Twitter (now X) is quick-moving- quicker than the brands which have not been correctly prepared to listen. Although most businesses say that they are tracking Twitter, not many of them are doing it successfully. You won’t even hear them run down your marketing, customer support and reputation management activities: bad performance, old approaches, shallow monitoring can do the damage.
Unless Twitter monitoring is bringing real value to your brand, then it is likely that you are committing one (or a combination of) the following errors. These errors can make sure that the brands never get the full benefits of social media listening, real time monitoring, and real time media tracking.
1. Following Ground Rules Only and Failing to See the Forest.
Direct mentioning or tagged tweets is one of the most widespread Twitter monitoring errors. Although such interactions are significant, they constitute a minimal part of the discussion that takes place on the platform.
Users use brands without tagging them, particularly when providing sincere opinions, complaints, or comparisons. When monitoring is narrowed down to mentions, it loses precious information on customer sentiment and expectations as well as emerging patterns. To be a good social listener it is important to have the ability to listen to more than what is explicitly aimed at you.
2. Using Twitter Monitoring as a One-Time Installation.
The other huge problem is that people have reduced the monitoring of Twitter to a one-time affair that should be established. The language is changed, the behavior of the audience is modified, and the priorities of business also change. Keywords, which were relevant several months ago, might not be relevant to the way people describe your brand or your industry.
The monitoring setups are not updated, and thus the quality of data decreases. The teams might get irrelevant notifications, miss any crucial discussions, or lose the trust of the entire monitoring process over time. RealTime Media Monitoring needs to co-exist with your brand and market in order to be useful.
3. Disregard of Sentiment and Context.
Most brands are highly volume-oriented, i.e. how many times they are mentioned without paying much attention to the sentiment or context. An increase in activity burst may seem good on the surface but equally can represent a lack of satisfaction, an opposition or a looming crisis.
Brands run the risk of misinterpreting conversations without sentiment analysis that would lead to an inappropriate or an untimely reaction. Good social media listening is more than numbers and investigates the feelings of the listeners and the reason why the listeners are conversing.
4. Failing to Act in Real Time
Twitter is more real time, but most brands analyse information hours or days after a conversation. At that time, the avenues of engagement, issue resolution or crisis prevention might be lost.
Slow response time may irritate customer attitudes and raise negative feelings. Conversely, realtime media monitoring enables the brands to keep abreast with the conversations as they happen and therefore take a timely action when it matters the most.
5. Twitter Monitoring Data Siloing.
The insights of Twitter tend to be confined to one department and it is most likely marketing or social media. This compartmentalized method restricts the cumulative effects of surveillance operation.
Through customer support teams, they do not get early warning signs, product teams are not able to access feature feedback, and leadership cannot see brand perception. The usefulness of real time monitoring is much greater when the insights are distributed among the departments and can be used in making wider business decisions.
6. Ignoring Competitive Intelligence.
Another error one does is reviewing your brand alone, which is restricting the usefulness of Twitter monitoring. Twitter is a forum where people are free to discuss the products, to criticize competitors and to share their plans to change brands.
Losing such discussions is a way of losing chances to determine market gaps and expectations of customers. Media tracking in real time can show what the audience thinks about your competitors and where your brand can be different.
7. Relying on Vanity Metrics
The number of impressions, likes, and the number of followers is easy to follow-up, but these measures hardly translate into actual business influence. These vanity metrics have the ability to make a false impression of success even though there may be underlying problems.
The quality of engagement, trend of sentiment, common complaints, and customer needs are important sources of insightful information. Social listening should focus on working data rather than on superficial data.
8. Failure to Align Monitoring and Business Goals.
Twitter monitoring can hardly be effective in case they do not have clear objectives. Following up on each and every detail results in noise and data overloads and unfocused reporting.
Even the most powerful Real Time Media Monitoring tools will be unable to provide value without being aligned to the business objectives like brand reputation, customer support, lead generation, or crisis management.
Final Thoughts
Monitoring Twitter is not about staying connected with what people are saying, but rather being in the know of conversations, emotions and trends in their real-time. Brands that use old fashioned means or superficial tracking lose important insights and they are vulnerable to being overtaken by more nimble companies.
Twitter can become an effective source of intelligence instead of a mere noisy channel by these tips as well as enhancing your attitude toward social media listening, real time media monitoring, and real time monitoring.
