Why social media monitoring is good for business
Competitive social media monitoring is the process of keeping a tab on the social media activities of rival businesses and dissecting the metrics thereof to draw insights to drive consistent growth and profitability. In general, business’s activities on social media include ads, video and visual content, customer support, updates, marketing, networking, blog posts, answering questions, and lots more. Brands also use social media platforms as vehicles for products featured in social media posts, images, and short- and long-form videos by persons with knowledge, influence, or authority, the so-called influencers.
Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, WhatsApp, and LinkedIn are some of the platforms businesses extensively leverage to get target audiences interested in their brands and ensure customers keep thinking about them. Of course, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, Snapchat, and Quora are no less relevant.
Together, these platforms boast a mind-blowing 12 billion-plus monthly active users. So, it’s crucial that brands actively monitor their adversaries’ social media plays aimed at improving brand recall and fostering stronger relationships with customers. Competitors might also most certainly be using social media to identify and reach out to potential clients. Besides, they employ these platforms to stack up critical data on customer likes, motivations, inclinations, and expectations around specific offerings. So, those are some of the good reasons for “social media monitoring competitive”.
Importance of the Service
Track the competition to stay ahead
Businesses need to be fully cognizant of these as well as draw relevant lessons from key competitor KPIs like comments, shares, impressions, click-through rates, and follower size. This apart, digital teams must include in their calculations competitors’ social media mentions, sales conversion rates, and overall ROI from their social media dollars. Businesses typically kick off their social media monitoring exercise by deciding on the top competitors they plan to go after as part of this effort. C-suites should leave no stone unturned in this step and must look for not just direct and indirect competitors, but also new entrants and emerging competitors that keep rearing their heads occasionally. Who said “Social media monitoring competitive” isn’t worth all that effort?
Draw on lessons from the competition
There is hardly any shortage of automated tools for gathering up relevant data on competitors’ social media activities. As a point of fact, research for this article turned up more than a dozen in-market platforms designed to help businesses collect and make eminent sense of competitors’ social media content. These tools pour over key details like posting frequency, audience engagement rates, audience demographics, and competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. These tools cover almost the entire panoply of social media actions triggered by the competitor, from hashtag tracking to influencer identification and everything in between. Armed with these software applications, businesses are busy secretively watching over what the competitor is up to on social media. The whole point is to get a grasp of where they stand in relation to the competition in the social media battle of wits. As the famous saying goes: “Never stop learning from your competition.” So, get clued up about “social media monitoring competitive.”
Benchmark your social media channels
Outputs from the competitive social media monitoring exercise, previously discussed, would serve as the starting point for any business’s social channel benchmarking journey. Identifying room for improvement in social media performance is the whole intent and purpose. Here benchmarking practitioners run the business’s social channel performance metrics past best practices from industry at large and peers in particular. No wonder, businesses are putting money on “social media monitoring competitive.”
How Infiniti Research can help you?
With an effective social media monitoring solution in place, organizations can identify consumers’ preferences and efficiently recalibrate their strategies based on changing customer needs and desires. Social media monitoring also enables organizations to get deep, accurate, and timely metrics on competitors and industry influencers in specific industry sectors. Furthermore, by effectively optimizing social media monitoring, businesses of all sizes can assist companies in strengthening their online presence, and, by extension, bolster customers’ emotions and perceptions about the brand.
With years of expertise in social media monitoring, our experts help clients devise strategies and roll them out with finesse. Our industry-leading practitioners in social media monitoring enable clients to monitor their social networking channels more effectively, so they can stay on top of the latest industry developments, market trends, and competitor moves. Trust us, “social media monitoring competitive” can be a force for good.
Customer success story: Food services business turns garbled social media chatter into streamlined customer insights
The food services industry in Western Europe, worth more than $1 trillion at last count, is led by a handful of large enterprises. However, market participants, especially mid-to-small businesses, like our client, find themselves hassled by growing price sensitivity and progressively shrinking margins. On the bright side, online food ordering and a general shift toward healthier plant-based and pesticide-free diets promise to lift the sector’s prospects. There is a catch though. While social media can be a conduit to wider audiences, to ride high on this wave, the client must build out customer trust online.
Posting high-quality social media content, sharing customer-generated ideas, and being more responsive toward target audiences were some of the steps the client planned to take to build more “social media capital.” But first, the client wanted to understand customers’ perception of the brand and keep a constant watch on the social media chatter around it. Be it on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. Mindful of this, the client’s CMO reached out to our social media monitoring experts to conduct a social network analysis for customer perception and satisfaction at scale, covering a mind-blowing 300,000 comments across all the platforms mentioned above! Our experts dug into this tidal wave of data and performed logic-based sentiment analysis of the comments collected.
Sentiment analysis allowed us to group customers’ opinions, emotions, and attitudes as positive, negative, neutral through automation enabling us to understand the patterns from the ocean of data. The insights were presented through an online dashboard where our client could slice and dice the data as per their needs. Notably, the client is able to gain insights into these trends – as they happen. So, our social media monitoring engagement enables the client to get a pulse of customer sentiment from across multiple storefronts and diverse locations. The net effect is that the client has finally managed to secure a firmer foothold in online food services.
Conclusion
A mid-size food services business in Western Europe reached out to our social media monitoring experts to carry out a social network analysis at scale, covering a mind-blowing 300,000 comments! Our experts dug into this tidal wave of data, backed by the right kind of sentiment analysis tools, to identify and group customers’ opinions, emotions, and attitudes (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Notably, the client is able to gain insights into customer trends – as they happen. This insight was designed to help the client tailor high-performance content to lift sales conversion rates. The net effect is that the client has finally managed to secure a firmer foothold in online food services.
