Quick question: did you ever wonder how to get dressed quickly every Monday morning? We always make small decisions that steal our time and energy. What if you were to decrease the decision-making process to its minimum? The more options each of us have, the more time we spend making a choice. Let’s take a look at choosing a brand monitoring tool.
Much like picking up the clothing, people spend hours searching and testing countless online web monitoring tools and services. The elimination of your choice to three main options, and later on to the one that works the best, is the direct path to productivity. This rule easily applies to optimize the search for online assistance like monitoring tools. These days such kinds of tools became an essential part of digital and influencer marketing.
Outline:
- Tip 1. Improve your time management
- Tip 2. Choose understandable user interface
- Tip 3. Mind the word gap
- Tip 4. Define the age range of your target audience
- Tip 5. Know the difference: social media listening vs social media monitoring
- Tip 6. Free tools vs. paid tools
Tip 1. Improve your time management
To be way ahead of your competitors is crucial. That’s why need in professional monitoring tool rings true now as never before. It’s obvious that manual research on the Internet takes too much time, which you could spend upgrading our product. People invented automation tools for reason, you know. For sure, it’s a whole lot better to spend your time using a special tool that collects the data and shows the statistics within seconds.
Be procreative in your search for online tools. This is similar to the employment process: it requires selection according to the several must-have features and evaluation of performance. Tools are online assistants that help out boosting the business process. For this reason, choose wisely, yet don’t spend too much time.
Typing in Google “top 10 brand monitoring tools” make sure to be as specific as possible. It is similar to a birthday wish, the more details you include, the higher the chances to get what you want. That means to add to your search the niche you work in, the region and mention date to get the most recent information.
Try to focus attention on the main parameters that should be included in every web monitoring tool.
Besides, does it make sense to waste time? The manual search usually takes at least 15-20 minutes, while the automotive tool search fastens the process. Almost every business niche is full of competitors, so it takes timely actions and reactions to put yourself on the map.
Tip 2. Choose understandable user interface
Design is the entire world of hidden triggers that later on skillfully direct users to like some product or service better. It takes too many efforts to make people think “Yeah, I really enjoy this interface”. Sure, UX has its own secret and Peter Morville from Semantic Studios shared some of them. In short, the interface is good if it:
- valuable
- useful
- usable
- findable
- credible
- desirable
- accessible
Pay attention to a website’s usability. While using a free trial period option on a brand monitoring tool, make sure to explore all available features and apply them to your case.
If everything works the way you expect, including tracking of a brand mentions, your competitors, great selection of influencers in your niche to collaborate with, don’t hesitate to pick the tool.
But if anything doesn’t quite work like postponement in data collection, the lack of the social media platform you count on or unusually delayed support service reply, think twice before taking that service.
Color also impacts the interface design of a website and its usability. Besides, it’s popular in branding and kind of important what color has been used to represent a brand. So if you like or don’t really like the interface, these are the signs of well-thought or bad design accordingly.
All of us heard about the colors’ therapy and their effects on human consciousness. Branding is not an exception. Famous brands that we are aware of choose specific colors for a reason, depending on what brand identity, impression and reputation they want to shape.
According to statistics, the most successful brands give preference to blue(Facebook, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Samsung, Ford, Pepsi,), red (YouTube, Netflix, Lego, Nintendo, Coca Cola, Yelp) and yellow (Snapchat, Sprint, McDonald’s, DHL,) colors. Following this point, we choose certain brand based on emotions and feelings that feel at the moment.
Tip 3. Mind the word gap
While you search for the “perfect match” among online tools, be as specific as possible when it comes to the location of your real and potential customers. Moreover, make sure that the tool you need, supports the language of your target audience, not to mention your brand. For instance, if you’re located in Europe, you’re probably not going to use a web monitoring tool in Spanish, as most of the customers choose English.
This works the other way around: in the Spanish speaking country or even continent ( like Latin America), the English language is not as popular as it could be. In a word, follow the values and needs of your audience to make your brand work.
Tip 4. Define the age range of your target audience
Source: Sprout Social
In case, your attention is centered around social media, check if a tool maintains monitoring in the webs you need. The most popular platforms for mention monitoring are Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, although other webs may be useful as well.
According to Business Insider’s research, the age range of your customers impacts the choice of a platform. They might choose YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or Twitter, much like you see on the picture above. For example, in 2019 YouTube most viewed categories are Gaming, Sports, Makeup, Health Care, Weight Loss, Education, Pop Music, and Pets. If your brand related to any of these niches, you can easily spot your target audience on the platform of 18-35 years old.
YouTubers generation usually headed to platforms related to visualization. So YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram are your hot spots when you can find potential customers and even content creators if you’re interested in promotions and sponsorship programs.
In a word, as soon as you define the picture of your audience you’re going to have better impact be able to head marketing campaigns on particular platforms.
Tip 5. Know the difference: social media listening vs social media monitoring
As it turned out, it’s useful to distinguish these two definitions, as not everyone has a clear understanding. Before starting a search of any tool, let’s define the difference between the mentioned above functions.
Social Media Monitoring is a simplification of a product name mentions search and related keywords. In particular, to track mentions, comments and replies from customers fall under this definition. Every time you look up the recent comments and likes, you perform the process of social media monitoring.
The screenshot reflects the mention dynamics of Ahrefs on Twitter. Famm.io shows all the changes for the last 3 months, including mentions, likes, comments, reach and shares. This way, it’s never been easier to collect and manage the data for any period you need, choosing social platforms to your preference.
Social Media Listening focuses on the preferences and general mood of the target audience. You just make an Instagram post about recent updates on the platform you develop with a team and see how it is involved with your audience. The tone of these positive, negative or neutral comments, the identification of what was implied is actually a social listening.
As an example, if you’re willing to check mentions and comments of your brand name on Twitter, just insert several keywords using free social monitoring tool and easily spot recent retweets as you see on the screenshot below. It’s pretty clear and straightforward: account’s name, the date and the exact time, the number of views, likes and retweets if there are any.
Clear differentiation of these features built-in one tool gives a thorough understanding of how, when and why to use them for the sake of your enterprise development.
Tip 6. Free Tools vs. Paid Tools
The eternal dilemma for users of all times: of free products/services/tools or their complete opposites? To be honest, both of these options have their benefits, but after all, customers give preference to pay to have a guarantee of quality or to unlock the features in the paid plan. Putting it another way, customers pay for the trustworthiness of a brand. Many users pick free tools if they have basic features that seem to be enough for work. Despite that, an increasing number of customers switches to paid monitoring tools to find the effectiveness’ guarantee. Keep in mind that not each and every tool gives the full list of features or services in a free trial plan. And, clearly, users go for the paid plans chasing all features and better quality. It’s good to know that some tools give unlimited access like Famm.io. They provide useful features absolutely for free, like zero costs. Plus, this platform seems very beneficial, as users can search for up to 5000 online mentions. Impressive, isn’t it? Wait, what if a tool works fine, without any prepayment or paid plan to just because it brings value? Yes, it is possible. Yes, such kind of a tool does exist. If you’re interested in exploring such valuable tools, you can check out socialwick.com for more information.
To wrap it up
These days, it is not an issue to spot a brand monitoring tool, yet it is a bit of a challenge to find a good one. We went through 6 tips that define must-have features of professional web monitoring, discussed the difference between social media monitoring and social media listening and finally reviewed cos and pros of free and paid tools.
It is up to you which one to pick for your work, whether you grow a business or work on promotions of someone else’s brand. The main point is to understand if a tool can give value and expected results; and if you’re lucky to find a free “assistant”, just keep calm and stick to it.