What is Social Media Monitoring?

Digital has transformed how businesses interact with their customers and understand their market. Social media monitoring, a critical component of this transformation, has evolved from an open-access data pool to a more regulated and insightful tool, significantly impacting marketing and brand management strategies.

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring, also called social listening, involves tracking and analyzing conversations, keywords, hashtags, and mentions related to a business on various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

The main goal is to understand what the target audience and potential customers think about a particular brand, topic, or trend and how the business is perceived across different platforms. This process helps businesses manage reputations and crisis management, improve customer service and satisfaction, and enhance lead generation and sales conversions.

Effective social media monitoring allows brands to gain customer and competitor insights, which can be used to benchmark and improve their products, designs, features, and marketing strategies. It enables businesses to identify the social share of voice, understand social sentiment, analyze competitor performance, stay on top of trends, and measure the social return on investment (ROI).

How Do Brands Benefit from Social Listening?

Social media listening offers a strategic advantage for growing your business by allowing you to understand public perception and engage with your audience more effectively.

1. Monitor brand health: Protect your reputation by keeping an eye on brand mentions and addressing any negative feedback promptly.
2. Improve customer service: Quickly respond to mentions to enhance customer satisfaction and show your audience you value their input.
3. Analyze competitors: Gain insights into competitors’ strategies by tracking their mentions and customer reactions.
4. Find hot leads: Track specific keywords to discover potential customers expressing interest or dissatisfaction in similar products.
5. Discover PR opportunities: Look for mentions from journalists and trends on news sites to identify PR possibilities.
6. Collaborate with influencers: Use tools with influencer analytics to find and connect with key influencers in your niche.
7. Improve your product: Analyze feedback to refine products and address customer desires and complaints.
8. Research using online data: Utilize advanced search and analytics to gather comprehensive online data and insights.

Leveraging social media listening tools can significantly improve various aspects of your business, from customer service to market research, providing a holistic approach to brand management and development. Explore Awar.io for a comprehensive approach to social media listening.

How Social Media Monitoring Has Evolved

Initially, social media platforms offered extensive access to data, allowing businesses to easily track brand mentions, customer sentiments, and emerging trends. However, privacy concerns and platform policy changes have restricted data access, challenging companies to find alternative ways to effectively monitor their online presence.

The reduction in accessible data has had profound implications. It has limited the ability of businesses to conduct comprehensive and real-time analyses, forcing them to rely on third-party tools and advanced analytics to fill the gap. This shift underscores the need for businesses to adapt their strategies to continue harnessing the power of social media insights.

With large social media platforms tightening access to data, tools like Google Alerts emerged as alternatives. However, these tools often fail to capture the full spectrum of social media mentions, lacking real-time updates and advanced features like sentiment analysis. This limitation highlights the need for specialized social media monitoring tools for deeper analytics.

Best Practices for Effective Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring tools scan the web and social media content for brand mentions and utilize algorithms to analyze sentiment. These tools offer features such as competitive analysis, configurable alerts, trend tracking, and influencer tracking, which can aid in managing brand reputation and analyzing competition. Some best practices in utilizing these tools include:

• Develop Comprehensive Queries: Include brand names, misspellings, product names, and industry-related terms to capture a wide range of mentions. Consider tracking the following categories and examples:
  • Brand Name: YourBrandName, #YourBrandName
  • Product Names: ProductOne, #ProductTwo
  • Industry Keywords: SaaS, EcoFriendlyPackaging
  • Competitor Names: CompetitorBrand, #CompetitorProduct
  • Campaign Names/Hashtags: #SummerSale2024, #NewYearNewMe
  • Key People: CEO Name, Influencer Name
  • Customer Feedback: love YourBrand, hate YourBrand
  • Events: #IndustryExpo2024, AnnualSummit
• Utilize Advanced Monitoring Tools: Invest in tools that provide real-time monitoring, sentiment analysis, and integration with other data sources for a comprehensive understanding of social media landscapes.
• Regularly Refine Monitoring Strategies: Update search queries and strategies to align with current trends and linguistic changes to ensure relevant and timely data collection.

Monitoring should be conducted regularly, ideally daily, to keep up with the rapid pace of social media. This involves setting up alerts based on relevant keywords and terms associated with your brand. Additionally, sentiment analysis is critical as it helps identify whether the mentions of your brand are positive, negative, or neutral, thus enabling more informed decision-making and strategy adjustment.

Leading Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Several platforms stand out for their advanced features and licensed access to social media data:

• Agorapulse: Focuses on streamlining social media monitoring and engagement, offering user-friendly interfaces and effective filtering options.
• Awario: Awario is a social listening tool that gives brands access to data that matters to their business: insights on their customers, market, and competitors. 
• BrandMentions: Offers extensive monitoring across web and social platforms, providing real-time updates and sentiment analysis for effective brand reputation management.
• BuzzSumo: Specializes in content marketing and social media monitoring, aiding in brand mention tracking and influencer collaboration.
• Meltwater: Integrates social media and news monitoring, providing comprehensive insights into brand presence and public sentiment.
• Sprout Social: A versatile tool known for its social listening capabilities and boolean operators, enabling targeted tracking and analytics.
• YouScan: Uses AI for visual content analysis, identifying brand mentions in images and videos to capture user-generated content and brand visibility.

Each platform caters to different business needs, from detailed analytics and real-time monitoring to influencer collaboration and visual content analysis. Selecting the right platform depends on specific business objectives, budget, and the desired depth of insights.

As social media continues to evolve, so does the landscape of social media monitoring. Businesses must stay agile, adapting to changes and adopting best practices to leverage the full potential of social media insights. By choosing the right monitoring tools and strategies, companies can enhance their online presence, engage effectively with customers, and stay ahead in the competitive digital marketplace.

For a detailed understanding and comparison of these tools, exploring their features and benefits will help tailor the right strategy for your business’s unique needs.