Monitoring your business’ social media presence is incredibly important. You need to respond to
people talking about your brand and understand how people view your company. Social media isn’t this magical fairy dust that makes business leads come rushing in for your company. It’s hard work! It requires time and effort, often across multiple departments and amongst multiple employees.
Without a solid plans, social media can run away with your day. While keeping tabs on things is important, we know that your day is full of other important tasks so we want to help you streamline your social. Is it really possible to effectively monitor your social media presence in just 10 minutes a day? We’ll show you how.
Why Monitoring Matters
One of the main reasons why monitoring is important is because social media is meant to be social. All of those avatars are real people who expect a response if they engage you. The faster you can respond, the better their impression of your brand. Also, keeping an eye on what your audience is talking about can give you insight into what they want from you and your channel. Otherwise, your brand may just be screaming into the void.
Monitoring is also a great way to be sensitive to avoid disaster. If there’s a local or national tragedy, being one of the first to know means you can pause your social to avoid looking insensitive.
People talk about brands 24/7 on platforms like Facebook and Twitter – you, your competitors, your industry, your employees – whether you like it or not so monitoring to see what people are buzzing about is important.
Who Should Monitor
It might be tempting to hand off social media monitoring to the intern or the marketing department but it should really be a team effort. Public relations need to consider the brand’s voice and tone. Marketing wants to generate leads and sales. Customer service wants to resolve any issues before they spread. Unless your business is a one-man show, you’ll want to involve your team to monitor the different aspects related to their niche.
Listening & Responding
If you get inundated with comments and mentions, you might find it overwhelming. You’ve only alloted 10 minutes so you want to make it effective. Who do you respond to first? The trick is to seek out the influencers. Take a quick look at the number of followers they have and how often they post. If the post has begun to be shared, even if the original poster has a small number of followers, this would also bump it up the priority list. You want to get out in front of any complaints.
When responding, make sure you:
- Respond promptly and accurately.
- Show gratitude and respect. Never respond in an offensive or defensive way.
- Include facts instead of opinions and link to factual reference materials to support your case.
- Respond in a tone/voice that reflects the company’s culture and values.
- Let the person know how you’re connected to the company
Our ebook also has a handy chart to help you decide if you should respond to a post or let it slide. Download it now to check it out.
Setting Your Goals
Now that you know why you should monitor, who should monitor, and a few basics for how to go about doing it, it’s time to set some goals. Goals keep us focused and can help us determine how effective we are. When dealing with social media strategy it’s best to set SMART goals:
- Specific – use real numbers with real deadlines
- Measurable – make sure that you can track your goal
- Attainable – know what’s possible within your deadline and set your goal in those limits
- Realistic – be honest with yourself
- Timely – set a deadline
Want some examples of SMART goals you can set for your social media? Check out Chapter 4 in our ebook.
Prepping Your New Routine
In order to keep all this under 10 minutes a day, you’ll need to have some things prepared in advance. Using a third party tool to corral everything into one place is one way we love to streamline social media monitoring. This way you don’t need to load up and log into multiple sites. Finding a tool that will also track social mentions, leads, and opportunities is key. The value here is not only in the ability to both monitor and react within the tool itself, but to also track how those conversations integrate with your entire marketing strategy.
If you don’t want to go with a paid, all-in-one tool like HubSpot, there are some freebies out there. We break it all down by platform in our ebook. Download it to today to find out how you can use tools like Google Alerts to supercharge your social media monitoring.
Want even more? We also have a 10-minute social media monitoring checklist in our ebook so that you can see our breakdown of what tasks are included and how long each should take.
Final Thought
As time goes by and you develop better and more effective social media habits, you should make sure you also have a system in place to measure your success. (After all, you want data to prove those golden ten minutes are paying off, right?)
Reflect on your goals. If your goal was marketing-related, you should use tools like Google Analytics, HubSpot, or another tool to monitor the amount of traffic, leads, and customers you’re generating through social media channels as a result of your efforts.
If thought leadership was one of your goals, has there been an increase in the volume of blog and news articles written about your company? Has there been an increase in links? Links are a fantastic indication that people are using you as a resource and want to send their readers to your content. (And it’s a double win for SEO!)
No matter what the goal, be sure to monitor your metrics over time. If you decide to begin spending more than just ten minutes into your social media monitoring efforts, your success should correlate with the additional work you’re putting in!
Want to talk social media monitoring and strategy over a coffee? We’re up for that!
