Monitoring Social Media: Is it Worth it?
Launch a campaign with a tracking application to measure your growth. If you don’t have one, you cannot gauge your social reach. It shows what type of posts work best for your brand and helps you think of topics that will get attention.
Use social media monitoring tools (SMM) to find out how your campaigns are doing. Are they attracting enough returns on your published posts? How are people reacting and interacting with your brand online? Are they giving positive feedback or complaining about the ‘lousy’ service they receive? With social media monitoring, you don’t have to manually track each tweet, retweet, reply or mention of your posted articles. If you track each user’s reaction, the amount of cluttered data might overwhelm you.
A social monitoring tool will arrange all the data in one dashboard. Information gathering of every post about your brand is continuous. This aids you in evaluating, gauging and connecting with your audience. Make use of free social media monitoring applications to start tracking customer conversations about your business. This will help you strengthen your social media presence and enable you to connect more with your fans and followers, one at a time.
It’s important you observe how your posts fare as soon as you publish them. Social media monitoring lets you track your competitors’ present strategy and anticipate their future policies; know your prospective sale leads and find ways to improve your business approaches.
Here are some free tools you can use:
1. Social Mention – a social analysis platform that lets page administrators gather data about users’ generated content. It allows web admin to monitor and record what people are currently saying about your company, brand, product or any topic. This analytics application can also track more than 100 social media sites.
2. Wildfire – This software makes it easy for page managers to track leads, handle notifications and campaign promotion progress. User demographics can also be generated, as well as day-to-day page views and comment counters.
3. HootSuite–a social media management system that lets organizations mobilize campaigns across social networks from one dashboard. This free tool also allows you to establish a good relationship with your audience, and schedule updates on profiles.
4. Google Alerts – tracks the web for new content. This application provides the latest Google results on news stories, competitors and industries. It will ask you for keywords and phrases to watch out for, and will send updates on time frames you can set.
5. Boardreader – functions as a search engine to find information from the web’s forums and message boards. This application can search multiple message boards and allow people to share information through global means.
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