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Social media has become a powerful digital human capital, access to which provides opportunities for business development of various scales.

According to the latest Global Digital 2023 report, social networks have 4.76 billion users. Statіsta data also shows 140 billion dollars in total revenue in the social media market in 2023. Forecasts predict the revenue to grow to 183 billion dollars in 2027. These figures only confirm that social media is not merely a supplement but a full-fledged marketing and communication channel. Businesses should consider investing in and monitoring the effectiveness of their social media activity to establish the course of future action.

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring tracks mentions and sentiments of your audience and industry by collecting and analyzing keywords, trends, and hashtags related to your brand, product, and market in general.

Tracking social media communications helps you obtain data for refining your products and services, improving customer service and finding new customers, and developing a content and marketing strategy.

Social media monitoring implementation

Let us look closer at how a business can use social media monitoring data to accomplish its objectives.

Tracking brand mentions

A social media mention is a keyword, a hashtag, a brand name, or a competitor you are tracking. LOOQME hub shows you all data gathered in one place as a list of filtered results with analytics.

By monitoring social media, you can:

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• Discover mentions of your brand or company in real-time. Tracking social media mentions with the help of monitoring allows you to respond promptly to all communication challenges your brand might be facing.
• Find and respond to negative mentions quickly and effectively. Monitor not only negative mentions on your pages, but also collect posts, messages, and publications in open groups, influencer pages, and personal user pages. A quick reaction to negativity on social media helps brands avoid potential crises and scandals of various levels of complexity.
• Identify positive mentions of your brand and use them to strengthen your image and promotion. Working with positive feedback is more reassuring. Positive mentions on social media can be used internally, for example, to improve the promotion strategy or develop new communication messages, and externally - to integrate feedback into your content or share it in your communication channels.

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Competitor tracking on social media

Competitor tracking helps you identify key market trends and predict potential spikes in demand for your products or services. With social media monitoring data, you can see yourself in the context of the market and compare it with competitors.

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By monitoring your competitors' social media, you can:

• Learn about new products or services that competitors are launching. Track announcements on social media, presentations of new products, improvements to existing products and services of competitors, and stay updated on what is happening on the market.
• Analyze their marketing and audience engagement strategies. Social media marketing has many opportunities for each brand. Track the effectiveness of successful activities of competitors on social media and implement their experiences in your marketing plans.
• Improve work with feedback. You can decide how much negativity is acceptable and see how far it can go. You have the opportunity to look at competitors from the point of view of a customer to see what consumers criticize them for and what topics prove to be more and less sensitive.

To monitor the social media of your competitors and the industry, besides focusing on market leaders, we recommend looking at businesses in approximately the same economic stage of development.

Audience sentiment analysis

Each brand, person, or product in the information field has its emotional content. You can trace it on social media, where the audience posts positive or negative reactions, writes comments with recommendations or complaints, expresses admiration or criticism in personal posts by tagging a brand, product, company, or person, creates popular hashtags with positive or a negative tone about an event, product, or phenomenon that was liked or, on the contrary, caused anger.

In addition to the positive and negative tone, the brand needs to monitor the level of neutrality on social media. If mentions are few and mostly neutral, you should consider whether your audience is sufficiently informed about your service or product.

Social media monitoring helps businesses:

• Identify the audience sentiment and attitude to products, brands, or topics;
• Track user reactions to various marketing campaigns, PR campaigns, or news;
• Understand the reaction to your content so that you can improve it for greater effectiveness;
• Respond to changing audience sentiment and adapt your marketing strategy.

By understanding audience sentiment, a business can adjust its marketing development strategy and assess the effectiveness of its communication with customers on social media.

Search for influencers

Influencers are an effective channel for additional contact with your audience. The successful choice of a thought leader allows the brand to expand the field of communication with the target audience and gain valuable insights from cooperation to plan future integrations and activities.

Social media monitoring while working with opinion leaders helps you:

• Find influencers in a specific industry. With social media monitoring, you can see the influencers in your niche and easily reach out to them.
• Analyze the activity and popularity of influencers. With this data, you will identify the opinion leaders suitable for cooperation and understand what you will get from this interaction.
• Collaborate to promote your products or services. Influencers can increase your conversion rates because their audience, while looking for products or services, also believes that if particular influencers recommend you, they trust you as a brand.

Tracking trends

Social media monitoring will allow you to identify the main trends and tendencies of your industry and discover your audience’s preferences. You can then use relevant hashtags and keywords to increase reach and better target audience sentiment. For example, by searching for keywords or hashtags, you can track the popular type of video content for your audience, better understand their preferences, or more deeply analyze the brand's tone of voice by evaluating the characteristics of different media and their audience.

You can also use the obtained data to create content that will attract the audience. Content created based on audience preferences is easier to promote and leads to better engagement on social media.

Industry trends, buzzwords, and hashtags can also help predict future product demand, improve products or services, and develop marketing and communications strategies.

What are the social media monitoring objectives?

Most medium-sized and large businesses are present on at least two social media, where they publish their content and receive part of the mentions from the audience. The audience interacts with this content or produces new content in its posts, comments, reviews, reposts, likes, hashtags, and buzzwords. You can implement a successful social media monitoring strategy using the LOOQME hub, which helps track the entire set of business mentions.

Let us briefly summarize the business objectives of social media monitoring:

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• Crisis management. Tracking positive and negative mentions in real-time makes it possible to quickly find and resolve conflicts and scandals at the onset, preventing this negativity from growing into a crisis.
• Customer service. You cannot build a customer-centered service without a quick response to reviews and comments on social media. Both positive and negative messages require a response, as they all make up your content capital, which affects the image and reputation of the brand. Monitoring helps to identify client content in time and react to it instantly.
• Brand reputation. Reputation online is much more fragile than offline because it is much easier to taint it. Thanks to monitoring, it is possible to minimize the risks of damaging the reputation, and if such cases indeed occur, react accordingly in the initial stages of the crisis.
• Content creation. By understanding your customers’ sentiments and preferences, the brand can give them what they want. Tracking trending words and hashtags is especially relevant here.
• Tracking the effectiveness of campaigns. With the help of monitoring, you can evaluate the success of your activity or advertising integration on social media and identify its strengths and weaknesses.
• Trends and demographics. Social media monitoring helps you better understand your audience, its preferences, and localization.

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