eWom.. sounds funny doesn’t it? No eWom isn’t that furry little creature from Star Wars, this is something very different and your brand should be paying attention to it every day as part of your Social Media Marketing strategy.
What is Wom?
Let’s first wind back the clock to understand the Wom part of eWom! Traditional word-of-mouth (WOM) was originally defined as an oral form of interpersonal communication among acquaintances (Arndt, 1967)
Word of Mouth marketing in general is so powerful with McKinsey reporting that it is the primary factor behind 20 - 50% of all purchasing decisions, how can your brand ignore that!? They also say that word of mouth is no longer about one-on-one communication, but today it operates on a one-to-many basis with the rise of social media.
What about eWom?
eWom is short for electronic Word of Mouth, which in short refers to any positive or negative statement made by a potential, actual, or former customer about a product or company via the Internet (Cheung et al, 2010). So in short, eWom is all about people offering commentary about your brand online, instead of traditional word-of-mouth which takes place offline. eWom can occur in forums, on message boards, review sites like Product Review and for the primary purpose of this post, on Social Media platforms!
How should my brand monitor eWom?
Well this all depends on your brand’s Social Media Marketing strategy. If your brand is relatively small and only using one Social Media platform, i.e. Facebook, then maybe monitoring comments and messages using the platform directly will be enough for you.
For brands with a multi-channel Social Media Marketing strategy, there are great tools out there to help you and your team moderate for comments. Tools like Hootsuite allow your brand to not only schedule content across different platforms, but also easily moderate and respond to comments in one simple dashboard.
An Overview of the Hootsuite Dashboard. Source: Hootsuite on YouTube
There are other tools like Falcon, a social media listening tool that can help you monitor your brand outside of just your own channels.
What about monitoring eWom outside of Social Media?
It’s important to remember that consumers might be talking about your brand not just on your Social Media channels directly, but also in other online settings. Check out Talkwalker, a tool that can be used to monitor every single mention of your brand across the internet.
So tell me, do you use any social listening tools to monitor your brand on the Internet? I’d love to hear about your brand’s social listening strategy! Let me know in the comments.
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