Learn social media monitoring to succeed in the digital era !

Social media monitoring is the act of monitoring social media for information relevant to our business. 

Image source : netbase.com

To know this well, we need to learn all about

• Brand mentions (with or without direct tagging, aka @mention)
• Relevant hashtags
• Mentions of our competitors
• General trends that apply to our industry.
• This helps us track key social metrics like brand awareness and social share of voice. We can also use this nformation to test messaging and measure ROI.
• Once we begin collecting this valuable data, we can use it to look for trends and insights.
• We can also take action based on our findings. With this, we have moved on from the simple task of social media monitoring into the more complex work of social listening.

What’s the difference between the two? 

Social media monitoring is all about what has already taken place while social listening is about the future.

Social media monitoring is about collecting all the data and details we can. We capture what people are posting about  us. With this, we measure what we have already achieved, and create a record of what is happening in our industry’s social space.

The social listening part is active and strategic. We analyze the data for actionable insights. This could from engaging a happy customer to shifting our brand positioning strategy. This uses the data we gather to improve our social media strategy.

We shall show you some of the best tools to save time.

We could do basic social monitoring manually, For this, we would need to  check each social network individually for mentions, keywords, hashtags, and so on. For this, we would have to create some kind of reporting mechanism to collect and share all our research.

Fortunately, there’s no need to go about it like that. There are plenty of social media monitoring tools to help us keep track of more data and identify the most important information. Here are some of them

1. Hootsuite

This tool lets us monitor conversations relevant to our business, industry, and our products. We can monitor what people are saying based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and even specific users.

Once we set up your streams for social monitoring, you can share them with your team, so everyone can access the same information. If you discover a post that requires a response, you can assign it to the appropriate team member.

2. Google Alerts

Google Alerts lets us monitor the entire web for mentions of our company, our competitors, or other relevant topics. We need to just login into our Google account, go to the Google Alerts page, and type a keyword or phrase into the search box.

We’ll get an email notification every time Google finds results relevant to your alert criteria. We can also set alerts for specific regions and languages.

3. Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch

This goes even further and gives you data from 1.3 trillion social posts in real time. We need to save keywords or Boolean strings to find meaningful trends and patterns we might miss with social monitoring. We could filter our searches for specifics like dates, demographics, and geographies.

This way we can attain even deeper insights on your brand’s sentiment all over the world.

With this, we could visualize sentiment around your brand in automatically-generated word clouds and meters.

4. Talkwalker

This uses more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources.

We can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment.

5. Reddit search

With its 330 million average monthly active users and 14 billion average views per month, this is a social site we can’t ignore.

Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro allows us to monitor the site that bills itself as “the front page of the internet” for relevant keywords and phrases. We will learn who is talking about your brand, business, or competitors in the site’s 138,000 active communities.

6. Reputology

Management of reputation is extremely important, and social monitoring makes it surprisingly easy. This tool lets us monitor and check major review sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook reviews. We can track activity across multiple storefronts and locations, and respond using quick links.

7. Synthesio

This helps us monitor and track information that leads to deep insights and informed business decisions. We can monitor multiple mention streams at once to track the social media conversations most important to us.  .

8. Mentionlytics

This tool  scans web and social sources to look for mentions of our brand, even when we are not tagged. We can also see the emotion and sentiment information for every mention, so you can tell at a glance when there’s an issue we need to address.

9. Hootsuite RSS Syndicator

This monitors blogs and websites for stories relevant to our brand and mentions of our company or our competitors. If we spot a story that requires action, we can easily assign it to the appropriate team member for follow-up.

10. ReviewTrackers

This lets us monitor over 50 review websites in one place. If we use the tool within our Hootsuite dashboard, we can easily share positive reviews to your social networks and manage review profiles by location and user.

11. ReviewInc

This lets us view more than 200 popular review sites from more than 100 countries. We can organize positive reviews to share on social media sites, and respond to and resolve negative issues right away.

For social media management platform users, this tool integrates with Hootsuite.

12. NetBase

This uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to find online conversations relevant to our brand. We can also access old social posts so we can dig back into issues and conversations we might have missed in the past.

13. Crowd Analyzer

If we or our customers are based in the Middle East, Crowd Analyzer is an important analytics and social media monitoring tool. It is the first Arabic-focused social media monitoring platform, and  analyzes “Arabic content in terms of relevancy, dialect and sentiment.” It monitors  major social networks, blogs, forums, and news sites.

14. Nexalogy

This tool gives us a visual look at trending topics and discussions relevant to our brand. We shall see only the most relevant conversations on Twitter, so we can focus on the data that matters.

15. Tweepsmap

This shows us how hashtags spread, so we can track those most relevant to our business.  With this, we shall learn where our audience is and understand key demographics about them, as well as monitoring what they say.

Setting up the process

The list of keywords, topics, and usernames we monitor is most likely to grow and evolve over time. We could start by monitoring a small set of topics that are directly related to our brand with the following:

• Brand name
• Brand handles
• Product name(s)
• Names of key people and spokespeople
• Slogan
• Branded hashtags
• Competitors’ brand names, product names, slogans, hashtags, and handles
• Unbranded industry hashtags
• Industry keywords

We need to also monitor for common misspellings or abbreviations of all of the above

2. Setting up our streams

We need to use social media monitoring tools to set up tracking streams for each of the topics we wish to monitor. This we need to learn in our chosen stream.

Our views
With so many tools and options, it is up to us to be successful in social media monitoring and know our customers, both current and potential, better.

Ref : Ref : hootsuite.com