Everyone in your firm has left for the evening. You log in
to Facebook, go to your best client’s page and read the day’s posts. Are you
spying on your client?
The answer is no. This isn’t spying because the information you’re
reading was made available to the public by your client. However, following
your clients and reading the information they make available on their social
media accounts (also known as social media monitoring) can be very valuable.
The same goes for monitoring your competitors.
Following your clients’ Facebook and LinkedIn posts along
with their tweets and blogs can tell you what they’re thinking, doing or
concerned about. Monitoring your clients’ posts may offer opportunities to
provide additional services or maybe just help them out by answering their technical
questions.
What Is Social Media
Monitoring?
Wikipedia defines Social Media Monitoring as “an active
monitoring of social media channels for information about a company or
organization, usually tracking of various social media content such as blogs,
wikis, news sites, micro-blogs such as Twitter, social networking sites,
video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user-generated
content in general as a way to determine the volume and sentiment of online
conversation about a brand or topic.”
Which Social Media
Sites Should You Use?
There are a multitude of social medial sites and that number
grows daily, so don’t try to include them all. Select a limited number to
follow at first,-perhaps three or four. Once you have had some experience
monitoring your clients you can consider increasing the number of sites.
Some Recommended
Sites
Here are some sites you should consider including as part of
your social media monitoring:
- Facebook is
reported to have over 1.28 billion active monthly users. It should
definitely be included in any social media monitoring program.
- LinkedIn says that
they have 300 million active users. This is an excellent site for business
and professional monitoring.
- Twitter says they
have approximately 645 million active users who send over 500 million
tweets of no more than 140 character text-based messages each day.
- YouTube is a video
sharing website that purports to have more than 1 billion visitors each
month worldwide.
However, it is not enough just to join Facebook and
Linked-In and create Twitter and YouTube accounts. Because of the massive
amounts of data created by internet conversations you need to determine what your
goals are as they relate to your social media monitoring. Then you should review
the results of your monitoring to see if your goals are being met.
Collecting and Using
the Data
Trying to manually accumulate and digest the volume of
information generated from only four social media accounts would be like trying
to drink from a fire hose. However, collecting the data is the easy part; the
real challenge is analyzing the data and knowing how to use the results.
Obviously attempting to collect data one tweet or Facebook
post at a time is a daunting task. Instead, you can enlist the services of a
professional monitoring or listening tool to find content ideas, communities,
and advocates for your brands. Technology companies may also get social data
from data resellers, like DataSift. Some of the more popular platforms include:
- NUVI
- Sprout Social
- TweetDeck
- Spredfast
- Netbase
- Brand Watch
Because of privacy issues, even the professional listening
tools may not be able to find and access all social media conversations and
include them in their analysis.
Once you select a professional monitoring tool, identify the
words and phrases that apply to your clients. Next you should identify your
client’s key influencers. These are individuals who may be authorities in
fields in which your firm provides services.
Getting the Right
Tone
When posting on social media, be careful to address your
clients’ needs as you would if they were your next door neighbor rather than
trying to sell them something. Be sure that you:
- Don’t post the same content
from one site to another. Remember your clients may be on both sites.
- Control the urge to
“market” to your clients.
- Monitor your clients’ posts
and try to meet their needs.
- Create content that
benefits your customers and that they will want to share with others.
- Focus on the needs of your
customer and not on those of your firm.
The benefits of social media monitoring can’t be overlooked.
Engaging in social media monitoring is a required activity if you’re going to
keep up with your competition.
What do you think?
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