7 Ways of Using Social Media Monitoring to Increase Sales

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Social media monitoring is normally used for online reputation management – making sure your online audience’s perception of you aligns with your business’s marketing goals.

It can also be used in many ways to help streamline your sales funnel and increase your bottom line. Many companies monitor what is being said online using a range of free and/or paid tools available – as long as they avoid the pitfalls in social media monitoring. In this post, we list some of the best strategies one can use to leverage their social media monitoring tool to help increase sales.

1. Market sentiment about products/company
   Any tool can monitor social media keywords, but not many get sentiment analysis quite right. With the right sentiment analysis on large volumes of mentions, you can figure out which of your products have the most positive response, and which need to be rethought. Drilling down across advanced sentiment such as fear, anger, joy, excitement and happiness isn’t easy, but if done correctly can show unique insights that would be very cost prohibitive if done with traditional focus groups and surveys.
2. Investigate your competitors and what they are doing right (and wrong)
   Make sure to create brand profiles of your competitors, and see what people love and dislike about them. Using this information can give you a definite strategic advantage over the competition, since you are monitoring unfiltered words direct from the mouths of consumers. Comparing the equivalent sentiments of your top competitors to yourself, you can create a detailed profile of how best to focus on your company’s strengths while taking into account your competitors’ weaknesses.
3. Push promotions to the right audience at the right time
   With the right social media analysis on your mentions, you can easily figure out which times of day your audience interacts with your brand the most, and from which locations. This can set you ahead of the pack by allowing you to strategically publish your content at the perfect time to the right social media channels. This decreases costs associated with inbound lead generation from content, while increasing the “return on engagement” by maximizing the views of your content.
4. Finding and tagging leads for your existing products
   You can monitor an entire industry in the social media space (for example mentions of certain clothing within a city). These can then be seen as qualified leads that are ready and willing to buy into your products. If you have a corporate presence on the respective social media channel, it is easy and free to engage with them and pique their interest. The tricky part here is figuring out your industry keywords that are focused enough to find leads that do not yet know about your company and products.
5. Influencer scouting and engaging
   Perhaps one of the most important points in this list, it is extremely beneficial to take note of your brand champions and abassadors. These are the people who lead tribes of others, and convert their friends to use your brand. They need to be engaged with, nurtured and strategically rewarded for the benefits they bring to your company. The right social media tool can easily find the top influencers and allow you to engage with them in a social CRM interface.
6. Market research for new product lines and advertising campaigns
   This typically falls under the topic of crowdsourcing, which goes hand in hand with social media. A social media tool can show trends of what words are spoken about the most, giving hints into the needs of your target markets. This allows you to conduct research into expanding your existing product lines, and improving and refocusing marketing campaigns. The benefit of this is immense, and with the right content strategy and execution can bring real benefits to increasing your bottom line.
7. Investigating social media channels to focus on
   Unless you have massive personelle resources, it doesn’t make sense to engage on as many channels as you possibly can. This will thin out your content strategy, and your messages will appear to be unfocused. Analysis of the top channels where your online audience is talking, is key to engaging and focusing on only those channels. If your fans are on Facebook, and there is almost no buzz on Twitter, it is much easier to plan a social media strategy and campaign by focusing on the top social network.