Social media marketing for brands in today’s age is a no-brainer. It helps you reach out to potential customers with a click and raise brand awareness, among other benefits. In 2021, due to the coronavirus pandemic, leading social platforms saw an increase in monthly active users worldwide.
Platforms like Pinterest, Tik Tok, and Reddit saw an increase of over 30% in active monthly users. This means both challenges and opportunities exist for brands online, especially their sales and product teams.
However, this also translates into untapped data for brands which is only possible to gather through social media monitoring and listening. On average, internet users spend about 144 minutes daily on social media. This means conversations, reviews, insights, and feedback for brands if they’re using social media monitoring as part of their strategy.
In this article, we cover what is social media monitoring and how it informs your sales and product teams to lead to better business, product, and marketing decisions! Let’s begin.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Whether or not you’re an established brand, you can benefit from social media monitoring. Countless conversations regarding your brand are happening online. Social media monitoring is about tracking those conversations and brand mentions and responding to relevant questions and queries.
Now you may be wondering what’s to track because anytime a user mentions your brand, they will tag you. However, that isn’t always the case. Not everyone may tag your brand or spell it correctly leading to many mentions getting lost on the internet and not reaching you.
Social media monitoring specifically helps tackle this problem by allowing you to track each and every mention of your brand across various platforms that you choose to monitor. A social media monitoring tool like Notifier helps you track and respond to your mentions across various platforms. See for yourself through a free-trial starting today!
How Social Media Monitoring Informs your Sales Team
Social media monitoring is very beneficial for sales teams to find leads, gather insights, build strategies to convert those leads, and grow the business. Let’s take a look at all these benefits in detail below:
Find and Track Leads
Social media monitoring and listening can help sales teams identify leads. Important conversations are happening across platforms and today being “too salesy” just doesn’t cut it. Sales have to listen in and hunt for leads instead of reaching out to them directly.
For B2B businesses, 80% of all social media leads come from Linkedin. Sales teams can track relevant accounts and hashtags on Linkedin using social media monitoring tools like Notifier to find out potential clients.
For B2C, popular platforms like Facebook and Instagram have a lot of potential when it comes to finding clients. Reddit, Quora, and Twitter are others where people ask for recommendations, review products and give their feedback.
That’s a lot of ground to cover for sales teams to uncover potential leads and converting them. Social media monitoring and listening can significantly help them with their efforts.
Get Audience Insights
Through social monitoring and listening sales teams can get a lot of audience insights as well, which is crucial to develop consumer personas. If your company is in research phase of launching a new product, social monitoring can help identify consumer pain points, challenges and services or products that can bridge the gap.
Gain Competitor Insights
Along with monitoring your brand mentions, you should also monitor your competitor mentions. Chances are they are also using the same tools as you to better devise their markeitng strategies.
Customers today have a lot of choice and they are making important comparisons online. Monitoring your competitors can help you idenitfy market gaps and perhaps also educate customers to win them over. The goal with monitoring competitiors isnt to bring them down, but to put yourself in places you may be missing and helping out.
Respond Timely
Your customers are talking about you and perhaps also waiting for a response. It doesn’t reflect good on your brand to keep them hanging but what if you don’t know such conversations are taking place about you?
With social media monitoring you can avert a crisis and respond to queries online in time which can save you the embarrassment. Not responding or ignoring brand mentions online can mean a negative brand image and lost sales. Having real-time access to your brand mentions across channels means you can avail potential oppurtunities and divert a crisis.
How Social Media Monitoring Informs Product Teams
Product development is a strenuous process with many steps involved. However, with social listening, it has been made easier in several ways. Let’s talk about a few benefits of social media monitoring and how it informs products teams:
It Aids Research
Product development requires extensive research and the traditional methods have quite a few restraints. It is time consuming with a limited sample size and by the time you may get results, it may become outdated.
Social platforms are a goldmine of information for consumer facing brands as people love to talk about their favourite and not-so-favourite products online. Facebook groups, Quora, and Reddit are just a few examples where product managers can find out everything they need to related to their product and industry, if using social media listening and monitoring.
Deeper Consumer Insights
Social media monitoring helps product teams to listen to what consumers are saying related to their products, competitors’ products and industry trends. Through traditional research methods companies may have been able to find out answers to questions they could think of asking but with social listening they can find out what consumer’s want to tell.
By tracking industry and brand related keywords and trends, product teams can be on top of these insights and use them to bridge knowledge and product gaps. It gives the opportunity to gather real-time data and use it for product development.
Insights to Improve Operations
Your customers are leaving important feedback of their interaction with your brand online. Some consumers write detailed reviews outlining the good and bad of the product and their interactions with the company.
Through social media listening and monitoring product teams can use the insights to improve their product further, as well as imporve after-care services and packaging. For instance, your product may be great but lacking in after-care service response to technical glitches. If you’re monitoring your socials and hanging out at places where your consumers are hanging, you’ll be a in a better position to use those insights to improve business operations.
Social media monitoring and listening has significantly improved research and feedback processes for sales and product teams. How are you using social monitoring for your brand? Let us know in the comments below!