10 Ways Social Media Monitoring Can Help Your Business

Whether you've been utilizing social networking for your business or are just getting started, you've probably noticed that there is always a lot going on. Because social networks are so active, plenty of businesses feel a little overwhelmed in terms of staying on top of everything. If you're in a similar situation, social media monitoring can be extremely useful. To understand exactly why, let's look at ten reasons right now:

Find Leads

The best leads are people who are currently in need of exactly what your business offers. And since social networking is a real-time medium, being able to instantly find those conversations can do a lot in terms of generating leads.

Hone Pitches

Not only are relevant conversations very useful for generating leads, but they also help you understand how people talk about what you're selling. With that insight, you can better hone your marketing messages to connect with the right prospects.

Identify Influencers

A big part of social media marketing is trying to get your content and brand in front of the right audiences. Since influencers can help a lot in that department, it's worth taking the time to build a relationship with them. Monitoring tools make it simple to determine which users are considered authorities within your industry.

Handle Complaints

Being able to respond and resolve someone's problem as soon as they post it online can instantly change their negative experience with your business into a positive one.

Measure ROI

As a business, you want to get a return on the time you invest into social networking. While that used to be quite difficult to determine, social media monitoring means that it's now possible to pinpoint exactly how much your business is benefiting from what you're doing with social network.

Optimize Your Efforts

Having a social media dashboard that presents you with easy to digest data means you'll quickly be able to understand which of your social networking efforts are driving the most results.

Learn More About Competitors

With the right brand monitoring tool, you can easily stay on top of what's being said about your business, as well as what social media users are saying about your competitors. This will make it easy to see what they're doing right, and the areas where they're dropping the ball.

Get Feedback

Being tapped into social media conversations is an excellent way to get actionable feedback about your products and services.

Build Your Brand

Since monitoring is generally part of a social network engagement strategy, having this type of consistent activity means that you will become more visible, as well as establish your brand as one that cares about engaging with its customers.

Protect Your Reputation

If someone has any type of problem with your business and decides to post about it, being aware of that post as soon as it goes live means you can get on top of that situation before it blows up into a much bigger problem.

As you can see from the above list, using social networking platforms for marketing without having any type of social media monitoring is a lot like flying blind. Since that can be very frustrating and limit the results your business gets from marketing through social network, utilizing the right social media monitoring tool is a very wise decision.

This is the syndicated copy of an original article posted at SendSocialMedia.com. Interested in learning more? Visit SendSocialMedia.com/blog

I am Nigel Miller. I work with SendSocialMedia.Com as a VP Sales & Marketing.