Linsey Jepma — August 30, 2019 — August 30, 2019
Social media is open and the whole world reads along. Better safe than sorry is still often the motto. Yet we live in an era in which social media monitoring is no longer allowed to be absent from the communication strategy. There are opportunities for webcare, lead generation and reputation management. But how do you convince management of the added value of social media for your organization? In this blog we will tell you how you can use monitoring to create more internal support for social media.
Signal everything around you with media monitoring
Media monitoring gives you the opportunity to not only identify what people are saying about you or to you, but also what is happening around your stakeholders and competition. How do you distinguish yourself from the competition? What do your stakeholders do and how can you possibly join forces in this? But also: what do the critics criticise and what are your fans happy with?
Monitoring gives you an extra pair of ears and eyes to identify opportunities, threats and areas for improvement. By searching for your own brand name, competitors’ brand names and important words within your industry, you can quickly see what’s going on and what’s your position in the market. By reporting to the management, you are able to quickly demonstrate the activity on social media around the organization and where the opportunities lie.
Crisis monitoring; rapid notification of escalations
Too often, organizations are afraid that people will fall over them on social media. The use of alerts prevents you from being too late in anticipating. For example, many organizations use tools such as Google Alerts and Social Mention, which makes it possible to get notifications of where you are named as an organization.
Do you use extensive social media monitoring tools? Then you can also set up alerts here. Via e-mail or SMS a signal is given, for example when an exponentially growth in volume of messages around your company is measured. But also when you are mentioned by important people. Not only social media are included, but also websites, blogs, forums, RTV and even print. It is therefore important to anticipate and take action quickly.
From media insights to actions
Monitoring ensures that your organization has an extra pair of ears and eyes. This way you create the luxury position for yourself that you are quickly able to identify situations at an early stage. Responding to messages is, therefore, an important next step. This is where webcare comes in. Do not only respond to negative messages or escalations; also reward those who say positive things about your brand.
You can also create reports for webcare. These reports give you an insight into the number of messages received and the number of messages answered, but also how quickly you reacted and what the sentiment was. Service is the new marketing. And good webcare reports enable you to have a positive influence on the result.
Social media dashboard for internal awareness
Involve people in what you do. Transparency in activities and results provides a greater understanding of social media within the organization. Show what’s going on on social media, but also what’s being done with these messages. This can be done, for example, by running a social media dashboard or narrowcasting on a screen with a search on a certain subject, the company or an event. Explain to people what they see on the screen.
Applications like Livewall and Walls.io are examples of tools where you can start for free with a social media dashboard. Often, free tools are limited to monitoring certain hashtags or a limited number of accounts. Do you use an extensive social media monitoring tool? Then you are able to show extensive searches on a screen via a narrowcasting. In this you can add or exclude specific accounts and you are able to monitor and display different terms around a certain subject or event on the screen.
Narrowcasting makes clear what is going on on social media around your company or around an event. In this way it becomes immediately clear what is happening online.
Create support within the organization
Transparency in the work provides more support for social media within your organization. Because colleagues and management become aware of the effect of social media on the organization, shorter lines of communication are created. These lines work both ways. On the one hand, this makes it easier to contact colleagues and management when you cannot answer a question directly via social media or when a statement is needed. On the other hand, short lines of communication lower the threshold for reporting and communicating about social media to colleagues and management. Creating support is an ongoing process.
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