Any small or large business must or should already have some type of presence on the Internet, either managed internally within the company or by external professionals. One of the most recurrent resources to manage, especially with a local focus, are social networks that have generated profound changes in the commercialization of goods and services and that have taken connectivity to its highest peak.
More and more small and medium-sized businessmen and women are attending social networks, creating profiles where they show the surrounding community what they do and what they offer. But this digital presence carries with it the convenience of knowing what is said in these environments of your brand and your competition and how to take advantage of this knowledge to improve our reputation on social networks, to improve our image and to better know our followers, their hobbies, their origin or their behavior. That is what tracking consists of: about ‘sniffing’ social networks to see what is being said about your brand, your competition, and your sector, who is talking and how they are talking.
Although this activity may be heavy, it is not. In this article, we tell you how to track social networks with five simple tools that will help you in this task.
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But why is it essential to track your brand? There are many reasons:
To know our target audience. With tracking, you will know who is talking about your brand, how they do it, what hobbies they have, how they behave on the networks, what their gender is, their origin or location. This knowledge will make it easier to get the content we publish right, adapting it to our audience.
Know what needs the client has. We will detect trends in our sector, what is being talked about, what is the news, and what needs the client has that we can help satisfy. In this sense, active listening and observation of our followers on the networks are very important.
To know more about the competition. With tracking, we can observe the competition and know their weaknesses, threats, strengths, and opportunities. This way we will know what products or services it offers, how, or at what price. We will know why a client can abandon our brand and opt for the competition. Ultimately, we can improve our sales and our image by seeing what others do.
It makes it possible to optimize networks as a customer service platform. Social networks have become a space where users usually make complaints and suggestions or can raise doubts typical of customer service. This task can be attended to with tracking tools, which allow us to find the questions and offer a quick response, which in turn will increase the satisfaction of our followers and have a positive impact on the image of our brand.
Get to the germ of the problem. Tracking tools allow you to quickly reach the source of a reputation crisis, that is a negative comment about our brand or discontent, which becomes general and spreads rapidly. In this case, reaching the germ is essential to put out the fire and prevent it from spreading. With tracking tools, we can reach negative comments and resolve issues quickly to prevent that reputational crisis from occurring.
Promote online reputation. In line with the previous reason, with a good tracking strategy, it is possible to reach the conversations that revolve around our brand to know the image of the company. Online reputation is lost with a speed inversely proportional to the speed with which it is earned, so taking care of it and pampering it is the daily task of a company with a digital presence. In this sense, with the help of the keyword search and monitoring are the tools that will clear up the doubt of whether these conversations are positive or negative or if they require action from the person in charge of social networks.
But undoubtedly being on social networks implies knowing what they say about you, where they say it and how they say it. And it is that, among many other functionalities, social networks have been erected in an open space where everyone thinks about everything, a free forum. Knowing how to manage these opinions is a basic skill for anyone who has a small business or wants to enter the world of entrepreneurship.
The universe of social networks is so wide that tracking manually can become a challenge, so we propose five simple tools available to every business with which you can track your brand on the Internet to control what is said on social networks.
Hootsuite
The first of the tools that we bring is an old acquaintance on social media tracking platforms. Hootsuite is free, although it has paid functionalities (something very widespread in this type of service) if you need to make a more professional or exclusive use. It allows analyzing a great variety of social networks, among which are the main ones such as Facebook or Twitter.
In addition to seeing the number of likes or the profiles that your accounts follow on social networks, with Hootsuite you can see how campaigns get conversations, customers, or sales conversions. In addition, you can also analyze the behavior of the competition to see and analyze their methods and techniques. It offers real-time monitoring and recommendations to improve your results and increase the reach of your publications.
It has a separate product, Hootsuite Insights, that measures what is said about your brand by filtering results by gender, location, or language. And not only in the social profiles of your company but in other spaces such as blogs or forums. Returns data in real-time and you can set alerts for unusual behavior.
TweetReach
Its main feature is that it allows you to follow the trace and scope of a specific hashtag. You can know the impact of that tag on any of the social networks where you have a presence, although it is on Twitter where it is especially useful. You authorize the application and obtain data on the impact of your own campaign or that of the competition. Returns data on the last fifty tweets in which the analyzed hashtag has been used. But, as often happens in many of these platforms, if you switch to the payment method you can monitor your brand in real-time on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.
With TweetReach you can know which are your followers with the most influence on social media and take the path that leads your brand to the most correct audience, on which to focus your content. With this simple tool, you can distinguish those users who have received the message only once, from those who have received it on more than one occasion, so it is interesting to know the number of exposures. In addition, TweetReach tells you if the tweet related to your search is a tweet itself, a retweet, or a reply, as well as a list of the accounts that have contributed the most to spreading the analyzed hashtag.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a very popular tool and is a favorite for its reach since it reaches a wide variety of social media sites, as well as for the monitoring information it offers. The analytics is quite deep (to be free) and measures the influence of your brand in networks dividing it into categories such as strength, sentiment, passion, and reach. It is something like a search engine in social networks. Under the term of strength, it does not measure the volume of mentions but the probability that your brand is mentioned, it is the division of the mentions that it detects between an estimate of the possible mentions. Although its algorithm is unknown, when it speaks of sentiment it establishes it by dividing the mentions it considers positive by the mentions it considers negative. In Social Motion the term passion refers to the probability that some user who talks about our brand will continue to do so. By scope, it means the number of unique users who talk about our brand among the total number of mentions on the websites it monitors.
The view or the way in which the reports are presented is very complete and is very easy to interpret. It contains content not only from social networks but also from blogs, microblogs, images, or videos that fit the search terms you want. Monitor who mentions you, when and where.
Buzzsumo
It also acts as a tracking and content analysis tool as a listening tool on social media. In addition to the search results, it returns results on the engagement of each result. That is, you will not only know who wrote about your brand but also about the users who shared posts or articles that talk about your brand. Provides the number of links that each search result has received. With Buzzsumo you can create alerts to follow mentions of your brand, competitors, the mention of keywords, or the content of a website, among others.
Likewise, it is a useful platform when generating content or searching for interesting topics or important words for the SEO positioning of blogs or corporate website content. You can discover what content is being shared as it tracks brands, identifies influencers and the links they share, and generates reports on issues.
Iconsquare
It allows many features in the free version, although if you pay, your range of brand analysis possibilities will be expanded. It allows you to monitor your brand on social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter (most recently), or Instagram, the social network in which it is most used.
Analyze and identify your brand’s own labels or those of the competition and provide statistical data on the publications of your account and on the stories. It highlights a series of functionalities such as viewing the feed of publications, the photos, and videos of the people followed or seeing the most popular publications on Instagram. It allows you to know when to publish so that your posts achieve the desired success and thus improve engagement. It also offers the functionality to monitor your rival in the market to see how it behaves on the networks.
With iconosquare we can track the number of daily followers, the main fans of our brand, and control the growth or decrease of followers. In addition to being a monitoring tool, with Iconoquare we can schedule the publications.
Also Read: Advantages And Importance Of Facebook For Companies
