Monitoring your brand’s mentions is not an option these days. It’s a must.
The web is open and public. Someone is discussing your brand and you better be there to listen and participate.
But is there any way to get more out of a necessary task?
Yes. Consider these three ways to turn those brand mentions into content assets.
1. Web mentions into monthly roundups
There’s one fundamental tactic behind brand monitoring online: Promote your promoters – use your marketing channels to drive traffic to content that promotes your business.
Use your #marketing channels to drive traffic to #content that promotes your business, says @SEOSmarty. Click To Tweet
Think about the powerful benefits:
- You nurture your relationships with already engaged bloggers (who wrote about your brand), turning them into even more loyal members of your community.
- You generate more exposure for those favorable brand mentions and thus create a more powerful digital context around your brand.
Incorporate these web mentions into your on-site content through regular roundups or a “featured in” section. This way you:
- Encourage your promoters to engage with your site (by sharing the content asset in which they are included)
- Build the authority of pages mentioning you (and thus bring them higher in search results)
- Encourage more sites to mention your brand (in hopes you’ll include them in your content too)
- Prompt them to share their mentions to your community (and thus increase your reach)
Here’s how we did it for one project:
- Published post monthly rounding up the brand’s mentions in blog articles and videos
- Tweeted these mentions the last Thursday of every month using the brand hashtag and tagging the article authors (and other tools included in those articles alongside our brand)
Publish a monthly roundup of your brand’s mentions in articles & videos, says @SEOSmarty. Click To Tweet
This process worked well on multiple levels, including building relationships with niche bloggers and startups, and creating a fun tradition for our customers who enjoyed engaging with the monthly mention chat on Twitter.
Tool tip: Awario is a great way to monitor and organize mentions for later reuse. You can maintain a separate alert where you track only web and news/blogs mentions. Then you can log in regularly to go through mentions: Check the unimportant or minor mentions as done. Highlight the star on mentions that should be included in your roundup.
Monitor & organize brand mentions for later reuse w/ @AwarioApp, says @SEOSmarty. Click To Tweet
Apart from grouping those mentions by importance, schedule social media promotion of all articles mentioning your brand (using proper tagging).
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2. Tweets into testimonials
My favorite way to collect and publicize testimonials is through social media because it is:
- Believable and verifiable (anyone can see right away who posted them)
- Able to spread more easily (with your help too)
Twitter is the most effective and productive way to collect and promote those testimonials because most tweets are public and open. Plus, you can easily embed tweets to your site and scale the curation process using Twitter “likes” (previously, favorites).
Tool tips: I use TweetDeck to curate brand mentions for two reasons:
- You can dedicate a dashboard column for desktop alerts so you can engage with your Twitter mentions right away.
- You can use Twitter advanced search operators, which gives you flexibility in how to set it up.
Set up a column for #Twitter mentions in your @TweetDeck dashboard to engage w/ them right away. @SEOSmarty Click To Tweet
Speaking of advanced search, here’s my way of monitoring my personal brand:
(“ann smarty” OR seosmarty OR seosmarty.com -from: @seosmarty – @seosmarty)
This search does the following:
- Includes tweets mentioning the full name (but not necessarily my Twitter handle)
- Includes tweets containing the “unlinked” handle, i.e., those without an @ symbol
- Includes tweets mentioning the site or articles on the site
- Excludes my tweets
- Excludes tweets tagging me (I have a separate column for monitoring those.)
I enable desktop alerts for this search:
Whenever I come across a positive tweet, I add it to my Twitter “likes” to keep them in one place. From there, I can:
- Retweet with the comment
- Embed these tweets on the site’s About and Services pages
- Turn them into visuals and republish to Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook
- Automatically share them with the team through RSS or a Slack group (both can be done through Zapier)
If you feel like more playing, give Social Mention a try. It’s simple, free, and includes sentiment search. It is a great tool for basic monitoring and tracking, though it isn’t sufficient for a major campaign. It can supplement other tools, especially for quick searches for bare-bones information. It will show you sentiment, top keywords, links associated with your search, and the strength of that mention.
A free #socialmedia monitoring tool, @SocialMention, includes sentiment search, says @SEOSmarty. Click To Tweet
3. Social media questions into site FAQ or Q&A sections
These days customers are more comfortable discussing products and services online, in public, than emailing a business and waiting for a reply. Therefore, it’s crucial to monitor those conversations to be able to:
- Fix issues promptly
- Avoid reputation crisis
- Turn unhappy customers into brand advocates
- Make sure those questions and concerns are properly addressed on your site
It’s important to monitor mentions of your competitors and competing (or even complementing) products. You want to know what questions your competitors’ customers are asking so you can give them a better answer (right away and on your site). This way, you can steal your customers from a bigger, more established competitor.
Tool tips: Building a FAQ section is an ongoing process. Your site’s knowledge base should evolve with your market, product, and company. Here’s a handy collection of plug-ins to help.
When it comes to finding, monitoring, and curating niche questions to cover in your knowledge base, here are my three favorite tools:
Twitter is one of my favorite search operators. All you need is to type your term followed by a space and a question mark. For example, if you’re a website host provider, you could search: Go Daddy ?
#Twitter tip: Type a term followed by a space and a ? to see all questions asked on that topic. @SEOSmarty Click To Tweet
BuzzSumo Question Analyzer is another great way to discover questions on your topics. It indexes dozens of forums and Q&A databases. Type your term and let the tool generate a list of questions containing that term and related terms. You can expand your FAQ beyond your core term and look outside of the box.
Cyfe (a client of mine) can be used for many tasks, including on-site FAQ management. You can use it to:
- Monitor Twitter questions, creating an archive to go through once in a while, which can inform your content
- Note questions discovered from other sources such as BuzzSumo or customer support in a Google Spreadsheet that can be framed into the dashboard
Conclusion
Productive social media monitoring can result in more cool content ideas. The key is to include monitoring-related content in your content planning.
Are you utilizing your reputation monitoring in any creative way? Share in the comments.
Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).
Get more ideas on how to transform existing practices, like brand monitoring, into awesome content. Register today for Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 and use code BLOG100 to save $100.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute