Internet Marketing Blog

Social Media Monitoring for Small Business – Catching the unchained Monkey

We keep talking about social media marketing for small businesses at different platforms these days. There are so many blogs or resources discussing Facebook Marketing for Small Business, Twitter Marketing for Small Business, LinkedIn Marketing for Small business or any other way to use social media for targeting your customers.

Most of the Small and Medium Businesses are quite unsure about jumping into it yet. Even though we all agree that it may help, but not sure how to measure it because there are so many conversations happening at the same time.

Measuring your social media marketing activities could turn to be catching an unchained monkey. First of all you should consider that it may not include direct dollars spent but time and resources will still be charged. Most of the activities like creating a Blog, Facebook Page, Twitter Page, LinkedIn Profile and Youtube Channel are also free. But you still have to write pay-checks for people working on them. So exactly what will be the touch-stone to measure social media marketing for small business?

You can use these factors to see Value it brings to your business by following modes

• Value it brings to improve your products by observing customer comments or updates
• Value it brings to improve customer service & reduce cost on it
• Value it brings to engage potential customers and existing ones to get repeated orders
• Value it brings to make you and your company as Subject Matter Expert in industry & niche
• Value it brings to enhance Positive Sentiment about your brand over internet
• Value it brings to save your brand by listening to unfavorable conversations

Now all these factors are such volatile in nature that it may take you few months even year to actually scale it down. There are so many paid tools available to help you like Radian6, Sysomos, Attensity 360 or Alterian SM2 and they will cost you $50 to $600 every month. But I am in favour of using free tools to sharpen you social media marketing skills. Free Social Media Monitoring tool like Social Mention is good enough to start your roller costar ride.

Using Social Mention you can observe few very important things to enhance your brand’s social media presence:

• How many people are actually talking about your brand on internet?
• What are the chances they talk repeatedly?
• What is the sentiment, either positive or negative about your brand?
• Top users and sources of discussions
• List of the pages of actual conversation about your business and brand

enjoy the social media by measuring it!

Make sure that you consider every observation about your brand as an opportunity to improve your products or customer service. Because social media is all about being social with your customers and you will catch the unchained monkey of social media.

Amit Sati

Loves to cook, click, follow the latest trends, best practices, and emerging techniques to achieve high levels of growth, innovation, and user adoption for small Businesses & Startups.