Are you using tools to monitor social media for your practice?

Our world is shaped by social media today.

It’s how we share news, discover what’s going on in the world, and also find almost everything we need. Social media is a great tool for individuals, but it is even more important for companies. Companies can use social media to build their brand and in turn strengthen their presence.

According to a 2011 Nielsen report on social media and brand, 60 percent of consumers found a specific brand or service by using a social media site.¹ And that number has surely increased since then.

And while the report may have insight in the fact that people rely heavily on social media to discover brands, a lot has changed about how they access this information in the past five years. According to the report, only 15 percent of people preferred getting information from a company’s Facebook page. But in the Social Media Marketing Industry Report 2016, 55 percent of marketers said that Facebook was the most important social network to reach consumers.²

Social media allows you to connect with and interact with patients and in turn builds your presence in the digital world. But, creating social media accounts is only the first step.

Monitoring your accounts to make sure that your brand is performing well is important. There are tools to help with this. While there are many tools out there that examine social media presence, here are a few that will help you easily track and expand your social media presence to help increase business, get new patients and keep existing ones.

Social Mention

By simply typing a name or brand into a search bar, Social Mention allows you to see what people are saying about you on over 100 social media properties in real time.³ The tool goes more in depth than some of the others and breaks down the brand’s depth and influence into four categories: reach, strength, passion and sentiment.

Social Mention allows you to not only see how people feel about your brand, but also shows if people will repeat the mention again, allowing you to see what works and use the same tactics in the future. Social Mention is free and also provides you with an RSS feed of all your mentions to see your strengths and weaknesses.

Mention

Founded three years ago in Paris to give people a chance to see what others are saying about them in real time, Mention allows you to visualize your online presence. Since then, the company help more than 350,000 companies around the world monitor their social media presence.

The tool pulls together millions of sources in more than 40 languages to see how far your brand really extends. Mention offers a 14-day free trial and then $29 a month for individual and $99 a month for small businesses. The small business plan allows three users to track interaction with analytics and five alerts.

HowSociable

Not only does HowSociable measure your social media presence, but it also looks at the social media outlets of your competitors. The tool compiles all the data to create a magnitude score of 1 to 10 that shows the level of activity during one week. The scores for each social media platform show your what platforms are your best and worst, allowing you to make changes from there.

HowSociable examines 36 different social media sites and can also look back at past data, though this historical data is more expensive and less accurate.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a multi-channel social media management tool that looks at all your social media outlets including Facebook, Twitter, Google +, LinkedIn and more. It’s one of the easier tools to use and a favorite by many different brands. It works with both small and media sized companies and keeps everything in real time and shows you what people are saying about your brand as well as who’s engaging in conversations.

This free tool also has an RSS feed that makes the it easy to manage all your different social media outlets in one place.

SumAll

Having a great social media presence doesn’t just have to be for big companies. SumAll was founded in 2011 to help smaller companies. The company’s goal is to give every company, but mainly small businesses, the opportunity to see their online data and improve their businesses accordingly.

To do this, SumAll presents companies with visualized data that shows social media, traffic and email data pooled together for an inclusive look at what a company is doing right and wrong when it comes to social media. The company offers unlimited social media reporting for $99 a month.

References 

1 Nielsen. How Social Media Impacts Brand Marketing. Published October 14, 2011. Accessed July 2016.

2 Stelzner MA. 2016 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Published May 2016. Accessed July 2016.

3 Page J. 7 Social Media Monitoring Tools to Track Your Brand. Published October 2015. Accessed July 2016.