Businesses across the world have been using social media to market their wares for well over a decade now, but it seems there are many of us who are not quite sure how to measure how much impact their campaigns have.
What doesn’t help is the way that the industry seems to move the goal posts every time everyone gets comfortable with their way of checking the metrics.
Why Is monitoring social media campaigns important?
Social media data monitoring can help a marketing team track a number of different key aspects of how and where a post is shared and interacted with, showing its relative success compared with other campaigns run and helping teams to plan their next ideas.
This helps to make more informed decisions for future campaigns and posts. You can identify where your content did well and where it didn’t. This information can help you to build a continually improving social media strategy.
We all know that social media can be a highly effective tool for marketing businesses of all sectors, as there are a massive number of consumers who use many platforms on an almost daily basis.
Of course, social media is not about brands but about sharing, and those businesses that use social media most effectively are those that create content that compels users to share and help spread their message across the web.
Unlike almost any other form of marketing, once a post is out there, its final destination and interactions with users are unpredictable, as is the shelf life.
Listening for the Whale Song Among the Noise
Unfortunately, social media marketing comes with a lot of background noise.
Any business that has dipped its toes into the waters of social media is sure to have had replies from bots and other spam accounts, boosting numbers but making no difference to the business in any tangible way.
Social media data monitoring can help to identify patterns and reduce the impact that spoof accounts have on marketing, leaving marketers free to deal with real live interactions, analysing these to see where the real leads are coming from.
In addition to the spam bots, are the trolls who should also be ignored.
Real-time monitoring will separate the real comments, be they positive or negative, from the rest, allowing businesses to communicate with those who need time and attention to be given to them.
Better understand your audience
Whilst activities such as social media listening are important to look at the audience themselves, it tells you little about the success or otherwise of campaigns.
Any good marketing strategy should look at combining the activities of listening and monitoring to track what their audience is up to and into whilst also drilling into the numbers of shares and interactions their campaigns are receiving.
Ensuring a social media campaign is monitored effectively is the only way to evaluate its worth whilst also helping to plan all manner of aspects of the next campaign, including which platforms work best and which times of day provide most impact for the business, allowing for even greater penetration next time out.
Meet the team at Crowdify who are helping clients to expand and improve their social channel with insights from social media monitoring.