Know Your Audience
by patrickmceachran
Throughout our course and as a marketer, I have come to appreciate just how important social media monitoring has become for a brand. Without monitoring social media, you won’t be aware of what conversations consumers are having about your brand or your line of business and without this information, I think that companies will quickly find themselves becoming irrelevant.
Monitoring is about keeping an ear low to the ground. You need to be discovering and keeping watch over conversations that are discussing your brand. You then need to be analyzing and measuring these conversations. What topics are more common than others? Is the general tone of the conversations positive or negative? Do consumers have questions regarding your brand or are the presenting their opinions of your brand?
Once you have found the conversations and measured the content of these conversations, it’s time to engage. Engaging is where you show how well you’ve been monitoring. You don’t just need to engage with people, you need to engage with the right people. You must hang out in the right digital areas by embracing the online communities that your customers frequent. Creating relationships over the platforms that consumers are used to and answering to their questions and concerns is all part of building the trust and integrity of your brand. It all shapes how the consumers see you. A brand can’t be successful without the consumer knowing you.
A great example of this in an online community that I’m a part of are the ski companies that participate in discussions on Newschoolers, an online skiing content website and forum. All the skis companies have their own accounts or reps that represent them on the website and they’re constantly monitoring what’s being said about their gear and who’s saying what about their athletes.
The user ‘onenerdykid’ is commonly known as a rep for Atomic. Here we see him hosting a thread on the Gear Talk forum answering all the questions that other users have about ski boot fitting. The thread has over 6,000 views and nearly 450 replies.