Social Media Monitoring for More Effective Marketing
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social Media Monitoring is the practice of checking social media channels for information relevant to your industry, knowledge about competitors, to listen to what people are saying about your brand, product or service, to generate and nurture new leads, and to learn more about your target market.If that sounds like a lot, you’re right. There’s a lot of good stuff packed into Social Media Monitoring, which is why you can’t miss this opportunity.
How do I monitor Social Media?
First, it’s a good idea to begin by finding out what you want to gain from social media monitoring. You may want to focus on one search term and really scour a couple channels for it, or you may have a few keywords you comb through for. However, if you don’t specifically outline what you want to achieve though, you may get lost wading through tons of content without knowing what you’re even looking for.Examples of Social Media Monitoring Goals:
- I am monitoring to find out what my competitors are doing in the social space and how they're being successful
- I am monitoring to find out what's important to my target market
- I am monitoring to listen to conversations specifically about my brand
- I am monitoring to find out what customers are complaining about, or what they need more of, in order to improve my product or service.
- I am monitoring so that I can respond to people who need customer service.
Now, you need to figure out what keywords you will be using to search. This can help make your efforts more efficient.
Examples of Keywords to Search for:
- Your company name
- Product name
- Industry keywords
- Marketing taglines
- Competitor names
- Competitor product names
Find out what social networks you will be searching within.
Where are your customers? You can try to search all of the social channels, but it is usually more efficient to pick the few where your customers are most likely to be. You can also check to see where your competitors are most active to see which Social Media channels would be most effective for your company.Examples of Social Networks to Search Within:
- YouTube
- Google Plus
- FourSquare
- Tumblr
- Flickr
Use tools to help make your search easier.
Examples of Tools for Social Media Monitoring:
1. FollowerWonk
FollowerWonk has the useful feature of letting you search Twitter bios, allowing you to find relevant users who might be in your industry or talking about your brand. You can also compare users, analyze followers, track followers and search followers.
SocialMention allows you to search social networks in real time. They also have an alerts feature, like Google Alerts, that notifies you if keywords have showed up in social media. They provide measurements on strength, sentiment, reach and passion, as well as information about top keywords, users, hashtags and sources
3. TweetReach
TweetReach calculates how many accounts you’ve reached, your exposure, activity, top contributors, most retweeted tweets and more
Google Alerts is the classic social media monitoring tool, allowing you to receive email alerts when certain keywords you have selected show up in Google search.
5. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows you to manage multiple social networks at once, schedule messages, and provides analytics. It also allows you to search social networks.
6. Alltop
Alltop is a great tool for finding out about industry news and aggregates content in real time by category.
Addict-o-Matic searches Twitter, Bing, Wordpress.com, YouTube, Flickr, Google Blogs and more in real time, neatly displaying each medium’s search results.
8. Facebook Insights
Facebook Insights is a standard feature for every Facebook Page, allowing you to determine the reach, engagement, and virality of all of your posts, in addition to demographic information and information about when you received likes and were un-liked
9. Twitter Search
Use the Twitter search feature to search for users or discussions. It’s basic, but it can help you easily find what you need.ParkerWhite uses Social Media Monitoring to develop strategies for branding and messaging that resonates with target consumers to stimulate demand and ignite sales.
Want to know more about how social media monitoring can be used to tap into your target market? Email us, and tell us a little bit about your company. We'll get back to you with some ideas we have and sample social listening for your company.
