Social media can be a powerful tool to improve customer loyalty and create brand ambassadors. Words like ‘involve’ and ‘engagement’ are inextricably linked to social media. As a company, you of course want other to mention your product, service or brand in a positive way. People attach a lot of value to opinions of other. This means that it is important for your company to know what is being said about you. But how do you deal with this? How can you check what is being said about you on the various social media sites? The answer to that question: monitoring.

Social Media Monitoring tools are mushrooming. This often makes it difficult to know which one to use. We have listed a few of them below:

Radian6

Radian6 is a very advance social media monitoring tool and is seen as a leading international player in the field of social media monitoring and engagement. This tool has been developed with the idea that companies should listen to the signals from the social web. It allows companies to enter into a dialog with their target group. Radian6 covers more than 100 million sources, including news websites and social networks such as Hyves and Facebook. Based on a list of keywords, all mentions of these keywords can be monitored. An important advantage of using Radian6 is the ease with which customized dashboards can be created.

Messages measured via Radian6 are automatically sorted based on their source. This makes it easy to see the size of the impact regarding a certain topic and what is being said about it. In addition, it is possible to receive realtime pop-ups so that you could, if necessary, take action immediately.

Raventools

Originally, Raven is an SEO tool. Raventools can be used to monitor keywords and rankings for SEO purposes. Meanwhile, Raventools is being used extensively for social media monitoring. Raven’s social media tools offer wide-ranging possibilities for measuring communications about a brand via the internet, for instance on blogs, Twitter and Facebook. As soon as selected keywords are mentioned on a blog or social media platform, Raven will notify you about the source and what is being said. It is possible to link sentiments (positive, neutral, negative) to these messages. This is especially useful for being alerted on any negative news.

Hootsuite

To a certain extend, Hootsuite looks a lot like well known Tweetdeck. Hootsuite is a social media management tool to manage multiple social media profiles simultaneously. The basic version of Hootsuite is free and allows you to manage a maximum of 5 profiles. Their dashboards are clear and can be fully customized based on your own wishes. This social management tool allows you to send messages to all channels at the same time or to separate channels, all from within the same interface. In addition, Hootsuite allows for sending automated updates on preselected times.

Hootsuite also enables you to analyze the performance of several accounts through reports. You can link these reports to Google Analytics which could result in some very interesting insights.

The ‘Klout’

But what do you do once you find out that negative news about your product, service or brand is being spread via social media? When should you respond in order to prevent further negative word of mouth from spreading? People say a lot on Twitter. An opinion or remark of an influential person can be a lot more valuable than the same opinion or remark coming from a person that no one follows or someone that is considered totally irrelevant. The reach and importance of a person can be measured by the number of followers. However, this is not the only important component. What is at least as important is the value of the opinion of the person. How often has this tweet been read, retweeted, answered, and how influential is this person’s network? In order to determine the true value of a person on Twitter, a score called ‘Klout‘ has been created. This score can be interesting for customer relationship management. It allows you to determine which of your customers are the most influential. Knowing this allows you to involve them in the development of you website, or use them to attract new customers by using special offers.

As you can see, it is not just important what is being said, but also by whom. For this reason you should monitor what is being said about your company, brand, product or service and respond when needed. Surely there are many more social media monitoring tools that you can use. Would you like to know more about such tools? Please contact Onetomarket.