Monitoring Social Media
What are social media monitoring tools, and why should you care?
The emergence of Web 2.0 and social media has made everyone (including your customers, employees and members) a publisher of online content. Ten years ago, only a select group of individuals who knew HTML and other funny-sounding acronyms had the ability to publish anything online.
And the process was tedious.
Now, every one of us has multiple ways to publish information online (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Blogs, niche social networking sites).
This explosion in online content means that there a ton of conversations out there happening about your brand, your services and your industry; far too many for you to easily keep track of.
Enter online monitoring tools.
Finding the Signal Through the Noise
Social Media monitoring tools sift through the vast reams of content published every day to bring back the information that is relevant to you, your business and your audience.
As a marketer, you then log into a central dashboard to review what has been found. Depending on the tool and your unique marketing objectives, you can manage your Facebook and Twitter accounts, decide which blog comments to respond to or create and schedule recurring reports.
Online monitoring tools compile the data in one place. It then falls on you to do the analysis.
Getting Creative with Conversations
Once you have all of that information, there are a number of next steps you can take depending on your audience and your marketing goals.
- Join the conversation.
- Compile a list of influencers.
- Monitor the competition.
- Create a content marketing plan to inform and engage your audience.
A creative example of how one company tracks and acts on social media conversations is the Chevron Pulse Report. Chevron reviews the trove of online content to gauge public sentiment regarding energy issues, then turns that analysis into a white paper they publish on a quarterly basis. The information they mine is hugely beneficial to Chevron, and also positions them as a thought leader in their industry.
Using Online Monitoring Tools to Drive Business Decisions
If you're going to spend the time to listen, you need to budget the resources to respond and know how your participation will make you more successful.
Maybe your engagement in social media will cut down customer-service requests. Or perhaps monitoring the blogosphere will help support your other marketing efforts and make them more efficient.
Ultimately, having all of this information is great, but the goal is to use the additional data to make better business decisions.
A Few Examples
Trackur — Trackur allows you to monitor keywords used across the Internet, including news, blogs, video, images and forums. Trackur is great to keep your ear to the ground on what is being said about you. It's relatively inexpensive - if you're only tracking one search, then it's free! If you require more reporting and analysis, you'll want to step up, but either way Trackur is a great basic monitoring tool.
Raven — Raven sits in the middle of the pack in terms of price, but offers a robust suite of Internet marketing tools that goes beyond pure social media monitoring and includes Google Analytics, Wordpress and MailChimp integration, search engine marketing tools and competitive analysis.
radian6 — radian6 is one of the most powerful tools available, but it also comes with a hefty price tag. With radian6 you can monitor millions of blogs, social media posts, videos, forums, etc,, and it also tracks engagement and provides extensive reporting and analysis tools. Radian6 is a very powerful tool, and you may find it overwhelming to manage all the data that will be retrieved. For the price you'll pay and the amount of work to manage the tool, make sure your needs warrant such a comprehensive service.
