Over the past decade, social media use has become a popular way for brands to reach and engage with their stakeholders. Consequently, brands rely on social media analytics to obtain and identify valuable data that can support business decisions. However, once brands are active on a couple of social networks, they start becoming overwhelmed by the complexity of managing them. For this reason, they need to invest in social management tools that ensure their social media strategy is effective. Below we discuss how social media tools help businesses make marketing decisions and develop their promotion campaigns.
Identifying Trends
Businesses can find out what their audiences are consistently talking about online. The challenge is to differentiate a fad from a trend to ensure they do not invest in something with little staying power. Social analytics tools provide social insights that disclose business trends worth taking up. For instance, the insights may be helpful in inspiring product innovation to satisfy an unmet need. Brands aspiring to become category leaders need to be good at identifying trends before they initiate appropriate actions. Therefore, they need to use appropriate social monitoring tools.
Creating Engaging Content
Social listening tools will provide data that informs you about the right content for specific channels and the proper time to offer it. Brands must focus on creating content that their audiences want to see and what they already enjoy looking at online. However, it is not only about getting the most likes from the content. It’s about using tools to know what content results in a positive impact on brand awareness.
Keeping an Eye on the Competition
Social analytics tools help to perform competitive analysis that allows brands to have contextualized insights that help beat competitors. The tools make it easy to learn where your competitors are falling short or doing better and adopt advertising strategies that shift customers’ attention to your brand. In addition, the tools gather insights into the mistakes your brand is making and understand what efforts are bringing in desired results.
Protecting the Reputation of a Brand
The current competitive climate requires brands to avoid crises at all costs. After all, it can take only one wrong social media post to start a viral brand crisis that will be costly to manage. Social monitoring tools alert brands about potential problems well before they happen so they can prevent them from going viral. They also inform you about competitor crises so you can develop the right advertising strategies.
Choosing the Best Social Media Management Tools
The social media tools you apply in your business could negatively affect or enhance your capabilities. Brands have access to different tools, and each category helps fulfill varying needs. The tools should help to capture the most complete picture of your business, providing an insight combo that will propel the brand’s growth. For example, NetBase Quid applies a combo approach to offer brands excellent next-generation consumer and market intelligence. Social media analytics tools allow brands to differentiate between critical and non-essential issues in their decision-making easily. NetBase Quid also integrates your data, including surveys and all structured and unstructured data, and analyses it to get an exceptionally informative big-picture output. Therefore, business leaders require tools that provide actionable intel for making strategic business decisions. Brands need to identify social media monitoring options cover the following:
- Provides simple to complex social sharing capabilities
- Allows progressive understanding of marketing
- Tracks media mentions
- Curates and manages content
- Creates benchmarks for all brand-related activity online
- Understands and communicates ROI
In conclusion, investing in social media management tools is essential for businesses to overcome the complexities of managing various channels. It will also be easy to monitor trends, gather consumer opinions and feedback, and obtain valuable competitor information for better decision-making. The analytical data and real-time reporting that brands get from these tools will also enhance marketing strategies.
