People have been writing online about their lives and experiences, and chances are they are talking about your brand or product. In this post I will help you learn how to monitor and respond to people's feedback on your brand. In order to understand your customers you have to listen to what they are talking about, and find out what the public thinks of your brand. Luckily, social media has made this easier than ever. People are publicly posting their opinions and are basically doing the market research for you. Small business can find out what people think without having to use a focus group or a opt-in survey.
Search the twitter stream
Twitter is known for its public nature, and can really help you get a feel for what people think of your products. People are used to writing short posts about life experiences, and this can include your brand. Someone bought your product and thought it was unique, they probably wrote about it to their followers. Twitter has a built in search that allows you to find content in tweets and this can be helpful in seeking out information. Another Twitter feature that can help you find information is hash tags (#). Hash tags are used to categorize what you are tweeting about, and groups your tweet with others that use the same hash tag. If you quickly want to catch up on a topic look to see if a hash tag has been created for it and read those post.
Tweetdeck- Tweetdeck is a third party application that is meant for people who want more features than the default twitter site. Tweetdeck allows you to make dynamic columns, these columns can show your @replies, your direct messages or saved lists. This is where the power of Tweetdeck really comes in. You can search twitter for your brand name, and then save that search to a column. Now you can just refresh whenever you want to see if more tweets have been posted about your brand, instead of manually searching every time.
Monitter- If you do not want to download an application, monitter is web based. This will allow you to try out these search features without having to set up a desktop application.
Blogs
Ever since the launch of livejournal and blogger, people have been blogging. Blogs are used as a more formal and thought out form of media than Twitter. Over 300 million people read blogs and around 180 million own their own blogs. This is an incredible amount of people posting public data and you can use this to your advantage.
Technorati- Technorati is a massive blog database. If you wish to search for your brand on the blogosphere, this is a good place to start.
Now that you are listening to your customers, its time to engage. Here are a few of the things you should be doing with your time.
1) Stop fires: Find negative reactions to your brand and try to fix them. Negative feedback will hurt your image and if you can, you should resolve the quarrels the customer has. A simple message to them asking for more information on why they were dissatisfied could really go a long way for your brand image. Show yourself as a brand that cares about their customers after the sale is done, and be proactive. If you go to them they will feel better than if they came to you.
2) Build relationships: If people are just talking about your brand, make sure to comment. Showing that you are not just a seller of a product, but people you can trust, then your customers will stay loyal to you. Especially when your company is small try to respond to every mention of your company if it is appropriate, but do not spam users.
Social media helps you communicate with your customers, and there is no reason to deny this. Whether its helping disgruntled customers, or engaging with fans, social media will help you spread your brand and influence. If you have experience with using social media as customer service I would love to hear about it in the comments.
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