How to Use Social Media to Monitor Your Brand

Do you know what your customers are saying about you right now?  Would you like to know what they think about new products you’re considering before you invest the time and money in inventory and promotion?

Social media networks have become an excellent way to gather real-time feedback from customers and prospects and the good news for companies is it can all be done online for free.

Here are some of the most popular social networks and what they have to offer:

Facebook – if you have a Facebook Fan page for your business (and you should), you can add a polling application that allows you to ask questions and gather data via fan votes. Fans can also share the poll with their friends, thereby extending the reach of your brand.

Twitter – Twitter has an application called TwtPoll that lets you set up a question and then tweets it to all your followers, who can also retweet it to theirs as well. TwtPoll gives you options for question formats, including multiple choice, ranking, rating, image choices, comments, and more. You can also extend your TwtPoll to other social media sites, including Facebook.

Twitter also has great conversation tracking tools to monitor what people are saying about you. Monitter lets you track in real-time via keywords. Tweetbeep sends you an email every time your brand is mentioned, with links to the conversation.

LinkedIn – get feedback from your LinkedIn business connections by going to LinkedIn Answers and posting a question.

Blog – you can create a poll on your blog by utilising free polling applications like SurveyMonkey, PollDaddy or WuFoo.

Website – using one of the free polling services to host a poll on the home page of your website not only can furnish you with good information about how you’re serving customers, it can also help you create a dialog with your customers and draw them in to your online community.

Social media monitoring tools also allow you to respond quickly to any customer service problems as well. So it’s important to not only monitor, but also respond when problems arise and people are talking about it online.