How Social Media Monitoring Can Accelerate Your Brand Building Efforts

HubSpot recently asked 4,500 marketing and sales professionals about their biggest challenges. At the very top of the list was generating traffic and leads. In fact, 65% of those asked face this challenge!

We already know social media is full of action. It builds a great relationship between a brand and its customers and is also a powerful channel to share stories and messages well beyond our existing customers.

• 92% of marketers say that social media is important to their business. More than half of marketers who’ve been using social media for at least two years say it helped improve sales. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)
• 90% of marketers indicated that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their businesses. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)
• 61% of those investing a minimum of six hours per week in social media marketing saw improvements in search engine rankings. (Social Media Examiner, 2015)

As marketing professionals, what if we switched from playing offense, in terms of landing more leads and getting more traffic, to being more observant?

What if we changed our focus from doing and paid more attention to listening to what is already happening around us? And what if we cast our net beyond just social channels and actually listened to chatter across the entire Internet?

If that sounds like a daunting task, then you aren’t alone. Most marketers and online community builders I talk to would love to do this work, but they’re lost on where to start. They also feel intimidated by the volume of chatter they will likely find.

Here is a four step process we use at Piktochart to actively listen to what’s being shared online about our brand:

1. A few times each month, one person on our team combs through recent mentions of our brand one-by-one. The mentions are filtered from larger conversations. Many of these mentions, any tweets using @Piktochart for example, were already spotted by our social and community team. However, some mentions are more obscure: an influencer mentioning our tool in an interview, Reddit user comments about their Piktochart experiences, or a workshop announcement for how to use Piktochart. There are a number of platforms to help you analyze online conversations mentioning your brand.
2. You can use insight from analyzing online conversations to make business decisions that will help grow the brand. This extra sweep allows your team to be aware of what’s happening aside from basic inbound messages on social channels. We can now thank influencers for sharing your product with their community, promote news articles that make your team proud, and come up with creative community engagement solutions based on the chatter that we’ve been monitoring. For example, it was the incredible videos we were seeing that led us to leverage amazing user-generated content and create a video tutorial gallery .
3. We also use our brand monitoring work to build meaningful relationships with our community. Monitoring online mentions can lead to alliances and collaborations you might not find through more traditional channels. When we see other brands praise Piktochart, we reach out and strike up a conversation. Through that interaction, we see what we can build together to make an even bigger impact for both of our user bases. We have this awareness to thank for our collaboration with Indiegogo and others.
4. Some relationships will take time to blossom and won’t have an immediate next action. By being able to see who is talking about the brand, we have created a record of notable press mentions with information about the influencer, blogger, or journalist. When we are ready to launch a new feature or have a big announcement, we now have a list of Piktochart fans to tap into. Knowing who has talked about Piktochart in the past gives us a leg up when the time comes to make an announcement.

Here at Piktochart, we think of monitoring brand mentions as a vital tool in our marketing and community toolbox. While we still push traditional marketing messages, we are spending just as much time listening to what users, partners, influencers, and industry change makers are saying online.

This contributor post originally appeared on Business.Nasdaq.com.