Brands are placing a greater emphasis on creating content that sparks engagement among digital audiences. In today’s landscape, if a brand is not being talked about online, it is an indication that they are either no longer relevant to their target demographics or that their content is not resonating with audiences. Every brand, regardless of vertical or growth stage, is acutely aware of the growing importance of creating online engagements. But it isn’t enough to just produce content for audiences to consume and and interact with, brands also must adequately be able to track the ways in which various audiences are discussing their products and content online.

Tracking social mentions consistently is imperative to sustainable social success. To ensure that your brand is creating the right content to spark interest and conversations, you first have to know what those existing conversations are. Social media provides a lens into the mindsets and interests of customers, and not taking advantage of this holistic view is doing a disservice to your brand.

Today’s companies are more fervently focusing on creating engagements and stories that fuel customer engagement and interaction across social platforms. In this landscape, if a brand is not being talked about online, it is an indication that they are either no longer relevant to their target demographics or that their content is not resonating with audiences. Every brand, regardless of vertical or growth stage, is acutely aware of the growing importance of creating online engagements and, subsequently, monitoring this activity.

Social monitoring should not be executed just for the sake of realizing vanity metrics. While it’s nice to know how many @mentions or hashtag mentions your brand receives on a daily basis, the real value of social monitoring lies in being able to better glean the sentiments surrounding your brand. Did you just launch a new product with a specific social campaign? Sure, learning how many times your product hashtag has been mentioned since the launch can give you an idea of the reach of your product launch, but what is more valuable is the context surrounding each of those mentions. Are consumers offended by the campaign creative? Are they having a difficult time ordering the product? Do they love the new direction that your company is taking with this product launch? How and why social consumers are speaking about your brand is more important recognizing the simple fact that they are speaking about your brand.

Thanks to the growing social tech landscape, there are efficient resources and social mention tools available to automate the tracking process so that your brand is not spending hours excavating social platforms in search of every Twitter mention and Instagram mention. Tools like Hootsuite, Mention and Socialix’s Brand Monitoring feature can help manage activity buzzing around your brand in real time.

Staying on the pulse of the ways in which consumers are discussing your brand across platforms will also enable you to make real-time decision that can better the performance of a campaign. Perhaps, many of the social mentions your brand has received in the last 24 hours reveal that consumers don’t understand your latest campaign or feel mis-led by the creative. Tracking these conversations as they unfold across platforms may give you the chance to salvage a campaign that is not performing up to expectations by tweaking the creative or messaging. Being a part of these conversations as they occur across networks, could also lead to creative ideas for future social initiatives.

 

Image Source: Fast Company