Why monitor Social Media?

Measuring Marketing effectiveness

Marketing managers are spending huge amounts of money online and want to understand the impact of their marketing campaigns. A good marketing strategy should create positive conversations both online and offline.

By measuring conversation levels in social media and their sentiment, companies can see if their marketing strategies that are successful and take appropriate counter-measures to make sure the market gets balanced information on their products.

Manage crisis pro-actively

There are numerous cases where companies have been caught off-guard by issues that emerged in social media, escalated and then snowballed out of control. Dell Hell began with a single post by Jeff Jarvis. Motrin Moms was a campaign launched in blogs and on Twitter. Listening to social media by keeping an eye on the levels of buzz and sentiment around your brands and products will help you detect any issues that could impact you, your brands and even your competitors. Early detection of negative discussions and issues is essential for effective crisis management. Online monitoring can help you proactively avoid and diffuse problems that may otherwise severely impact your business.

Do effective online public relations

PR departments are responsible for consistent communication with their stakeholders. A company’s main stakeholders are online. More and more companies develop communication strategies that take into account the powerful online influencers, and ensure that they listen and talk to them on an ongoing basis.

Listening platforms like Attentio Brand Dashboard™ allow you to identify influencers and monitor them closely; enabling ongoing communication with them. PR departments can also measure the impact of their activities.

Benchmark your competition

Potential buyers compare products, their features, advantages/disadvantages and the reasons for buying a particular brand. And potential and past buyers might recommend products or services for specific purposes; they share the best locations for bargains and discuss their experiences. Monitoring your competitors is fundamental to staying ahead in the game. Are your strategies really helping them to hold on to competitive ground?

Listening tools help marketing managers understand their products’ share of online conversations compared to their close competitors and help them understand the reasons why they are winning or loosing the competitive edge.

Identify new market opportunities

Listening online can help you identify new messages, new audiences, ambassadors and more:

People might be using your product in ways you had not considered, or might be recommending your brand for reasons you were not aware.

They might ask for support and assistance online that shows flaws your product department did not know about. Many brands have been surprised to find online fan sites that were acting as their ambassadors, without the marketing departments knowing...

Get market insights in the most cost effective manner

It is more cost effective to collect opinions and structure them into insights by listening to social media compared to traditional market surveys. Information is also readily available when the marketing managers need it. It is available by simply logging into the Attentio Brand Dashboard™.

Market research companies know this, but still focus on more expensive methods to protect their margins. The truth is that social media provides similar insights in less time and at less cost. More and more companies are using social media analysis to drive and adapt their marketing activities including panning, measuring effectiveness and preparing product launch strategies.