Susan Payton: How To Discover (And Manage) What People Are Saying About Your Brand On Social

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Social media has given marketers and business owners alike unprecedented access to their customers. Monitoring what people are saying about your brand on social is easier than you might think, and can help you get out in front of a problem and, if done well, can have a positive impact on your bottom line. So let’s look at a few helpful tools small businesses can use to monitor what people are saying about their brand on social and how to respond.

Monitor Your Brand

1. Google Alerts. Setting an alert for your brand, keywords and even your competitors is low hanging reputation management fruit. Use advanced filters to get only web results and use quotation marks around your search so you’re more likely to only get the results you’re looking for.
2. SocialMention. SocialMention is a phenomenal resource for reputation management on social. Set an alert, like Google Alerts, and SocialMention will aggregate and email you any mention of that search from more than 100 social media sites. It also segments comments into positive, neutral and negative, and even identifies the hashtags associated with your search. Did I mention it’s free?
3. Postling. Postling not only sends alerts directly to your inbox, it also allows you to reply to comments left on your blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn even YouTube, directly from your email. Starting at $10 a month, Postling is a good investment in your brand’s social reputation.
4. SumAll. If you’re a visual sort of person, SumAll might just be for you. SumAll combines all of your relevant commercial data and social mentions into one place and then visualizes it so it’s easy to understand and make better decisions. This is a must tool for every small ecommerce small business. And it’s free!
5. Hootsuite. Hootsuite allows you to create alerts. In Hootsuite, for example, simply create a new Stream for each keyword or phrase you’d like to monitor and it will be included in your other social media management streams for easy, real-time access to what people are saying about your brand on social.

Of course there are other resources to help small business monitor their brands on social, and the one that you’ll use is the best one for you.

Responding to Feedback

It’s a good idea to respond to all feedback in some way. Be professional, and remember: a genuine reply will be appreciated more than a generic canned response.

If feedback is positive, say thanks and be specific so they know you’re not a robot.

Negative comments should be responded to immediately. If you can solve a problem, do it. Answer questions publicly and take more complicated problems offline. Whatever you do, don’t direct them to your automated 800 number. Chances are they tried that already without success so they took to social for a better response.

Social media provides a great opportunity to understand what your customers are thinking and how they perceive your brand, the value you offer, and your products. Monitor what is being said on social, respond appropriately and enjoy the rewards that come with having engaged customers.