Monitor and measure your financial brand on social media

Are you tweeting, sharing content on Facebook, connecting with professionals on LinkedIn or broadcasting on YouTube? If you are then this article is definitely going to be of interest to you.

Chances are that people are talking about your brand, your services or their experience. The question is, are you aware of the conversations taking places and are you taking any action to manage your online reputation.

Let’s take a look at two distinct aspects of tracking your brand on the social web: Monitoring your brand and measuring your brand. The tools we will share are pretty easy to use, economical and can provide a lot of insight as to what others are saying about your personal brand online.

1. Monitor Your Brand

It is not enough to simply create a profile on a social site anymore, nor is it to post content and be ‘active’. You need to discover and listen to the conversations that could impact your business bottom line. This will allow you to learn, help, collaborate or engage with the very same people that will contribute in growing your social web presence overtime.

Your typical ‘listening’ list’ may include your clients, prospects, former clients, industry thought leaders or business partners.

By using specific tools such as Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) or Google Blogsearch (blogsearch.google.com), you can decide which relevant keywords you want to track and monitor. These should include your name, brand, branded products etc.

Other more sophisticated yet affordable tools like BuzzTrac (www.buzztrac.com) or Trackur (www.trackur.com) will allow you to create profile for monitoring your brands, connect to multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts, monitor your reputation, check on trends and analyze media attention for your company.

Once you start ‘listening’, you will find all kind of conversations about your industry, your competitors, your brand or even come across people looking for financial services you offer.

2. Measure Your Brand

While monitoring was all about managing your brand reputation, measuring your brand is all about metrics and statistics and optimizing your discovery of new clients.

Measurement tools will help you understand what needs to be done in order to stay on top of the social media trends, learn how you can make your product more attractive to your potential clients or discover how well you are benchmarking against your competitors.

Tools like SocialTALK (www.socialtalk.com) or Viralheat (www.viralheat.com) allow you to segment how your clients and prospects rate your different products or services on the social web. This can prove hugely beneficial to get valuable insight into how conversations are converting to your internal goals and ROI targets!

Takeaways

If you keep an honest and transparent approach to your social media presence then you will likely turn the social web into a virtual asset for your business. Remember, your ability to respond quickly to negative comments and benchmark your success over time is priceless and should be a top priority when defining your social media strategy!

Photo: Brooks Elliott

About the author:
Loic is the Sales and Web Marketing Director at Advisor Websites where he helps financial services professionals grow their market share by leveraging online marketing and social media. He is also spearheading the US and French markets expansions. He is a member of the Financial Planning Association® (FPA®). Connect with Loic on Linkedin, Twitter or Google+ : +Loic Jeanjean.
You can email Loic at: loic@advisorwebsites.com

Please Note: this article is for informational purposes only. We strongly encourage you to verify any content and information you use with your own compliance department or legal counsel.