Monitoring is an essential part of social media marketing. Negative buzz can seriously damage the reputation of a company. In spite of this, most companies don’t seem to be giving it a high enough priority. InformationWeek Analytics conducted a survey of US IT professionals to find out the popular tools used by companies to monitor their presence on social networks. The results indicate that majority of companies rely on low-tech tools for social media monitoring.
According to a recent survey, 56 percent companies used search alerts for social media monitoring, 16 percent employed external vendors for this purpose and 15 percent used speciality applications. Also, companies seemed unprepared to handle negative buzz on social sites.
The same survey also collected information on types of social media comments, for which companies have a formal handling process in place. 32 percent respondents said that their company had a formal process for posting official announcements on different social networking sites other than company homepage, 26 percent have a formal process to handle inappropriate employee comments, 21 percent companies have a formal process for complaints on e-commerce sites, while only 14 and 12 percent companies had a formal process for handling complaints posted via Facebook and Twitter respectively. Surprisingly, 43 percent respondents said that their companies didn’t have a formal process for handling any types of social media content.
Although negative comments and complaints are problematic, legitimate complaints provide companies an opportunity to improve their service and demonstrate their dedication to customer service. Use of effective social media monitoring tools and formal handling processes for various social networks are essential for successful social media marketing and minimizing the negative buzz.