Monitoring what is being said online, both by you and by others is the only reliable way of keeping your content relevant and interesting to your customers.
A combination of different channels must be employed online to reach your customers effectively, with blog posts, tweets, status updates and comments all feeding back in to the marketing plan.
Digital marketing relies heavily on analysis of past efforts on these websites and social media sites in order to predict the success of future campaigns and to gain insight into your customers.
But how do you keep track of it all?
There are two main aspects to monitoring your online presence:
- Analyse what your posts say about your brand
- Track what others are saying about you
Analyse What You’re Saying
One of the most difficult aspects of having a presence on a large number of different social networking websites is keeping tabs on all your own information.
In an ideal world, you would plan every post, Tweet and status update in advance and would keep a complete historical record and a backup of your interactions. Having a record of these interactions allows you to see what kind of content is most popular with your audience, to avoid repeating yourself and to better plan for future campaigns.
Some backup and analysis tools include:
- ThinkUp – a tool which allows you to both backup and view statistics about social media accounts
- Google Analytics Social Reports – view reports on what social content is engaging your users most
Keep Track of What Others are Saying About You
Some of the most horrific social media explosions happened because the company or brand involved did not respond to the criticism or address issues quickly enough.
Keeping an eye on your online reputation can make or break you. Some reputation management tools include:
- Google Alert – you receive an notification when a chosen keyword or phrase is mentioned online.
- Hootsuite – manage multiple profiles and keep track of when your brand is mentioned.
One Tool for Everything?
In an ideal world there would be a tool which does all of the following:
- Keeps a secure backup of every single post or interaction you make, across all online channels
- Allows these posts to be restored intact in case of emergency
- Allows you to view statistics about the types of content and interaction on your account
- Tells you when your brand is mentioned online
- Gives you an overview of the sentiment expressed about your brand
- Plan campaigns across different channels
- Schedule posts in advance and roll them out across different social media accounts
- Is completely secure and does not misuse this sensitive brand information in any way
- Is free and open source
Is there such a thing?
Very interesting Claire,
the ‘one tool for everything’ is the Holy Grail of social media,
if you stumble upon it please let me know!
Ger