As the Internet took over the role of being the primary source of information, it became a necessity for many industries to recognize numerous opportunities provided for their business online. Media monitoring and social media listening tools can identify those opportunities. By filtering enormous amounts of data they find posts, tweets, and articles most relevant to your company.
Even the companies that utilize such tools (although many still don’t), don’t use them to their full potential. With a bit of creativity, various departments in a company can use (social) media monitoring to improve their performance. Here are some ideas for their application:
1. Public Relations
Be in the (k)now
The Internet has made a revolution in the way many industries do their business, including Public Relations. Almost everything PR did before the Internet is now digitalized and advanced. Luckily, the tools PR agents use nowadays are also much quicker and enable them to do their job more efficiently.
Using media monitoring and social media listening tools such as Determ to track mentions of a brand or relevant topics and keywords enables PR departments to know what the media is talking about the moment it happens as they can receive real-time alerts about their topics.
Prevent Crises
If you work in PR or Marketing, you also know how important it is to react promptly to whatever is happening regarding your client and your strategy. A (potential) crisis can be completely avoided or handled more successfully if the answer to it is given in due time. Using Determ’s real-time alerts would be beneficial in these situations since it immediately alerts you if your brand or a certain topic is mentioned somewhere.
Whether you need to analyze how your company is perceived by the public, manage your company’s reputation or evaluate the success of your campaigns and marketing efforts, you can use Determ’s features such as Sentiment analysis, Share of voice, or create personalized brand reports in minutes.
Keep up with the competition
PR agents and brand managers are recommended to track mentions of their competitors at least once a day across portals and social media. By following news about your competitor’s business, you can anticipate major changes that could affect your own business.
For example, your competitors might announce that they are reducing the price of their product, thus making yours seem unreasonable. This would be a good moment to consider if you are willing to lower yours too, or perhaps come up with a communication strategy with a goal of keeping your customers by highlighting the benefits of your product despite the higher cost.
The priority is not to know about something the exact moment it happened. Rather stay on top of everything so you know when and if to react and adjust.
2. Marketing
Find influencers to work with
By using Determ, you could easily find influencers relevant to your brand and whose followers are your target audience. In order to do so, it would be a good idea to track mentions of your industry or keywords relevant to your niche. When tracking a topic
, the tool will automatically show you the top influencers who are posting about it the most. Choosing the right one to promote your brand can give a great boost to your ROI.
For example, we’ve set Determ to track the hashtag #PublicRelations. After the tool has gathered data across various platforms, it will list all the users and media talking about the chosen topic and sort them by the number of mentions, source, sentiment and reach.
Easily track user-generated content
Another benefit for the Marketing department is finding user-generated content – a way to turn customers into brand advocates. When a customer is happy with your product, he or she might naturally want to share his experience with friends and followers. This might be in a form of a blog post, status update, tweet, video or picture and so on. The important thing is, the user himself created content that can be used to promote your brand.
For example, if you have a clothing brand, your customer might post a picture of themselves wearing your items. Reposting their picture (with their prior consent, of course) would expose their content to your audience in a way that is genuine and non-advertorial. It also encourages more engagement than promotional posts. On the other hand, you are also providing more exposure for them which makes this a win-win situation.
Since many users trust other consumers’ recommendations more than brands’, this can be a great way to get more new customers and reach a wider audience. It’s an extremely effective and affordable way to do so, too.
Read PR vs Marketing: 5 Main Differences Explained (And Compared)
3. Sales
Track people looking for recommendations
The Sales team can also use media monitoring and social media listening tools to their advantage. Many companies are being creative with their sales enablement process by identifying what people are looking for online.
People tend to search for recommendations and opinions about a certain product or a service before deciding to buy it or become a user, and they often do so by asking their friends or online followers. Research shows that 91 percent of people regularly or occasionally read online reviews, and 84 percent trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation.
Whether it’s someone looking for advice on your product or searching for a recommendation in general, using social media monitoring means you can find these mentions. As a result, you could potentially convert their authors to your new customers. You could track your brand and phrases such as “where can I buy” or “do you recommend”. Then, tune in and do your magic as a salesperson.
2. An example of a brand that is not mentioned directly, but is tracking their mentions on Twitter and hence can engage with the user.
Gain insights into your competitors’ shortcomings
It would also be a good idea to track your competitors’ mentions, as they can give you insights into what their customers might be unsatisfied about. If your product can give a solution to their problem, you can engage with the customer. Explain how using your product or service would be more beneficial to them.
Gaining insights into your (potential) customers’ needs could give you suggestions on new leads to follow or improvements that could be made on your overall advertising strategy.
4. Customer service
Improve customer satisfaction and your product
No matter how much effort you put into your product or service, some people will still have a bad experience with it. This is where the Customer service steps in. If an unhappy customer feels like you’re putting effort into finding a solution to his problem, he is more likely to continue using your product.
However, dissatisfied customers don’t always directly contact the Customer service. They often voice their issues on social media outlets, forums, and blogs. Negative reviews and recommendations can affect your business, so it is important to identify them promptly.
3. A brand resolving an issue by directly responding to a tweet by their customer.
You can do this easily by tracking mentions of your product or service and how your customers perceive it to find possible user complaints and respond to them.
Customer feedback can also be used to further improve your product by determining its strengths and shortcomings and then sharing that data with any department of your company that can help in the process.
5. Human resources
Position yourself as a desirable employer
Not only PR and Marketing departments benefit from having insights on the public image of a company. HR professionals can also use this data to manage their employer branding strategy. If you know how the public perceives your company as an employer, you can improve your efforts to appeal to the exact target of people you wish to recruit.
Make your recruitment process easier
Finding new employees is one of the most important tasks an HR professional takes care of. Choosing the right person for a certain position is a challenge in itself, but discovering them is a true skill. Using a media monitoring tool can make this process much easier. You can track people sharing their interest in finding a job or dissatisfaction with their current position. Likewise, you can search for those who have just finished college and are on a lookout for a traineeship.
As in any industry, it’s important to stay on top of trends and developments in HR. Tracking news or new rules and regulations will surely help your business grow and stay updated and fresh.
6. Management
Monitor your company’s progress and industry news
CEOs and Management members can track their company to get daily insights into the company’s performance and progress. A good practice is to also keep up with what your competitors are doing and planning. Hence, you can adjust your strategy in time.
Finally, monitoring industry news and trends is a must. Track a few key sources such as the major economy, finance and news portals relevant to your company in order to gain an overall market overview and make business decisions based on relevant data and knowledge.
The starting point
So, now you’re acquainted with various ways your company could benefit from using Determ. Let’s summarize the main topics every company is recommended to track:
- The brand/company name
- Key company figure(s)
- Your product(s)
- Your competitor(s)
- Relevant keywords to identify influencers
- Relevant media outlets to track industry news
This will make for a great foundation and provide valuable data on which you can further build on and track more specific topics, according to your needs and goals. Therefore, media monitoring and social media listening tools can be assets of great value to your company. The options of their utilization go far beyond the usual misconception that only the PR department should use one.
Want to maximize your company’s performance? Book a demo and try Determ.