monitoring social media

Monitoring your brand on Twitter

A few years ago, consumers started looking at online reviews before buying a product or service. Today, who would buy a TV without first looking at different reviews and then finding the best price in a store nearby?

With the ever increasing presence of social media in our daily life, ordinary people have started to document their shopping experience. For example, if there is a line up in front of a restaurant, someone may write on Twitter: “stuck in front of XXX, my fav restaurant” with his cellphone. It doesn’t have a widespread impact because, unlike reviews, the number of people reading this messages will be limited. However, people that are reading this message will trust the sender and that innocuous cellphone message could have a deeper impact than a typical restaurant review.

Here are a few tricks to search for types of messages similar the cellphone example above. All the examples below are given with a fake brand named MegaBook.

1.    Look for your brand and add “:(” ex: MegaBook :(

2.    Use the “from:Twitterer” with someone famous. For example, if you’re in the social media business, “mashable” is a collective of web critics with a lot of influence. ex: MegaBook from:mashable

3.    Look for your brand with the “near” keyword ex: MegaBook near:Vancouver

4.    Search for unanswered questions for your product with “?” ex: Megabook ?

Finally, what do you do with all these conversations? Being in touch with your customers and engaging in conversations is a must; especially if your customer had a bad experience.

If your customer believes he received a bad service, respond as if you were speaking to him face to face.

1. Apologize. Even if it’s not your fault, the customer thinks it is.

2. Make sure you understand his problem. Reformulate and restate what you understand until you’re both on the same page.

3. Offer either excuses or something special (not necessarily free goods) that will encourage your customer to return.

On the other hand, if your customer was happy with your service, just a quick work to say “thanks for supporting us” is usually more than enough.

Happy new year!

Taotao

eMarketing Strategist

Tags: branding, Marketing Strategy, monitoring social media, Twitter