Do You Have A Social Media Monitoring Policy In Your Company?

A single rotten apple in a barrel can spoil the rest if it is not taken out. The case of online brand feedback is somewhat similar. One negative sentiment is enough to throw your brand out of the good books of customers. It may be a comment in a blog post, or a Tweet or a Facebook status update or anything that could damage your company's online social reputation. But in a minute there are about a million activities happening in the web and how on Earth do you expect to find that single comment or Tweet that damages your reputation. Well this is where social media monitoring works magic. It is essential that you keep track of whatever activity or online event that makes a reference to your brand.

So how do you keep track of online reputation of your company or brand? Well it is a 6 step procedure which includes:

1. Find out what is spoken about your brand

Just like you often search your name in Google to see what interesting results pop up, try with your brand name or the product your company offers. Search engines flush out almost everything related to your search keyword. Simple search is not enough; try different related keywords as you do not possible want to miss out on any info.

2. Aggregate the obtained information

You can use various custom tools to identify and group similar sentiments and feedbacks for your brand or its services. You can also make use of several commercial feed readers to effectively aggregate information based on set priority or preference. Aggregating data is important to learn which needs your attention immediately or what you can use to promote your business.

3. Inform the right personnel

The gathered data should be passed onto the respective departments wherein the concerns reported in a particular area are addressed by the best personnel in that department. There are various social media monitoring tools allow ticketing, delegation systems, etc and make sure that whenever necessary an employee from any department can be made a part of the process.

4. Replying with solutions

This is the area where your brains have to work the most. As far as positive comments are concerned a show of appreciation with a simple "Thank You" phrase is more than enough to let the customers know that you value them. However when responding to negative sentiments, then only skilled executives should be allowed to respond to the concerns reported in whatever form whether it be comments or Tweets or e-mail or even direct conversation via telephone or face-to-face ordeal.

5. Follow up to replies

Do not think that once you have responded to comments, it is all over. You may have to answer further questions or queries regarding your solutions or may have to present a different version of the solution to customers who are yet to understand your previous version. You need to employ the services of a powerful monitoring tool to help you keep track of such conversational sequences.

6. Save the comments for future

Once you feel that you have resolved the concerns and rectified the negative sentiments propagated about your brand, then it is important to make a note of the entire process from the registry of sentiment to the rectification so as to help in taking future decisions regarding your brand's growth. Such social feedbacks are effective in pattern tracking and also prove vital for training support staff as to how to respond to a similar event in future.

Hope you were not bored by that long section of how to maintain your brand's existence on the internet. If you did feel so, then just think of how worthy that few minutes would be if you did what was said in my blog. Marketing and managerial Guru's will definitely understand the value of social media monitoring and it is wise if you could also follow suit.

Social Defender is all-in-one social media monitoring tool allows you to manage your multiple social media networks from a single login.

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