Social Media Monitoring: It’s Not All Bad News

Part of what we do at IncSlingers is provide content strategies, for both online and offline communications. When we conduct Social Media Monitoring it isn’t just to warn our clients of bad comments or even good ones. A lot of the time we are looking for content opportunities.

There is a perception amongst marketers that brand monitoring has to be undertaken so that they can be warned of bad conversations happening about their brand. Having seen brands get their fingers burned in Social Media they feel that Social Media monitoring tools will help them better combat these horrible conversations that are happening on a regular basis about them. A lot of them are surprised to find that this conversations are often imagined, after all shouldn’t a company know if it has a bad product or service?

So often what we are looking for is gaps in the conversation, days of the week or times of the month when the conversation drops off or just trends downwards. These are the times when a company can legitimately fill the gap. Its a natural pause in the ongoing conversation, they aren’t busting into the conversation. Think of it as a happy hour, you are at a gathering, you are surrounded by conversations, and you wait your turn to speak, well you do if you want anyone to listen, you don’t just shout the group down and hope someone will stay to listen.

What is important here is to have a plan that helps you decide in advance what you are going to fill the gap with. Having identified the opportunity it is probably too late if you then have to go through the process of actually creating the content and (at least at the Enterprise level) having it approved.  Having a plan in place and appropriate content outlined, cuts the response time down and means that it can meet the opportunity.

Coming to Social Media Monitoring expecting bad news and only focusing your attention on that will leave you missing the much broader opportunities that the good tools that are available to marketers actually provide.