Do you care what your customers are saying about you? What about the competition  – are you losing potential customers because the proactive online are waxing lyrical about the competition?

How do you know who is talking about your products, your service or your brand online? Like any conversation, a big part of your marketing communications using social media is about listening to your audience as well engaging with them.

If you get to understand the voice of the customer – you can start to tailor your messages and also tweak your products and services in line with your customers expectations.

A major part of any marketing strategy is to anticipate what your customers want next and to supply it to them before the competition does but also the ability to respond quickly to your customers conversations online does wonders for your reputation.

Everyone uses “word of mouth” marketing – we are all familiar with it – using social media is moving WOM onto a digital platform. Think about it, when was the last time you purchased/booked/installed anything online without reading a review or checking the ratings first?

What we do get with social media is the ability to amplify that WOM message to a much larger audience instantaneously.

The starting point is to assess and review what conversations are already being held online – there are some great tools to do this and this list is by no means exhaustive.

Google Alerts – Monitor the web for new content based on key search queries you have entered. Delivered into your inbox courtesy of Google. Someone mentioned your brand today? Google Alerts will tell you.

Brand Mentions– Real time social media search and analysis, get a free and quick “snapshot” regarding the tone of conversation about a brand, product or service.

Twitonomy – Follow and engage in Twitter users on particular topics, monitor brands and conversations and even get a geolocated map of the most frequently used locations when Tweeting.

Tweriod– Find the most productive times of day and days of the week to Tweet.

We are only just scratching the surface here – please feel free to share your favourite monitoring tools too!