She recommends monitoring social media, whether by using an agency or through free monitoring tools.
“Businesses need to monitor their social media not only for negative comments but also to see how effectively they are using it; are they getting retweets, what is the sentiment out there.”
One of the most popular ways of monitoring social media is to hire a monitoring agency to do the work such as BuzzNumbers.
Jess Whittaker, who describes her role as a “product evangelist” at BuzzNumbers, told SmartCompany social media monitoring is important for the reputation management of a business.
“You don’t know what you don’t know. For a lot of companies it’s important to be ahead of the public in finding out what is being said. There is also an element of being able to track competitors to make sure you are not making the same mistakes or keeping in front of what they are up to,” she says.
Whittaker says there are many ways that businesses can monitor social media for free using tools such as Google Alerts and Social Mentions.
She also recommends using the search bar on Twitter to monitor mentions of your business along with Twitter tools like TweetDeck and HootSuite, although Whittaker warns free social media monitoring has its limitations.
“Free tools are very siloed on their approach; you track news here, Facebook here, Twitter there,” she says.
For businesses that want more advanced monitoring, tools such as Sprout Social give reporting capabilities and report social media mentions in a graph.
BuzzNumbers charges businesses around $800 a month, for which they receive reporting capabilities with accurate data on social media that is indexed in real time.
“We bring all online sources into one spot, online news, blogs, forum, social media, YouTube so there is the depth of data as well as the breadth of data,” says Whittaker.
“At the end of the day what you pay for is what you get.”
This story first appeared on SmartCompany.
Cara Waters is a former SmartCompany editor. Previously, Cara was a senior reporter for the Financial Times’ website and worked for The Sunday Times in London.
