Yes.

According to Social Sprout, 30 percent of millennials engage with brands on social media at least once a month. Unfortunately, almost 90 percent of social media messages addressed to brands are ignored. That's not a great number; the better your brand communicates with potential and established customers, the better your business will be.

So what can you do about it? Well, social media monitoring can help you out. Here are several benefits of social monitoring you might be missing out on - or, alternatively, several reasons to begin social media monitoring ASAP.

Gain a better understanding between listening and monitoring

As the name probably suggests, there's a difference between the two: social media monitoring deals more with collecting social messages into a single stream in order to take specific action in response to individual messages (e.g. likes, comments).

And both are pretty important. Sure, monitoring and analysis are key, but all the analysis in the world won't help your brand if you don't take the time to really listen to what your customers are saying. Listening helps your brand extract insights and monitoring enables your brand to expand discussions and engage with your customers.

Becoming more approachable to customers

According to Lithium, 78 percent of Twitter users who complain to a brand on the social media platform expect a response within the hour. Social Sprout reports that it takes a brand an average of 10 hours to respond, while the average user only waits for four hours.

Using social monitoring would go a long way in improving your response times - and thus improving your customer service. If your customers have a good experience interacting with your brand, it will increase their regard for the brand and lead to recommending the brand to their friends.

Never miss a brand-relevant message

Monitoring social messages also focuses your efforts on incoming brand-relevant messages, whether the message mentions the brand directly or not. Without it, it's all too easy to miss important social messages, especially if the user hasn't tagged the brand, @mentioned the brand, or used your brand's hashtag. Investing in a social media monitoring platform can help you identify and track relevant keywords to increase the important social messages you see and can interact with.

Stay organized with marketing campaigns

Having a single channel to promote might not be the best idea; a lot of companies will have several Twitter accounts, for example, to handle different aspects. As an example, PlayStation has an "Ask PlayStation" account separate from their main Twitter to handle direct inquiries and technical issues.

This can be helpful to reduce the sheer number of social messages to wade through. Separate, organized channels help organize the messages by topic, which in turn improves your brand's ability to respond and interact with customers in a timely manner.

Interact with key customers and brand advocates

What about your "biggest fans"? Don't leave them hanging!

Interacting with key customers and brand advocates (a.k.a. the customers who are sold on you and loyal to the brand) can make the difference between a simple sale and a big win for the business. With social media monitoring, "you can find and reply to those customers on the edge to make a purchase from you."

And it's definitely worth the time to seek out and bolster those loyal customers: word-of-mouth marketing influences 74% of customers in their purchasing decisions. Get interactive and build up those positive experiences!

Understand what is - and what is not - working for your competitors

Keep your friends close and enemies closer - that's how the saying goes, right? Take a good look at your competitors and their social media strategies and figure out what works for them and what doesn't. Once you figure out what works, you can emulate it in your own strategy. You can also avoid any social media pitfalls - learn from their examples.

Of course, you don't want to replicate it exactly (and it might not work even if you did), but gaining an understanding of why what your competitor is doing works can help you improve your own strategy.

Win back lost customers

Responding in a timely manner can make a world of difference. People like to feel valued and listened to, so if a customer tweets a question or a complaint it should be a goal to quickly hop on and try to fix the issue. Even if it's not fixable, taking the time to respond and try and show that you, the brand, cares about this single customer can increase your chances of doing business with them later.

Don't let negative experiences go unnoticed. Use a social media monitoring platform to dig through the plethora of social messages to find the biggest issues to address and fix if you can.

Like it or not, social media is taking over the world, and the business world is part of that. As times change and it becomes even more ingrained in our culture, your brand needs to learn and adapt to stay relevant.