So you’re using social media to get the word out about your business. You have some kind of social media marketing strategy in place, and you’re sharing helpful information with your prospects and building relationships, not violating the  Facebook timeline walls of group members with “buy my stuff!” “buy my stuff please?” and “oh by the way by my stuff”. Now you’re trying to understand the “customer experience” part of social media marketing. (Apparently, Customer Service is an outdated term)

Well, one of the best ways to be proactive about ensuring that you can create a wonderful customer experience is by monitoring the conversation about your brand and industry.

What will that accomplish?

Well, you may want to monitor the conversation because you want to be alerted when people are saying bad or good things about your brand. That way you can capitalize on the good things with prospects who are still on the fence about your services, and address the issues of those saying bad things. You may also want to set up a monitoring system to quickly respond to all business inquiries. Or you may simply want to join the conversation to bring more credibility to your brand.

But I’m a small business and I don’t have resources to monitor my business online.

Well, it doesn’t take much time to set up a social media monitoring system using a free tools such as Trackr or Socialmention And you don’t have to take all day. Just 10 minutes in a business day is all it takes to look for any brand mentions so you can send a quick thank you or a message to set up a meeting so you can clear up a misunderstanding.  

Whether you like it or not people are talking about you. The question is do you want to be apart of the conversation.

Flickr Credit: Jeffrey Beall