For some, social media outreach is limited to simply creating and posting content but little do they know that the real work starts after the content is posted. It is called social media monitoring or social listening.

The objective of social listening is to track the conversations that are in any way related to your brand or industry or product. The objective of social listening is to notice relevant content and respond to it quickly.

For example, you find your brand mentioned in a tweet. On further digging, you find that the tweet was regarding an article by your brand. Second thing is that Twitter is really a great platform to generate and third is that the Twitter user could be a potential customer.

Following are the important factors that can help in social media monitoring. But it is you who need to decide which factor to choose and what things to look or monitor.

  1. Brand mentions

 Not a single tweet, post or comment with your brand with or without @ or # should get missed from your eyes. Also, you should even notice the names that match with your brands as they could be misspelled by searchers. You should check the intention of tweets like success or potential crisis to strategize your marketing.

  1. Matching terms

 Not everyone would know your brand but they could be closer to your brand. For example, take McDonald’s. People looking for burger joints will search “where I can eat burger” instead of McDonald’s. If the brand is optimized for the keyword “burger”, it will certainly have the advantage over others.

  1. Customer queries

 Today’s smart customers make decisions only after getting satisfactory answers to their queries and they give little time to brands to react. If you aren’t alert about the queries of your customers then you will certainly miss the opportunities. The best thing you can do is to set an inbox in the social media you use most and keep checking the inbox for customer queries.

  1. Competitors

 Keeping checking on your competitors to know how they are doing on social media. It is necessary because the keywords you are optimizing your brand for might show up your competitors. You need to implement unique marketing tactics, ideas and customer feedback to build your campaigns.

  1. Customer sentiment

 It is only after studying the sentiments of your customers that you will be able to understand what is preventing them from embracing your brand. They will tell what they expect from your brand and how short are you from fulfilling their desires.