Social monitoring: find out what your customers think

Social media are a rich source of information, and you can use them to your advantage to understand and analyse what is being said about your company and your products or services.
Most users today use social platforms to seek information about brands, asking questions, reading reviews, seeking advice and feedback.
Keeping track of opinions expressed online helps you improve your reputation and understand what is and is not appreciated by listening to the opinions of customers or users. This can also be helped by social listening, which we discussed in a previous article and gave you some tips on how to make the most of it.

Analysing and monitoring web and social provides you with benefits in five areas:

#1 Customer service and feedback
Through social platforms you can communicate with customers quickly and informally, becoming part of the customer journey and facilitating customer service.
You can instantly check feedback on your products and campaigns, understand what is valued most and correct or improve your strategies.

#2 Environment and market analysis
You can keep an eye on market trends, with hashtags or keyword research, and observe how your competitors operate and the interactions they receive.
You can explore potential new markets, studying them to understand whether to introduce your product. By applying passive listening you will be able to understand fashions and trends and then implement your strategies, and you can do a swot analysis to discover opportunities and threats for your business.

#3 Users and targets
You can monitor your audience, finding out what they like and what they think. You can understand their needs and analyse sentiment towards your brand and even understand customer satisfaction.
It helps you find influencers or content creators to collaborate with to share your products or services in a positive way.

#4 Reputation
Keeping tabs on social media and the opinions that are spread online allows you to understand what people think of your brand and monitor reputation.
By tracking hashtags and doing keyword searches you can find content where users are talking about your brand and implement or improve your corporate identity communication.

#5 Crisis management
If negative comments and opinions about your business are disseminated online, you are informed in real time and can react immediately and contain the situation.
You will find it easier to prevent crisis situations or limit them before they become complex to manage.

Below you can find 5 monitoring tools that help you automate the process and have effective and efficient statistics to manage and analyse the collected data.

Hootsuite
Offers real-time conversation monitoring, sentiment analysis, audience segmentation, influencer identification and competitor analysis. It has numerous community management functions, integrated with leading marketing systems that facilitate data collection and analysis. It creates simple but effective analysis reports to understand trends.
A free and a paid version is available.

Brandwatch
This tool allows you to create, schedule and publish content on social media and analyse it for more information about consumers.
In addition, you can monitor posts, comments and conversations, but also hashtags, trends and shares related to other brands or topics. From the platform you can search through filters and select influencers to collaborate with.
It offers a 7-day free trial, after which it is chargeable.

Sprout Social
It is a social media management application that supports you in creating statistics, scheduling and publishing content automatically, monitors conversions, helps you organise and control contacts and content.
You can use it as a team working together with your team. It offers a free 30-day trial period, then a subscription is required.

Awario
Offers the possibility to monitor comments, competition and industry. With Awario you can monitor most social media and see mentionmaps, share of voice, search for top influencers and do sentiment analysis.
It is among the cheapest paid platforms.

Social Searcher
Allowing you to do keyword searches on any platform, Social Searcher classifies results by date, language, source and location, and gives you the option of selecting the platform on which to search.
You can get in-depth and detailed real-time statistics of your own content or the ones of your competitors to analyse your strategies.
It is a completely free tool that helps you find what you need.