With billions of users globally and millions of social media posts each day, it is clear that your company isn’t the only one that sees the value of focusing on your target audience through social media platforms. This means you must keep track of what is going on to be proactive rather than reactive as trends change. If you don’t, you risk falling behind or losing followers to your rivals.
But if you’ve already missed the chance of being ahead of the curve and lost followers to your competitors, innovative social media monitoring strategies can help you reverse this loss. You’ll need an actionable plan incorporating best practices from across the digital marketing ecosystem, which is what this article discusses.
Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring involves tracking your social media accounts and collecting data on posts and engagement they receive, including reactions and comments. You can assign this job to someone on your team, which will likely slow down the process. For faster results, you can use social media monitoring services, which use sophisticated tools to analyze data and have the capability to deliver results quickly.
With social media monitoring, you can “scrape” social media platforms to gather information and insights about posts. This can include the post’s author and time and the number of reactions, retweets, likes, etc. The data you collect through social media monitoring will help you identify which strategies work for you and analyze how your posts are received. This will allow you to eliminate the issues that led to losing followers in the first place and ensure that this isn’t repeated in the future.
4 Social Media Monitoring Strategies to Win Back Followers
Winning back your followers is simple. However, most businesses complicate the process by overlooking how minor reforms make major differences. Following are four sure shout strategies that are bound to work:
1) Set Up a Monitoring Schedule
You’ll have to be regular and consistent to win back followers with social media monitoring. This ensures the collection of quality data to discover the issues that forced your followers away. You can start by setting aside a few minutes each day to review your social media account and see if anything pops out to you as a potential issue.
Ideally, you must have a system in place, so you don’t have to spend too much time daily. This way, you don’t have to worry about missing anything.
2) Look At Old Data to Find Problem Areas
Looking at old data is another way to regain followers you’ve lost. Using historical data will give you a wealth of insight into what’s wrong with your social media strategy. By comparing your data with the historical data of your competitors, you can identify the areas where you are lagging and evolve a plan to work on these areas. Making comparisons in critical areas like engagement and response is a good idea.
While comparing data manually would be challenging, using a tool will make the exercise manageable and, more importantly, efficient. The sooner you can collect the data and analyze it to identify what’s missing, the better off you’ll be — remember that you would be losing followers during the exercise.
3) Use Data to Find Opportunities for Growth
Social media monitoring can also be used to find new growth opportunities. Now you may ask how growth will help gain lost followers. Well, it’s simple — when you outdo your competitors in the industry or at least improve your performance, the prospects of gaining back your lost followers will improve.
Do not hesitate to employ market research services to identify growth opportunities if you have to. Growth is a great enabler. While it is known that it brings new business opportunities and opens doors previously closed for you, it also makes you a more attractive option for many than you were before.
You can put yourself in the pole position in the industry and challenge the dominance of other key players. It will not go unnoticed on social media, which is increasingly becoming an arena for competition between brands. We’ve all seen how Netflix and Amazon Prime try to outdo each other on social media platforms like Twitter. Well, now you know why they do it!
4) Try Out New Strategies and Tactics
Once you’ve identified problem areas using social media monitoring, try implementing those changes as soon as possible. This will prevent your social media strategy from falling behind if you have to stop for any reason. Continue to check in periodically so you can adjust your social media strategy and tactics as needed. Setting up a social media reporting schedule would help you achieve this goal.
Bottom Line
Social media is not limited to posting content and waiting for followers to click. It’s about providing value to your followers and ensuring they actively engage with your brand. Reviewing your social media strategy can quickly find problem areas and identify growth opportunities. With this information, you can take action regularly and regain your lost followers over some time.