Social media can facilitate the creation and exchange of information, ideas, and other interests. It can allow a business a greater understanding of its current audience and can help to reach a larger crowd. Using social media, you can build your brand, connect with your audience, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
Consequently, monitoring social media can aid in the understanding of your clients, what they want, and provide information on competitors. The information that you can gain from social media monitoring will allow your product team to have a greater focus on what is important to your customers, it can aid product management, user experience, and product analytics. The sales team can also benefit from the data and as it can help them better understand current and prospective customers and how to convert these.
Audience
Social media allows you a special insight into your customers. It can allow a business to understand the group that they reach and compare that with the group of individuals that purchase, impressions, and click-throughs are one example of this. You may know the typical statistics on your target demographic. Social media monitoring allows you to go deeper than statistics, you can learn so much more about the individuals that trust your business. What makes them tick, what features are they looking for, what do they not like, what problems they are facing. This kind of information is integral to a product team, it can help with road mapping and prioritizing.
Furthermore, what kind of marketing do your customers respond best to, can you switch up your strategies to incorporate this. Also, if prospective customers follow you, or other similar brands, you can analyses what it will take for them to go from observer to customer and in turn, increase sales. The sales team can use this information to finetune their strategies and introduce new ones to maximize sales.
Monitoring social media can also give you a better idea of how your customers hear about you. Word of mouth and email marketing are still effective methods, however social media spans across different platforms and mediums. Have you spent a lot of money on Facebook ads, but don’t know if this is the most effective platform for you and your customers? Analyzing this data can show you which channels perform best, and then spend more time on these methods.
User Research
Monitoring social media can provide the product team with data on what features of a product are or aren’t working well, it can act as user research. Customers often take their opinions to social media which can be both positive and negative to your business. If customers are praising your product or service online, then this response will increase your reach. Good service may mean that customers are posting your product, which is essentially free advertising, you could even create a new marketing stream from this, e.g., discount codes.
Conversely, if the feedback is negative, it is reaching a large audience, and you have little control over user opinion. Do not fret, you can use this to make improvements or add features. You can also turn negative feedback into a positive through reaching out and engaging with negative comments and providing support, managing the brands’ reputation.
Competitors
You can use social media monitoring tools to track your competitors; shared keywords or phrasing. Expand the tracking of words related to your industry. Keeping a close eye on what your competition is up to as well as helping you to keep up to date with current trends and how you can incorporate them in your business. How are competitors driving sales, are they introducing new products, or have they changed their marketing strategy? Using social monitoring, you can plan accordingly. Can your sales team mimic the competitor’s new strategy, can it provide them with a fresh take or some new ideas. Whilst you may not know the direct effect on sales their changes have made, you can take inspiration from their customers, format, etc. You can also monitor their audience and trends within them. Are the customers happy with the service they are receiving from the competitor, you can use their complaints and praise to improve your product. This information will benefit your product team greatly, the competitors’ downfalls, can now become your strongest features.
Communication
Social media makes it much easier for a business to interact with its customers. Whether that is through a direct message query or via the comment sections on platforms, regularly monitoring this can allow you to quickly respond to their needs. Customers love when brands reach out and respond to these queries, doing this publicly will show your customers that they are important and that you are listening to them. This increase in brand loyalty can drive new customers in, as they can see how you communicate. Social media can also help you to communicate with your customers, what new products or features you are planning to add, and provide early indicators to make it successful, which will benefit the product team. Furthermore, this fact can allow you to understand more of the user journey; how your current customers are using the product or service, and reveal user behaviors and pain points.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring can be a very successful tool that will enable a greater understanding of your users. It provides excellent insight into the competitive landscape. If your business is not currently utilizing this fantastic tool, your product and sales team should invest in it now. The information is priceless and can give you clear answers into taking your business to the next level. If you are currently monitoring your social media, you can improve your metrics by looking into your competitors or expanding which social media you are currently monitoring. Your customers are giving you this information, use it.
