Social Media Monitoring

The most simple explanation of social media monitoring is listening to what online consumers are telling you and others about your product or brand on social media websites. User generated content as blog comments, forum threads, product reviews and microblogging are the most common used discussion techniques for exchanging product or brand experiences. Listening, reading and collecting all conversations can be a very time consuming for marketers and brand managers, especially for organizations with a wide scale product and service portfolio. Not even mentioned any action or participating in these discussions.

To enable to possibility for companies to monitor their social media exposure and sphere on an periodical, broad and automatic way some tooling and services are available today. This (online) software platforms provide features to extract, collect and analyze user generated content from social media websites and translating this unstructured data into dashboards and reports. Solely these reports with social metrics are of no value because it still needs to be analyzed, interpreted and converted into insight driven optimizations and interaction for social media engagements. Only if organization are able to repeat the complete process of monitoring, analyzing, optimizating and engaging they will be able to benefit and become more in control in managing their brand reputation and equity. This is not a onetime exercise but a continue looping process.

How do Social Media Monitors work?

Social Media Monitoring tools normally consist of a couple of standard components. First of all it needs a comprehensive crawler which tracks and indexes (specified) social websites with  threads, posts, user reviews, connections etc. about a desired product or brand. Beside a web crawler it needs to be able to track specific related keywords and phrases within texts, like a old fashion keyword density algorithm to recognize specific topics, categorize and filter them out. Based upon this subset of data it must determine sentiments, judgements, trends and opinions in a discussion and also needs to assesses the authority of participants. A natural language processing stage or text mining function is necessary to filter out and measure experience based on a set of variable indicators for unstructured texts, as it needs to be SMART. Last a delivery vehicle is needed to provide the collected and calculated information in representative matter, normally a set of reports, dashboards or notification tools are used to present this data.

Usage of Social Media Monitoring

The essence of social media monitoring focuses on brand reputation management and marketing intelligence. Brand managers have understood that ignoring social media is not an option anymore as their customers are using social media websites to evaluate experiences and express their feelings about brands and products. Influencing the brand equity of organizations continously. It can take years to built up a reputation but due the rise of social media it can be ruined also within a couple of hours. Organizations need to identify these risks and develop adequate response techniques to protect themselves to this new kind of brand attacks. On the other side social media is a great enabler to promote and boost a brand on a large scale when people are positive and expressing this feeling, also in that case it still isn’t superfluous to participate and interact with these (potential) customers.

In case of Marketing Intelligence, social media monitoring is far more cost effective as well as, more reliable, uncensored and direct than the conventional marketing methods as surveys, review groups and market researches among several segments. Cost effective targeted marketing activities are in today’s economy a precondition for companies due several budget cuts and the urgent need to gain market share and keep up with competitors. Social media monitoring is used by organizations and ad agencies as input to current online campaign strategies as well as optimizing targeted advertisement which lower their daily ad costs. Eventually this effort pays off in higher customer satisfaction, product experience and better ROI.

Social tools like monitors, analyzer and social search engines are of great value for organizations when implemented and used in the right way. For more information about specific social media technologies, software or consulting services please do hesitate to contact me with your questions or request. I am very keen to look into your specific case and discuss the opportunities social media offers to your brand, product or organization.

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