Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring is comparable to watching a real-time focus group. The results are candid, unfiltered and unprompted. The value to your campaign, to your products and to your larger brand image is the value of personalization. You now have the ability to influence where previously the space separating brands from their consumers created an impersonal association. Social media monitoring helps you to connect. As soon as a company connects to the end consumer on a personal level, the consumer is apt to be more loyal to your brand.
Everything is instant and almost everything is transparent. With the blink of an eye a topic can start to gain global trending traction or a gaffe can spiral out of control into a public relations catastrophe. Online and offline, social media monitoring is our greatest defense against the uncontrollable and social media monitoring is our greatest asset to maintain reasonable influence over the controllable. Part of any effective social media strategy must be a plan for monitoring social media.
No company can control everything that will happen with their brand across social media, nor should they hope to secure absolute control. Across social media, companies open themselves up for critique, just as they provide a path by which they can be praised. What this means is that every brand must have an intelligent social media monitoring capability. If you know what your publics are saying about you, you can quickly respond to negativity or equally promote positive social statements. The ability to directly interact with customers and potential customers, equally, is an asset.