential benefits:

• Using industry-specific keywords and hashtags can help you in increasing your brand’s visibility as it helps you get discovered in the audience’s feed.
  
  
• Another benefit of using keyword and hashtags are it can help you rank for those terms and lead traffic to your website.

However, it is important to note that using only relevant keywords and hashtags will provide you with mentioned or more benefits. Even if your content is high-quality, using irrelevant keywords and hashtags will not help your content get viral or even be found among your target audiences.

Knowing what keywords are relevant and popular among the consumers and industry requires a lot of research and accuracy. Free tools by google such as Google Trends and Google keywords planner helps you discover industry-specific keywords by region and language.

3. Deciphers consumer behavior 

In this fast-paced world, it is difficult to keep up with the constant changes in the consumption pattern of the audiences. Any industry or market calls for competitiveness, be it with your services or customer loyalty.

One mistake or a false alarm, and your competitor might be able to snatch away your customers.

Being mindful of consumers’ concerns by tracking mentions helps the brands to have more focused positioning strategies. For instance, if the customers are unhappy with your competitor’s product and services, you can quickly adapt and provide your audiences with something your competitors lack.

If there is a new trend in the industry, your social media marketing strategy must include contents that follow those trends to remain connected to your customers.

Your marketing strategy must resonate with your customers and target audiences, or else, it can bore your customers or be irrelevant.

Snapshot Social Chain (Twitter) 

In the above example, the data collected by Social Chain explains how Burger King remained updated with the audience’s behaviour and the trends on social media. In return, the customers rewarded Burger King with helping it overtake its rival.

Aggregating a huge amount of data and segmenting them down according to each social media platform, tools like Mandala Analytics helps ease the heavy load of a marketer’s task. Based on mentions, comments and engagement, you can understand what is popular and most likeable among your audience.

Mandala Analytics provides essential data from social media platforms to get a deep insight into your audience and industry. You can create a project by adding industry-specific keywords to monitor mentions based on specific periods, mention types, etc. Image source: Mandala Analytics dashboard. 

Social monitoring tools also helps to analyze the sentiment of your audiences towards your brands and competitors. For example, Mandala Analytics provides sentiment analysis. The analysis breaks down positive, negative or neutral social mentions of the audiences towards your brand.

You can access the overall mentions on a specific date from multiple social media platforms. Image source: Mandala Analytics dashboard. 

4. Improves sales growth by retaining customers 

It is difficult to gain a customer base as it takes a lot of effort and resources however, it is even more difficult to sustain it.

For example, if you have a favourite café for taking your morning coffee but they lack comfortable seating and take long to prepare your order. How long is it until you visit them? At a certain point, you might give up and look for a new place, even if it means compromising on the taste.

Likewise, to maintain a long-lasting relationship with your audience and improve sales growth, you must know your customers well enough.

Analyzing user data (updated) helps to get a deeper insight into your audience, peers and prospects.

User data includes:

1. Liked/disliked product or services from you

2. Popular social media platforms

3. A popular time of posting

4. Issues/ grievances

5. Demographics

Once you gather an update on this information, it will indicate your level of bonding with your customer.

Your relationship with your current customer can help build or break your brand’s awareness. Studies have suggested that more than half of the users share their experiences with new products or services among their friends or families. Utilize word-of-mouth marketing to build brand loyalty among your customers.

Practices such as offering rewards or coupons, sharing their customer journey on social channels, open quizzes, shootouts, birthday emails, etc., helps in keeping your customer happy.

The more engagement you attract, the more visibility your brand is likely to receive.

Alongside customer happiness, it is essential to ensure that your product and services provides customer satisfaction.  

Below examples can help you to make your customers feel satisfied:

1. Offer Q&A: Regular Q&A on social media platforms can help you uncover your audience’s grief and other issues. Social media’s features such as Twitter Q&A and Instagram’s Polls are a popular way for brands to reach out to customers and to know their level of interest, or even connect.

2. Make your content easy to share: It would be a pity if you prepare great content, but customers face difficulty in sharing it with their friends or family. Make sure to attach valid links on the social media platforms of your blogs, products, etc., to make it easier for anyone to share. 

3. Easy to buy: Add shoppable links to your posts on social media to ensure your customer doesn’t face a challenge in purchasing your product. Utilizing features from social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest’s shoppable links makes the shopping experience easier and quicker for the customers. 

Conclusion: 

So, is social media monitoring essential for long-lasting customer relationships? 

The answer to that is a resounding YES.

Monitoring social media platforms is undoubtfully important for any business to increase brand awareness, brand loyalty, and improve sales growth.  

Not just big brands, social media platforms have helped SMEs (small and medium enterprises) to better interact with their customers and promote their products and services to a broad group of people.

With its ease of usage, reach, and features, the social network has unveiled a chance for this group to gain an instant following or even an audience base.   

However, the social network is gigantic, and to not get lost in the black hole – it is essential to be equipped with resourceful tools that help ease your workload.

Social media monitoring tools allow you to stay updated, connected and relevant to your customers.

Social media monitoring tools can help you –

1. Track mentions of your brand and your competitors

2. Provide industry-specific keywords and hashtags to stay relevant

3. Able to analyze popular trends and platforms among users

4. Provide sentiment analysis to determine deeper context

5. Gather engagement rates of your audience that can help you understand the likeliness of one product or service.

Although social media can be exhausting, having such insights can save time, effort and money. Hence, social media monitoring also helps build an effective marketing campaign.

Mandala Analytics is a social analytics tool that helps you stay a step ahead in the competition by monitoring your audience and competitors.

It provides important data such as:

• Popular keywords and hashtags: This help to learn the popular terms used by audiences and competitors. 
  
  
• Geolocation: Helps to identify where your audiences are located and where is your brand most popular 
  
  
• Top channels: This helps to spot top channels and influencers
  
  
• Languages: Number of languages used by audiences 
  
  
• Time: Popular time of audiences to post, engage and interact 
  
  
• Sentiment: Track sentiment of audiences towards your brand 
  
  
• Questions: Help indicate popular queries and issues among the audiences 
  
  
• Mentions category: Breaks down the nature of mentions such as requests, compliments, complaints, profane etc. 
  
  
• Mention Type: Tells the type of mentions such as channel mentions, comments, reply comments, user comments.

Remember one thing – customer satisfaction is an utmost responsibility and with social media’s wide popularity, utilizing these platforms for better responsiveness and visibility of your brand makes perfect sense.

So, are you ready to get a deeper understanding of your audience and improve your customer relationship? Sign up for a 7-day free trial now. 

Learn more about Mandala analytics through the website.