Your brand may be mentioned in social media channels – and you may not even know it. Yet social media carries more weight than ever. Your potential customers on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media channels are likely paying more attention to their friends and followers than your marketing activities.
According to a Nielsen study, recommendations from friends are the most trusted form of advertising and the second most trusted form is branded websites.
That makes tracking your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest more essential than ever.
Fortunately you can automatically track mentions of your brand – and even your competitor’s brands – through “social listening” tools that monitor social media sites and provide reports you can use to track trends and analyze your progress in promoting your brand.
One tool, for example, is Hootsuite, perhaps one of the more popular platforms, which comes in a free and professional version. The professional version adds in more analytics and other features.
By listening to social media mentions of your brand, you can measure and track brand awareness in these media, get a better sense of your brand’s reputation, respond to any negative complaints, and even gain insights into competitive brands.
