What is Social Media Monitoring?

What is social media monitoring?
Let’s begin with the basics. What is social media monitoring and why should you do it?

Social media monitoring is about listening to the discussions that take place around your brand in order to find out what people are saying, how often, as well as looking for opportunities and spikes in engagement that could mean something more. It’s a very important tool, not just within your social media crisis plan, but for your marketing plan as well.

First and foremost, by actively and continuously monitoring the discussions around your brand, you will give yourself the opportunity to:

• Listen for negative criticism about your brand, which you can then respond to, turning that unhappy customer into a lifelong brand advocate
• Listen to the positive comments people are saying about your brand, giving you the opportunity to connect further with those individuals
• Detect a social media crisis in the rise, before it builds up and begins to spiral out of control

It also allows you to:

• Identify your share of voice within the market: How many people are currently talking about your brand, compared to your competition?
• Identify your share of sentiment: Are the majority of those discussions positive, negative or of a neutral sentiment?

This information opens the door to new marketing opportunities and lets you discover areas of your business that are in need of strengthening, as well as determining how prone you are to a social media crisis.

Apart from this, social media monitoring also permits you to:

• Discover sales opportunities and new leads for potential clients who are in the market for your product or service right now
• Keep tabs on your top competitors – knowing what they’re up to as well as what the market’s current opinion of them is
• Discover gaps in the market that could define an opportunity for your brand

So it’s not just about your social media crisis plan. Monitoring the social discussions around your brand is beneficial for many aspects of your business and day-to-day activity.

How to know if social media monitoring is something you should do
This answer is pretty simple: If you have a business, if you care about that business, if you have customers or want to get customers, and whether you’re active on social media or not, you should be monitoring the discussions around your brand for all of the reasons mentioned above.

It’s an important tool that should be a regular part of your daily activities.

But you’re already so busy, you don’t have time for yet another social media task!
One of the great advantages of social media monitoring, is that after the initial setup you simply let the tools do all the work! You don’t have to spend any part of your day actually checking to see if you’ve been mentioned. That’s the beauty of today’s technology! You simply set up your listening posts and when your brand gets mentioned online, you instantly get notified by your devices.

Now doesn’t that sound dreamy?! Always having your finger on the pulse while never actually having to lift a finger!

So now that you understand the importance of social media monitoring (and you have no excuses left for not doing it), over the next four days I’m going to help you:

• Determine the type of listener you should be
• Understand what you should be monitoring for
• Decide which social media monitoring tools best suit your needs
• Narrow in on your searches
• Figure out if you need a social media monitoring team, and if that team should be in-house or outsourced
• And a whole bunch more

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Do you currently monitor the social discussions around your brand, and if so, has it proven itself to be advantageous to your company? Be sure to share your stories in the comments section below!