Social Media Monitoring – Are You Listening?

What Is Social Media Monitoring And Why Should You Be Doing It? 

Conversations are happening about your company, products and services across the internet and they are happening fast. Whether you like it or not, these conversations are changing perceptions about your company. People voice their opinions, spread ideas, and ask questions – are you paying attention? You should be. 

You need to be taking part in these conversations, possibly influencing them and most definitely learning from them. Social Media Monitoring enables you tune in to relevant conversations and officially or covertly influencing the conversation.

How to Use ‘Social Media Monitoring’ 

Monitor the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Campaign 

Are you about to launch a marketing campaign for a new product or is your company about to enter a new market? Do you want to know how your company and products are received by potential customers? Social Media Monitoring can assist in tracking the spread or reach of a campaign, press release and additional marketing activities. 

Keep Track of Your Competition 

Keeping track of your competition is critical to your business. What are people saying about their new products, features or services? What are they saying about your products and services, what marketing activities are they carrying out and how are they being received by potential clients?
Generate Leads and Sales
The way you make a sale these days has definitely changed. It’s no longer just about making the same old sales pitch. There are so many messages that your customers need to deal with and one more message just isn’t effective - you need to build relationships with people to get their attention and ultimately their sale. You need to build trust by participating in online communities and social network conversations to make a lasting impression and assure credibility.

Discover Market Trends 

Customer needs and opinions change extremely fast in many markets. An effective way to stay ahead of the competition and maintain your competitive advantage is to stay aware of emerging market trends. Use the intelligence established through Social Media Monitoring wisely. Create articles or whitepapers, craft the messages for your marketing collateral and feed R&D with the necessary knowledge to positively influence the future of your product roadmap.

Crisis Management 

It has happened to us all and it is not pleasant, but when something goes wrong and you are being talked about negatively in the blogosphere, it is critical that your company is aware of the prevailing conversations and opinions in order to identify the influencers and act accordingly. Stop the misinformation, rumors and negative press by intervening and controlling the situation- turn it around by being proactive.

Unearth Your Influencers 

Use Social Media Monitoring to seek out potential people in your market that have the ability to reach a wide range of your potential customers. Whether it may be industry bloggers, passionate Tweeters or heavy web community users; find out what they are saying about your company. Is it good, bad or are they saying nothing at all? Put together a list of important influencers and help them become passionate brand advocates who build up your trust & authority in the market place, defending you when times get tough.

Superior Customer Service 

Social media is a truly effective way to solve customer issues in real time, in a manner that they do not expect. The old adage about ‘delighting’ your customer is especially pertinent if done by responding to them on social networks. If your customers see this level of responsiveness you can quickly earn their trust and future custom. 


Contact 3Sixty for a chat about how we can help with your online reputation.

1. Not having a keyword strategy. The biggest mistake is to not have a keyword strategy or do keyword research. You need to have a prioritized list of your company's target markets and a list of keywords / phrases used in those niches by potential customers when searching online.

2. Not monitoring results or acting upon results. Test, test, test is important in all aspects of marketing and doubly so when it comes to SEO. Monitor everything via a robust analytics package including traffic, rankings, and response for each page/keyword. How many people are signing up for a newsletter, buying your product, reading your blog etc? If something is working well how can you make it work even better? If something is not working, then know when to quit and try something new. Peoples search behavior is in constant flux and you need to make sure you are following the trends.

3. Having a bad Content Management System (CMS). Or none at all! Have control over your content so you can add, remove, edit, test etc. Without control you will find it time consuming and expensive to get things changed.

4. Not doing SEO today! It's difficult to get your website to appear on page one of Google results for most keywords. This will only get harder as time goes by. Start now to build up your presence, dominate the top positions for a few keywords/phrases and then build upon it.

5. Not understanding how important site structure is. Most websites have hundreds if not thousands of pages. We all find it easier to use a website with an organized and easy-to-navigate structure. This makes people want to spend more time on your website. If the navigation and structure are confusing then people won't stay and that's something the search engines frown upon even if you have great page optimization!

6. Neglecting your Homepage. By far the most important page that you have. It's where most of your inbound links point to and probably ranks the best with search engines. You need to make sure that you use your keywords and that you help the visitor get to where he/she wants as fast as possible.

7. Focusing too much on your home page! After a while you need to build up other pages to have the same success as the homepage. The homepage can only be effective for a limited number of keywords. Use internal linking to develop other pages on the site.

Having a good web site and using internet marketing is crucial for running a business that addresses international markets. 

The most important contribution of a web site is to provide information about your products and services in the fastest, easiest and most comprehensive way, reaching as many clients as possible. 

Today's internet and software technologies enable us to provide on-line customer support that was unthinkable 10 years ago. Clients can install software on-line or automatically upgrade software with file sizes that can reach hundreds of megabytes. To make things more efficient, software licenses can also be automatically generated through the web site client account management system. 

Internet collaboration software such as WebEx and Go to Meeting allows us to control client PC’s providing technical support, training and even solve hardware related problems. The alternative would have been sending support engineers to client locations across the globe which is both costly and time consuming.

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SEO Beginners Guide - Part 1

Keyword Research

Keywords. This is a term that you hear all the time when it comes to SEO and Internet Marketing. In fact, it’s difficult to read something about SEO without keywords being mentioned. This blog post will help you understand why keywords & keyword research are so important to the popularity of your website. 

                     

Simply put, keywords are the words that the search engines use to catalog, index and find your website. The idea is to find the most relevant and popular search terms that apply to your business and then make sure the content of your website are optimized for them.

For example if a user searches for “walking maps in the Negev”, a web page with that exact text will rank better than a page that says “desert walking routes in Israel”

In fact, keyword research is very much like traditional market research. You need to find out as much information as possible about your target market(s) to ensure your marketing messages are relevant and useful to the reader.

Why is keyword research important? Well there are three main reasons:

1. It helps to bring lots of visitors to your website
Finding and using the right keywords on your web site to improve your site’s ranking is really the cornerstone, if not the most important part, of any SEO strategy or project. The difference between two similar keywords or phrases can mean the difference between 2, 200 or 2000 visits a day.

2. Focusing on relevant keywords and useful content will improve the experience for the visitor
People don’t have lots of time to waste and want to find relevant information, products or services as quickly as possible. Search engines want the same thing. In order to keep both of them happy you need to provide useful and relevant content that relates to the popular search terms. This way the search engines will rank you higher because they trust visitors will be happy with your content.

3. Keyword research can help identify new areas of opportunity you were unaware of
Conducting keyword research really uncovers the needs & interests of your existing & potential customers. Looking at what they search for highlights problems or needs, interests or passions, and what’s valuable or relevant.

We would appreciate your feedback on this blog post. Please click here to take our very short survey

Read about 3Sixty's Internet Marketing services