Five Questions You Need To Answer Before You Start A Social Media Marketing Campaign

Social media is the primary way that the public will share how they feel about your business. Through this media you will discover how they perceive your brand, what they think of your product or service and whether or not re-branding is necessary. That’s right, businesses re-brand a lot and for a variety of reasons and social media monitoring is one of the most open formats you can use to see and hear whether or not people are ‘getting you’ and what you are selling or providing.

Basically this means that just because you had a great idea doesn’t mean that the public understands the concept that you are trying to convey. The way to make sure that companies are being understood and can monitor their image is through a Media Monitoring Service and her are five basic tools you need to build such a service successfully.

•    What are the metrics? Before you find the appropriate Social Media Monitoring tool you must first figure out what your business needs to monitor. Every business is different so what is the most important thing you need to measure?

•    What is the social media monitoring budget you have to work with? Make sure you know what you need as far as monitoring your ‘social mentions’. Do you need to be apprised of every one? If not then there are many free or low-cost tools that have alerts that you don’t have to pay a premium for. You can set up alerts for certain negative commentary or certain positive feedback on a particular query. In other words do you really want to pay for an alert each time someone says “Hey I like the new signs you put up in the front of your shop?” Or something more trivial?

•    What is the reach you need? For this one you need to ask yourself who and how far do I need to reach. Again, everything has a cost attached and you want to pay only for what you need. Your reach consists of the number of followers, blog subscribers, retweets and comments as well as all other relevant data.

Basically you need to really think about it before you spend on the most expensive social media monitoring tool. There are tons of free or inexpensive tools you can use online to get the result you need for a small or very young business. You have to also see the flip-side and that is you may actually need the most expensive tools because depending on your audience and your business goals you may have to have every statistic known to man. It is a daunting process and yet a very necessary one. Once you have mastered social media monitoring you will soon experience a difference in your numbers and your feedback. You will also eventually devise a faster method for monitoring so that it becomes habit and you waste less time on it. Appropriate media monitoring service can help you achieve the success.