How Your eCommerce Business Can Benefit from Social Media Monitoring

You must have heard the digital buzz “social media monitoring” making rounds. Does my eCommerce business need it, you may ask?

Well, let’s see.

When social media first made its appearance, it was purely to socialize. People were using it to see what their friends and family were up to. They were connecting with their long-lost friends on Facebook and sharing their thoughts on Twitter.

Almost two decades later, the meaning and essence of social media have transformed. The endless conversations are all about discussing brands, product experiences, service reviews, complaints, recommendations, and much more. The unique part about this tendency is that the user has the liberty to either praise you or call you out in the DMs and comment sections.

This change in the narrative of social media is beneficial for online stores. Instead of relying solely on customer surveys, you can see your audience speaking their minds on social media. You can leverage customer discussions to address their needs and pain points. But to benefit from this opportunity, you must know where, when, and how to look for these conversations.

This is where social media monitoring comes into the picture. A thought-out strategy can have a huge impact on your relationship with customers and your business growth.

In this article, we are going to explain in detail how an eCommerce business like yours can benefit from a structured use of social media monitoring.

Get Help with Social Listening

As mentioned above, social media is an undetachable part of your brand’s being. It is the new coffee house - modern and digital. Whether you are on social media or not, if you have customers, they are discussing you there.

Their discussions include all sorts of exchanges - your brand’s positives, negatives, things you can be better at, things your competitors are better at, etc. Don’t you think knowing this sort of information, right from the people whom you market your services to, is precious?

Sure thing there are other ways to get insights from your customers like online reviews or feedback forms. However, there is no guarantee that they will be honest or have no bias towards you. People are more likely to be honest and authentic when talking about their personal experiences on social media.

Social media monitoring allows you to be a virtual fly on the wall. It gives you an opportunity to observe customers’ thoughts without asking them directly. By monitoring regularly, you can know what people are saying about you on different platforms. It will help you define your brand’s personality, strengths, and weaknesses to make practical improvements in your business.

Monitoring each social network manually can take a lot of your time. Consider using special tools that collect brand mentions across all networks and show them in a single interface with analytics, filters, and other handy features.

Mandala AI

Mandala AI, an ultimate platform for brand monitoring, offers you a streamlined approach to focus on important social profiles, discover trends, and spot popular posts across 50 diverse categories, complete with keywords and hashtags. For easier content analysis and benchmarking, this platform furnishes a unique performance score, engagement stats, and multiple filters by industry, language, and more.

With Mandala, everything is neatly consolidated into one dashboard, simplifying the monitoring process across different profiles and platforms. Mandala can speed up your team’s performance, allowing them to curate personalized feeds, build organized workflows, and share content via libraries, tags, and keyword lists.

Plus, for those seeking deeper insights, Mandala goes the extra mile. The platform also provides robust social listening tools, allowing users to access comprehensive analytics data and track brand mentions with just a few clicks, tapping into datasets derived from billions of mentions across the internet.

Mention

Mention analyzes mentions from over 1 billion sources daily, giving full visibility into any topic, trend, or brand. You can fetch mentions from up to 2 years in the past and share the data in-app, by email, or export it as a list. From collaborative features to organizational hacks, Mention has everything for better productivity and teamwork.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics can help you measure your brand’s recognition in one easy-to-use dashboard. With a sentiment analysis, you’ll know your audience's feelings about your products or services, while the share of voice metric will reveal who dominates your market today. To narrow down results, you can use advanced filters and boolean searches.

Improve Customer Experience

Many people consider customer experience a crucial factor to remain loyal towards a brand. They are also more forgiving if you normally deliver a satisfactory service and won’t mind continuing business with you even after you make a mistake.

The term ‘customer service’ often makes people think of a team professionally handling complaints. However, one of the standard customer service practices is social care.

Customers now have the power to reach out to brands directly. They can tag you on social media, message you, and comment under your posts. Moreover, since they have so many ways to communicate with you, they expect to be heard. Social media monitoring does this function for you.

You can set alerts for customer messages or other activities that involve your brand. It allows you to never miss activities from your customer communications. Be it a message or a story, you can respond immediately and take care of their concerns within an appropriate time frame.

Handle Crisis Management

Social media is a great station to track customer feedback on your brand or products and services. You can keep an eye on any issues in real time and take necessary actions fast. Still, negative feedback can harm your reputation and contribute to negative press.

While some sort of negative press is unavoidable, there are steps you can take to make sure negative comments don’t spiral out of control. With a social media monitoring strategy in place, you can stay on top of every attention-worthy mention.

Since you are tracking all the conversations around you, you can get immediate alerts about discussions around your brand. Time is of the essence in crisis management. Gladly, you can take appropriate measures to not let the fire out and avoid a crisis.

Social media monitoring tools can also help you track the progression of the crisis. All sorts of evaluations will give you a better idea of the measures you need to take to fix things up. With regular reports, you'll gain insights about customer sentiments before and after the crisis. You’ll see whether your actions are making a positive impact or making things worse and change your strategies accordingly.

Identifу Brand Influencers

Before digitalization, word-of-mouth marketing prevailed the most. Today, it has got a digital twist. Customers still believe in friendly references but the way to make them has changed. Now, influencers play the field.

Influencers’ opinions carry a lot of weight - their followers are like their tribe. More often than not, they believe in the authenticity of influencers and trust their recommendations. Hence, influencer marketing is a separate column these days in marketing budgets.

Gaining influencers’ trust and getting them to collaborate with you can be tricky. More so because you also wish to get on board with someone who appreciates your brand. With social media monitoring, you can track the buzz on different platforms and find influencers who would be perfect to advocate for your stuff.

There are also special platforms that give access to large databases of influencers. For convenience, you can filter them by location, number of followers, likes, and other aspects that can make your influencer search much easier.

NeoReach

NeoReach lets users run influencer marketing campaigns across all social networks, backed up with actionable insights into ROI, engagement, and impressions. The platform gives access to exclusive deals and collaboration opportunities in basically every genre and area of interest. Thanks to 40+ filters, you can find influencers that meet your specific criteria in no time, be it their profile performance, audience demographics, location, costs, and much more. Whenever there’s an important update in the creator community, you’ll be the first to know by receiving a prompt alert to your mailbox.

Influencity

Influencity contains over +200M influencer profiles worldwide that you can filter through to find the right fit. You can consider their demographics, niche topics, style of storytelling, and even explore previous partnerships to get a better idea of the ROI you’ll get. Influencity will also help you avoid profiles with fake followers and find influencers who offer real engagement and authentic content.

Influence.co

Influence.co allows you to search influencers by a wide range of criteria, including age, gender, engagement rate, starting price, and many others. When you create your campaign brief, Influence.co will also market it, allowing influencers interested in your deal to apply themselves. You will be able to track each influencer's progress from application to final posting.

Find New Content Ideas

Every digital marketer faces the challenge of finding new ideas. Creating fresh and relevant content regularly is not an easy task. If you are finding yourself in a confusing spot again and again, you should use a social media monitoring tool.

You can monitor popular industry trends and strategize your ideas well in advance. Customers always appreciate the content made on trending topics, which brings higher engagement to businesses. Thanks to social media monitoring, you can identify the key trends about your brand-new offers, including customers’ demographics, most popular items, hot seasons, highest consumption, anything.

Step Ahead of the Competition

Knowing what your competitors are up to is always a blessing. Fortunately, social media monitoring is the holy grail of competition tracking. With a social media monitoring tool, you can get an insight into how your competitors are handling their presence on various social media platforms:

• the content they primarily share;
• their customer service management;
• customers’ perception about their brand;
• their strategies for brand promotion;
• customer complaints and feedback;
• their mistakes;
• crisis management strategies, and more.

Such an in-depth competitor analysis can help you understand the strengths of your competitors. You will learn about the strategies that are working for their audience and take inspiration from them. As for their weaknesses, you will have an opportunity to take preventive measures in advance to not bear the loss.

Engage with New Leads

Social media is synonymous with search engines these days - users explore new products and services on various platforms. You can take leverage of this habit and track keywords relevant to your brand to generate new leads. People who are not your customers but are looking for those keywords are your neglected target audience.

For example, a restaurant should track industry keywords like ‘fine dining,’ ‘gluten-free,’ and ‘live music’. You can also search for brand-specific keywords and commonly misspelled words related to your brand. If your company is popular in specific locations, combine your primary keyword with the location keyword and search for it. The results obtained will lead you to people who’ve been in your blind spot until now. They are your potential customers whom you can pitch to and gain new customers.

Social media monitoring is not a one-off process. Once you set it up and make it a part of your routine strategy, it will help you grow your brand. Keep monitoring the web and social media and have the conversation going.

Seek Help from Social Media Marketing Agencies

Being present on social media is good and all, but if you’re oriented at lead generation, it requires more than just publishing one or two posts a day and glancing at how people reacted to it in comments.

You’ll need to do strategic planning - identify your target audience based on anything from their demographics to interests and behavior, run campaigns that would resonate with them, create attention-grabbing content, monitor its performance, make data-driven adjustments, identify opportunities for further growth, and the list goes on…

Add to that the time you’ll need to invest and the tools you’ll need to pay for, and you’ll end up with a new weight around your neck. It may be unbearable if you’re a startupper with a limited budget, a solopreneur or have a very small team where everyone already has too much on their to-do lists.

To relieve yourself or teammates of that additional burden, you can seek help from social media marketing agencies. Whether you want to boost your online presence and create a winning digital marketing strategy, find a professional agency partner that shares your vision and objectives via SE Ranking's Agency Catalog. Agencies already know what works and what doesn’t, have a well-trained staff and all the necessary tools to do the work efficiently.

Here are some agencies that can help you generate leads on social media.

Web Sharx

Web Sharx is a Toronto-based digital marketing agency that can help you grow your followers and drive more traffic to your site. They can run both organic posting and paid ad campaigns in your brand style to build loyalty for your company. Their team keeps up with constantly evolving social algorithms and trends through real-time data analytics to make sure all your goals are met.

IMPACT

IMPACT is a leading marketing agency based in Singapore, helping brands grow on social media such as TikTok, Facebook, Instagram and more. They leverage content strategies, breakthrough creatives, social media trends, data analytics and marketing insights, to drive results for their social media clients.

BARE International

BARE International provides a social network assessment platform to monitor your online reputation and give you real-time data visualizations across multiple social media platforms. These insightful, data-driven reports can help you fuel your strategy and guide your decision-making process.

Alpha Digital

Alpha Digital can take all the planning, analysis, scheduling, caption writing, and publishing off your plate. To target your audience with compelling ads, they tap into multiple insights, including their location, job role, relationship status, lifestyle interests, and more. Their team also analyzes customers already interested in the brand, then places ads in front of more people who are just like them.

Social Garden

Social Garden is a social media marketing company focused on delivering sales results. They combine data-driven insights with creative thinking to make sure your social media performance doesn't stagnate. Their campaigns embrace anything from social listening, copywriting, and video creation to community management, conversion tracking, and remarketing.

MediaPlus

MediaPlus offers an SMM campaign management service, allowing your brand to find new audiences based on demographics, interests and lookalike audiences. The campaign's creatives they create, from videos to image carousels, always stay in line with the target audience. At the media buy stage, MediaPlus can help you secure ad placements at the best rates possible.

Caseo

Caseo works with businesses of all sizes and can create custom social media strategies that would suit both your needs and budget. Their services include Facebook advertising, content creation, and graphic design to ensure your business is accurately represented across all social communities. Since social media trends are constantly evolving, Caseo’s team always combines new tactics with previously proven methods.

Conclusion