Success in social media marketing comes from consistency and understanding your audience. Consistency is the easy part here, just stay focused on your campaigns and keep working hard. But how do you understand your audience, and more importantly, how do you make a lasting impression on them, and eventually convert them into buying customers? This is where metrics comes into play. There are a lot of tutorials and guides that explains different metrics and how they affect your social media marketing. So we will not insist on that for now. Instead, we will talk about social media monitoring and how you can use it to find and interact with influencers.
Why Social Media Monitoring?
Monitoring your social media campaigns is a vital element in marketing via social media platforms. It might seem like a secondary objective, but, in fact, it is one of the most important factors to follow and understand. This also allows you to identify the so-called influencers in your niche. Understanding influencers is important because they can make you or break you with their following. Think of them as the celebrities of social media, and understanding them can help you win their endorsement for your social media campaigns.
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Social Media Monitoring Tools
The whole concept of influencer marketing is based on communication, and this is where monitoring the social media feeds comes into play. By putting in place effective measures for monitoring your social media marketing efforts you can communicate with potential buyers, interested parties and influencers. Monitoring can be done via multiple different platforms, and many different experts in the field recommend different methods of monitoring. We will go through a few of the most popular tools, how to leverage them to your advantage and finally, how to make influencers notice you and help you in promoting your social media campaigns.
BUFFER
Buffer is one of the best-known players in the game to date. They took the market by storm and are still controlling many of the major social feeds for numerous large companies and agencies alike. It offers a free version of their services, but for a more efficient and dominant control over multiple social media platforms and accounts, you might want to consider upgrading to their paid plan. Buffer allows you to monitor the effectiveness of your social media efforts in relation to the number of replies and impressions they receive, allows you to communicate directly with your audience and provides you with informative statistics and graphics to easily identify optimal times for posting, commenting and everything in between.
HOOTSUITE
Hootsuite is probably the largest social media management tool that corporations all around the world use to enhance their brand management in the social platforms. It allows you to listen, measure engagement, collaborate and securely operate your social media monitoring efforts from a single easy to use dashboard. Sounds temptingly convenient, doesn’t it? Well, that it is. There is a good reason Hootsuite has managed to grab major corporations and turn them into clients, with examples like HBO, Virgin Group and Facebook using their services to manage their brands on the social media platforms. Enhanced reports are provided to social media managers, which disclose all of their strengths and weaknesses, from posting times to audience engagement. Hootsuite also excels in influencer marketing, because you can identify influencers using the Klout score each user has. We’ll discuss Klout later on in more detail.
BRANDWATCH
Brandwatch is the oldest of the three, and going stronger than ever. It might not have had such an explosive start as the two other tools mentioned above, but it certainly has a strong and loyal user base. Companies such as Seat, PepsiCo and Virgin Australia are using Brandwatch to provide them with analytics and monitoring over their social media and brand image. Brandwatch differs from the other two in one major feature, it focuses heavily on the analytics side. The analytical powers of this tool go way beyond your standard social media management tools, as you can easily identify influencers, gather data automatically from all over the web with support to 27 languages, respond to your social media audience and solve PR problems instantaneously. However, the robust features come in at a price, which is a hefty $800 per month to begin with. But the good news is, they have an integration with Hootsuite, allowing you to make use of the robust analytical powers of Brandwatch and manage your social media with Hootsuite. For anyone interested in the market's most efficient social media monitoring tools, a combination of these two will definitely get you on your A game. Combine these with Mass Planner and you have the perfectly automated social media campaign together with robust analytics and effective monitoring.
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How To: Influencer Marketing
Now that you are familiar with some of our favorite tools for monitoring your social media marketing efforts and communicating with your audience, it’s time to dig deeper on influencer marketing. Social media, just like any other form of media, or even many sports, have their own influencers, listened to and respected by a mass following. Think of Warren Buffet giving out investment tips or recommendations, but just a niche specific and social media focused version of an event like that. Having an influencer supporting your brand is a powerful asset to have to support your brand.
We mentioned Klout score earlier, and now it’s time to explain it in more detail. Klout is a company that ranks social media users based on their influence. It uses different metrics, which include the very same ones we mentioned in our previous article, and give each user a Klout score. The higher the score, the more powerful the influencer. Kloutis a handy tool to identify influencers, and Hootsuite for one allows you to see the Klout score of each person engaging with your brand via social media. Identifying social media influencers is the mandatory first step to turning them into powerful allies.
Another way of identifying influencers in your niche is to use Google, for example finding influencers in the food niche could be done by searching for “Food blog” on Google, and opening up the few blogs that come up first. Usually, a combination of both methods can give you the best results.
After you have identified the influencers commanding a followership in your niche, it’s time to start communicating with them. Engage them in their blogs, on articles they post both in their blog and in social media. Creating a first impression of you being an open and approachable brand is important, and remember to offer them value. Don’t waste their time, but engage them with creative and useful comments. This type of communication and engagement can then be turned into influencer marketing with the help of your newly found associate.
Conclusion
Managing your social media is much easier when using the proper tools for the job, and now we have given you an insight into the three top tools for monitoring your social media. Using any of these three to help with your efforts is a guaranteed boost in traffic and engagement. Use monitoring and social media listening to identify influencers in your field. Start building genuine relationships with them and you will have a powerful marketing strategy in your hands.
