Track your brand’s health, the way you’d track your own.

Even though we may not like doing so, people generally schedule regular check-ups to make sure their bodies are healthy. We have a sphygmomanometer for blood pressure, a stethoscope for the heart and a bunch of other medical machines.

The same goes for companies, only that the check-ups should be far more frequent and in-depth. And it may be to CEOs’ relief that unlike the human body, the monitor for brand health comes in an all-in-one package – that’s right, social media.

But what’s brand health, actually?
It’s a big term encompassing a lot of factors indicating how healthy your company is – brand awareness, brand equity, product evaluation, etc. By monitoring certain metrics in social media, you can track the trend and changes of your brand health. And remember, everything’s in comparison to your competitors, so it’s not only about being healthy, but being healthier than your industry rivals.

It’s simple on paper, but what does it actually mean to track brand health through social monitoring?
What are the KPIs and programs needed to gather not all information, but the information necessary?

This is where social media analytics come in, we at Socialmetrix work hard to make tracking your brand’s health extremely simple through our social media analytics platform, that’s why our technology organize the data for you.
The services social media analytics provide are designed for making data relevant and easy to follow. This lets you track both your company and your competitors’ changes in brand health over time, allowing for formulating timely business strategies and taking advantage of real-time marketing.

Still not sure about what to do? The following are 2 easy-to-follow steps for measuring your company’s brand health from two aspects:

1) Tracking brand awareness – one of the largest indicators of brand health. This actually means you need to track your company’s share of voice. For instance, by using Socialmetrix you can track your share of voice by geo-location by social network, by sentiment or even by product. Depending on what you’re looking for, user interaction data calculates your brand sensitivity and can also indicate customer loyalty.

Apart of using rudimentary data like followers/fans on social media, using a social media analytics platform to analyze sentiment and topics around your Brand, helps you track the volume of user interactions within the whole community and how talked about your company is. It organizes your data into trends and categories using a simple interface that not only your technicians, but your other employees can comprehend and use.

2) Tracking brand equity – basically, the value of your company in the minds of your customers. This is something you can’t track without the support of an analytics platform with text mining capabilities. While you may be able to follow the number of shares or re-tweets done by your fans/followers, an analytics platform can help you further categorize the user interactions with your company’s social media channels into positive, neutral, or negative responses. This is done through sentiment analysis algorithms, plus using human sentiment classification services to increase accuracy, which means the system can automatically calculate the proportion of favorable and unfavorable responses both for your company and your competitors.

The recent Xbox One fiasco in June serves as a good example for why knowing whether your customers’ responses are favorable is so important. Due to its game-sharing limitations, social media responses for the release of Xbox One are largely negative. This brings two consequences: the sharp decline in trust for Microsoft, which harms its brand health, and (gasp!) an increase in stocks for Sony, its major competitor. Thankfully, Microsoft’s been tracking its social media channels and can retract the new features before things get too ugly.

This shows the importance of sentiment analysis: tracking your share of voice is also crucial, but it’s arguably more important for your company to gather opinions, even negative ones – they let you know what to change, and in business, it’s always about doing what’s good for your customers.

Quote of the day? Get a professional analytics platform for social media monitoring, the way you’d get a doctor for medical check-ups. In simple terms, having a large, positive share of voice means good brand health. And if you have good brand health, well, then you’re on your way to overtaking competitors.