Each quarter Snoo.ws tackles a new series topic to provide our audience with insight, intelligence, examples and ideas. This month is Monitoring Month where we will cover everything from basic monitoring 101 to the top monitoring tools to monitoring’s role in your overall strategy. So, stay tuned – there’s plenty to come.
Every day and at any given time, users go online to talk about your brand. The right monitoring tools allow you to capture their conversations, follow public opinion closely and get to the root cause of problems. But which one came first? Monitoring or community management? There is no easy answer to this “chicken or egg” question.
We can all agree that in order to interact with your target audience you must listen. Listening is at the core of every engagement strategy. This is how social media monitoring and community management go hand in hand. Regardless of which comes first, one cannot thrive without the other. If you want to create a meaningful relationship between your brand and your fans, you must listen to what they have to say and react to any shift of sentiment. Monitoring the social web allows you to keep track of the buzz and get a sense of where the conversations are happening and when they increase in volume. Thanks to monitoring, you can understand context and identify emerging topics in the customer conversation.
However, engaging with fans also allows you to listen, gain brand insights and connect with the individuals who have the greatest ability to reach others online. Community management is a vehicle that spreads word-of-mouth across the social media landscape. Real-time engagement can stop negative sentiment from building up and spreading. Community management and monitoring are both excellent starting points to an effective social media strategy.
Both community management and monitoring allow you to measure the pulse of your community and know in real-time how fans are responding to your latest announcement, product or campaign. Whether you’re a passive or an active listener, your goal is the same: to tap into the mechanisms that draw user engagement in the social media web.
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