Six key uses for Social Media Monitoring

Do a quick search of the Internet and you'll find a great number of useful tools for monitoring social networks, news and RSS feeds - and whilst many of them can perform quite complex searches, they are often just used to spot simple mentions of a product or organisation.

They can, however, be used for so much more - here are six classic uses of social media monitoring tools:

1 Brand monitoring

Monitoring mentions of the organisation/brand/product
Let start with the most common and the most obvious use of these tools - by setting up your monitoring systems to check for mentions of your organisation you can see how you are perceived in the world, receive candid feedback about your performance and get an idea of any change over time.

With a brand or product you can see the effects of advertising on the volume of conversations and gauge the empathy towards the product.

If you have a tool that can tag sentiment - assessing whether a post is positive, negative, neutral or mixed in feeling towards your brand or product and then marking that - over time it can alert you to dramatic changes of sentiment - potentially identifying situations calling for crisis management.

Monitoring setup: keywords, traffic, sentiment.
Outcomes: Board reporting, advertising decisions, crisis early warning system, strategy adjustment.

2 Customer service

Monitoring complaints about a product or service
By focussing the monitoring on comments about your product and service you can pick up customer service issues and deal with them.

Social media can be particularly effective in identifying issues early, before they are picked up by mainstream news services.

It is also able to address influential individual's problems - bloggers and celebrities - high profile people with lots of followers, who have a broad span of influence. Do this well, and those same individuals will tell the social world what good service you have.

Bear in mind though, that customers usually only post to Twitter and blogs if they have tried your conventional customer service channels and failed to get a response or found it difficult to find or interact with those channels.

So listening to social media is no substitute for a conventional, efficient, customer service - on the other hand, it will pick up those that fall through the cracks.

Be aware that by the time an individual is posting to Twitter or blogs, they are usually disgruntled - and prompt, bold, affirmative action will be needed to placate them.

Finally, it is no good having an excellent listening service if you don't have the logistics and resources to sort out the problems you find.

Monitoring setup: keywords, sentiment
Outcomes: Better customer service, free PR

3 Competitors

Keeping an eye on what your competitors are up to
If you monitor your competitor's activities in social media you will get an idea of how they are perceived. It's possible to discover how people see the difference between you and your competitors and what they think are the unique points about your product or service compared to your competitor.

This helps you to hone your product placement and marketing message, it can help you create a point of difference with competitors, or produce material that corrects any misconception about what your product or service is about.

You can get an idea of the authority of your brand versus your competitor's and then either reinforce this, or work on it, if it's an issue.

You can see how they deal with customer service issues, what initiatives they are launching and build a picture of their marketing activities.

Knowing all this allows you to concentrate your organisation's resources in areas where they will make the most impact.

On a positive note, you could also use monitoring to identify partnership opportunities and areas where there may be some profitable synergy in working with your competitors on a project.

Monitoring setup: keywords, sentiment
Outcomes: market perception, product positioning, competitor intelligence, partnership opportunities

4 Prospects

Identifying prospects and qualifying them
This is a simple enough concept, using social media monitoring to identify prospects and their activity.

And when you are talking to new prospects you can use the monitoring systems you have to qualify them, and the insights you gain can align your proposition with their objectives and show them you understand their business.

Monitoring setup: keywords
Outcomes: New business

5 Clients

Knowing what your clients are up to
Using monitoring to keep track of your client's activities means that not only can you use this information to learn of further opportunities, but you can remind them of your organisation by interacting with them and carrying on conversations online.

Monitoring setup: keywords
Outcomes: Sales opportunities, customer loyalty

6 Environmental Scanning

Keeping up with what is going on in the environment within which your organisation operates.
Using monitoring in a more general way allows you to keep track of industry issues and news.
This will help you identify opportunities and highlight threats - giving you valuable insights when planning strategy or launching new initiatives.

Monitoring setup: keywords, RSS feeds, influencers
Outcomes: Aware of environment, grasp opportunities, avoid threats

Conclusion

As you can see by this list, monitoring tools are not just for brand mentions but can be used for a wide variety of beneficial purposes - giving you maximum return on your investment.
This is not necessarily a definitive list - so if you can think of any other ways monitoring tools can be used, please let me know.