How to Improve Your Social Media Monitoring Strategy

How to Improve Your Social Media Monitoring Strategy

One of the most exciting aspects of social media is its capacity to alert you to things you may not have known existed—there are lots of online chats, forums, publications, and more. The trick is to find all of the material online that is relevant to you and your hobbies and bring it all back to you. 

Many brands and individuals rely on social media monitoring. With some basic monitoring tools and tactics, you can always keep an eye on what matters to you.

Social media monitoring (or social media listening) is more than just responding to internet mentions. The finest social media monitoring tactics not only help you find conversations but also help you comprehend them better. 

You may use social media monitoring to locate fantastic material to curate for your audience, to keep an eye on your competitors or other people in your industry, to give excellent customer service, to expand and improve your products or services, or all of the above! 

The benefits and opportunities that social media monitoring brings are surprisingly low-cost. It doesn't take hours a day to get the rewards. All you need is a plan and a few tools to ensure that just the information you want is coming in. Here's a brief guide to getting started with a social media monitoring strategy. 

Step 1: What to monitor? 

The first step is to determine what to watch and what searches would yield the greatest results. It may require some trial and error, but here are some suggestions. 

• Follow-up on a brand 
• Name or brand name 
• Name misspellings 
• Names of your company's most visible members 
• Mentions of certain campaigns 
• Your tagline or catchphrase 

Step 2: Monitoring 

Pick your tool once you know why you want to watch social media and what you want to monitor, you can enter your queries into a tool that will keep track of them and return results. This tool allows you to enter the exact phrase you want, plus any related words or phrases you don't want. If you look through the results, you'll probably find a means to get email alerts. Here's a search I built with mention (which works great with Buffer): 

You can also achieve a lot with the tools you currently own. Social media monitoring includes subscribing to competitors' blogs in Feedly. 

With Twitter alone, simple lists and searches can yield a wealth of information. Some ideas: 

• Save Twitter searches for key industry phrases and hashtags. 
• Keep an eye out for industry-related hashtags. 
• Make Twitter lists of business influencers and news sources. 
• Make Twitter lists for industry-specific subjects. 
• Make a Twitter list of your product's supporters. 
• Keep an eye out for queries or ideas on Twitter. 
• You can add more for Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Quora, etc. 

Step 3: What are you seeking and learning from your results 

The beauty of social media monitoring is that you never know what you'll find. It's like fishing—you have to see what's biting. 

Generally, the most valuable outcome of monitoring is an opportunity to develop new content, build new relationships, or even adjust your product or service to solve a common problem. As you look through your social media monitoring results, here are some possible outcomes and opportunities: 

• Are people primarily favorable or mostly negative about you? Do you spot any patterns that could help this ratio? (Perhaps you want to track that metric monthly.) 
• Feedback is always useful, especially the type you get from informal, back-and-forth exchanges on Twitter. You don't have to respond immediately away; it's all about listening. 
• Do you see the same questions regarding your brand or industry? Maybe we can generate information that answers these questions. 
• Language: If your brand is being mentioned in a lingual other than your own, try translating material or offering multi-language customer care. 
• Do several customers have the same issue with your product? Maybe that's a chance to change your approach to customer service. 
• Trends: If you sell fireworks in the US, you know summer is your season. Other businesses may have seasonal or even weekly trends (like Rebecca Black's “Sunday” video, which gets a weekly traffic boost every... Sunday!) 
• Advocates: There's nothing better than finding brand supporters eager to chat about you, learn about you, and promote your awesomeness. Use social media monitoring to grow your fan base. 
• Influencers: Close monitoring may reveal an industry leader whose voice is heard above the others. What is it about that person's work that you can learn from? Is it someone you want to meet?

Use these three steps and strategies to better monitor your social media and to expand and improve your products or services.