Social media monitoring involves observing the interactions between your customers on your brand’s social media page, whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Myspace or other social medium. Although this process may sound simple, it is not as crystal clear as you might think. Correctly utilizing this type of monitoring involves awareness of some key concepts.
Know Your Objective And Which Keywords to Use for Social Media Monitoring
The first thing you must understand is the reason why you are monitoring in the first place. You cannot just dive into this without a clear objective because this certainly will lead to failure. If your reason is simply to follow the crowd, this is not a good enough reason. You can have many reasons why you want to monitor social media, including understanding all the good and bad things people are saying about your brand, quickly responding to all of your customer questions, and/or joining the conversation yourself. Not only do you need to know your objective, you must also know what you should be monitoring. Keep in mind that monitoring involves using keywords. Because of this, you must ensure that you are correctly selecting the right keywords. Make sure that you are tracking your company name, product names, industry keywords, names of your competitors, etc.
Prioritize Where You Monitor And Listen More Than You Speak
It is important that you know where you should be monitoring. Understand that you cannot be everywhere at once. You must select the right places to monitor at the right times. Make sure that you are only monitoring the places that are of the utmost importance and where you can build an everlasting relationship with customers. Just like other marketing ideas, you should immerse yourself where your target market is. These important people are your customers, potential clients and industry leaders in your niche. Once you know where you should monitor, you must understand that you should be listening more than speaking. Do not just simply join in a conversation and plug your products.
This will not make you an authoritative figure among your industry. Thoroughly observe what types of people are involved in the conversation, the dialog between them and where the conversation is headed. Once you do this, you should then speak up and get to know everyone in the community. Although you should be mostly listening, you should still ensure you get to know the members and culture of the community.
Although successful social media monitoring involves many more steps, the ones outlined above are where you should begin on your quest. As it has already been stated, you cannot just blindly jump into social monitoring because you are likely to cause more harm than good to your brand. Apply these steps, and once you do, research some additional steps you need to take to ensure that you can achieve greatest amount of success possible.
About Kristen Bradley
Great post! I have been getting my head around social media for some time and I feel like I am getting there but I see so many people who are trying to do social media because they have been told that they have to so they give it a shot but don’t really know what they are doing or why. This post could certainly help a lot of newbies to get a bit of direction which would really help their efforts I’m sure
Thanks Kristen. Agree that an objective is key when deciding to undertake monitoring social media . I also think it extremely important for large organizations to understand that each department is going to have a different objective. For example HR might be concerned about job postings on social sites, while marketing is looking for conversation and insight on their brand. So it is very important for the different departments to join forces and create a “social media counsel”. I recently wrote a blog post on who should be monitoring from what department, might be helpful for readers in this area – http://info.brandprotect.com/Blog/bid/75745/What-Department-Should-be-Responsible-for-Monitoring-Social-Media-What-I-am-Monitoring-For