What are people saying about your clients’ brand on review sites? What are customers telling friends on social media about their products or services? Are people with influence talking about their business? It’s important for them to know the answer to those questions. In other words, are your clients monitoring social media mentions?

Not tracking what people are saying about you online is like taking a year out of your life to write a book, putting in the hard work to get it published, and then suddenly forgetting about it and having zero regard for what people think about it. Likewise, business owners put a lot of sweat into their company; it’d be a shame for them to miss out on valuable feedback and opportunities.

When people are loving on their business on social media, they’ve got some serious marketing power on their hands. On the other hand, if people are criticizing the company, there’s an opportunity to protect the brand and right a wrong (if it’s warranted).

But before we go any further, the pragmatist in me tells me I should first define what social media mentions are.

What is a social media mention?

While Webster’s Dictionary doesn’t mention it, we define a social media mention as keywords associated with a business (name, products, industry etc.) that are found in social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Google+.

The value of monitoring social media mentions

With more than 3.8 billion unique social media users (EduBirdie), chances are people are talking about your clients online. Meaning their brand reputation is on trial, and business opportunities are coming and going every day.

With numbers like that, if they’re not using tools to monitor their social mentions, they certainly need to be! There are plenty of tools that find mentions about businesses on social media, but we’d be remiss not to recommend Vendasta’s Reputation Management solution.

When it comes to mentions, our solution dives deep into the web to source the keywords that matter to businesses. With the right search, your clients can:

• Find out what’s being said about them online, including in unexpected places
• Instantly know whether the commentary is positive or negative
• Engage with customers beyond the official channels
• Take negative feedback as points for business improvement
• Gain a better understanding of who their customers and competitors are

Social monitoring tools are crucial, as they help businesses listen to and understand customers, prospects and competitors. Their discoveries often provide business and customer insights they can use to shape their marketing strategies.

Online reputation opportunities

Did you know that 97% of consumers search online for info about local businesses (BIA/Kelsey)? Any way you slice it, your clients’ online reputation matters! In fact, using tools to monitor a business’s brand is one of the fastest growing industries in online marketing, registering at 1.3 billion dollars for this year alone. Why is this? Uncovering intel such as mentions allow businesses to not only strengthen their rep, but also protect it.

Leveraging positive mentions

Discovering positive social mentions gives businesses the ability to view all of the places online where customers are singing their praises. By monitoring them, they now have the opportunity to engage with their followers, deepen relationships and also leverage the conversation to do a little bit of ad hoc marketing to other fans on that respective page.

Furthermore, knowing how to connect with followers on social is a big business driver and is proven to increase sales by 18% (Bazaar Voice). Another cool thing some companies are doing to rev their marketing efforts is reaching out to followers and making them brand ambassadors on their social channels like Facebook or Twitter. The primary function of these ambassadors is to test and review products and services in a good but honest light.

Managing negative mentions

On the other side of the coin, it’s just as important for businesses to monitor negative mentions. Customers are just as likely to hit social media when they’re dissatisfied like they do when they’re happy (Zendesk). Trouble here is, the negative typically outweighs the positive, as humans tend to put more stock into the bad stuff as opposed to the good.

If someone is slamming your clients’ business, they need to know about it. Social monitoring tools can alert business owners the moment a negative conversation is posted, allowing them to address the situation and prevent serious reputation damage.

Plus, with the right approach—an apology and solution—it’s not unheard of to turn a disgruntled customer into a happy one. More on this with how to manage online reviews effectively.

Mentions are an easy way to get customer feedback

Trying to gather customer testimonials is like pulling teeth, right? Sending out request for reviews, pushing surveys, asking for social shares is disruptive and often doesn't reap a scalable reward. By tracking mentions on social media, you can find this information organically, and then spin it into marketing gold (as prefaced above).

Gaining customer insights

Finally, businesses can get usable knowledge about how their target market is engaging with their products and services. By tracking social mentions, businesses can uncover both quantitative and qualitative data about how customers are interacting with their offering. #Paydirt. Businesses now have information to create more effective marketing campaigns—they know what customers like and what they don’t. Further to that, with these campaigns, they have now created ROI metrics. Who said social media is hard to measure?

Learn more about social mentions monitoring and one of the most-widely used Reputation Management solutions on the market.