What is Social Monitoring?
Social media is a powerful tool for reaching out to potential customers and interacting with current ones. By using social monitoring, people get the opportunity to learn about the likes, dislikes, preferences of their audience by tracking what they say on their own sites as well as third party sites such as blogs or news portals. Social monitoring is very similar to social listening, except monitoring tells you what is going on with the industry, and listening tells you why it is happening through the opinions of the public. Both are incredibly important for understanding the fundamental trends of a brand and how the public is reacting to its activity.
It is quite easy to get social listening and social monitoring confused. Both of them are critical for brands, and there is not a totally black and white distinction between the two, it is like a spectrum spanning the two. Monitoring tells you what, listening tells you why.
What is the purpose of Social Monitoring?
Maybe there could appear a question why a person should spend quite a long time and effort learning what people are saying about their brand online? Actually, there could be some reasons!
Social monitoring can help you gain insights about your brand’s visibility online by better understanding how often you are being mentioned in conversation. It can help you measure the impact of your campaigns by finding out if there is a buzz around them and learning what people are saying about them. Social Monitoring also can help you identify opportunities for engagement with your audience and improve your customer service levels by allowing you to respond to every mention of your brand, good or bad.
In addition, social monitoring also can allow you to gain insights and information about your competitors’ online activity and see what they are doing better or worse than you by learning what people are saying about them and in the future this will give you the ability to become better and have many advantages. Social Monitoring can give you the ability to stay relevant and competitive by helping you to keep up to date with trends in your industry. It can even alert you to impending crises, helping you learn about defects or other problems, by being able to hear online complaints.
In the end, Social Monitoring is critical in the research stage of developing your social media and digital marketing strategy, so you can ensure it is as effective as possible.When you have that chance to know what your prospects and customers are saying about your business, product or service, then it becomes easier to improve your social and digital efforts.
How Social Monitoring works?
To stay on top of what people are saying about your brand online, there are a variety of tools that can be used. These simple and easy to use programs do all the time-consuming, tedious, and complex work of finding any and all mentions of your brand and keywords across the web.
for you by scouring through websites across different platforms including Facebook posts or Instagram stories as well as Google search results pages.
In order to get the most out of social media monitoring, you need to choose your keywords or phrases quite carefully. You would, of course, start with the name of your brand and products or services which you serve and have, as well as your competitors’. Then, you should choose general terms that pertain to your industry.
The social monitoring tools then crawl publicly available sites and data continuously, some in real time, and then index them. Once the sites are indexed, the automatic search for your specific mentions begins. Then all of the information is collated in one place for you.
These tools use keyword-density checks, smart pattern-matching algorithms, and other systems in order to stop spam and junk content from clogging your data. They also eliminate double entries, and exclude irrelevant content so you don’t waste your time sifting through poor quality data.
Once your data is found and collated, you can use the tool to check out authors, metadata, and charting. You can perform a sentiment analysis and a topic analysis. You can compare queries. You can see data visualizations. You can even post and respond to the conversations!
There are also some reliable tools which will be helpful for Social Monitoring and in order to monitor the brand mentions. To see what people are saying about your brand online you can easily use
- Brand24
- Talkwalker Analytics
- Buzzsumo
- BrandWatch
- YouScan
Brand24 was founded in Poland in 2011, quickly building a name for themselves. Within two years their software was being used by famous and powerful companies, such as Intel, Panasonic, and AirFrance. They have continued to attract well-known customs, including Uber, H&M, and IKEA.
Brand24 offers three plans, ranging from Plus (at $49/month) to Max (at $199/month). Each plan adds additional users, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of mentions per month and the speed of tracking also improves with each plan. Brans24 is more than just a mere social media listening tool, however. It provides you with comprehensive data and analysis. It helps paint a thorough picture of how the world perceives your brand.
Talkwalker is a large-scale social marketing tool, aimed predominantly at large businesses and enterprises. One of its components is Talkwalker Analytics, which is a social listening and analytics suite. It analyzes online, social, print and TV or radio content in one. It incorporates image recognition technology to track 30,000 brand images.
By the help of this tool there is not only an ability to monitor your real time results but also you can have access to more than two year historical data.
Talkwalker provides the tools to undertake social listening for your brand over 10 social networks. It goes further than that, however, and monitors discussion on online news sites, blogs, forums, and even offline databases. In total, it monitors 150 million websites.
Of course, social listening is only one of Talkwalker’s features, and heavy-duty tools do not come cheap. The Basic plan costs about $9,600 per year, with Corporate and Enterprise plans available on request.
Although Buzzsumo is not primarily designed as a brand mention or social media monitoring tool, it does come with the ability to set up content alerts. It sends you content alerts on a daily basis whenever it encounters a reference to your brand on social networks. It allows you to set up alerts for your brand, competitors, keywords, authors, domains, and even backlinks. You can refine your alerts to cover just the title of an article, or to search the full text of articles. You can even set it to send an alert when somebody creates a new backlink to your site.
Buzzsumo allows you to set up your alerts to come via email or RSS. It also allows you to create a personalized dashboard to monitor all of your alerts.
As a business, you may opt to receive your alerts by daily alert, although real-time alerts are probably more practical when dealing with dissatisfied customers.
Brandwatch offers a range of products that offer real-time insights about your industry, your brand, and your marketing, as well as reporting capabilities and system connections that scale with your initiatives. Brandwatch is used by large and famous companies such as Walmart, Unilever, Microsoft, IKEA, and L’Oréal.
It splits its product uses into:
- Brand management
- Content strategy
- Competitor analysis
- Customer experience
- Influencer marketing
- Crisis management
In terms of brand management, Brandwatch allows you to track your brand health. It helps you know when people are talking about your company. It can tell you when your brands, products, and logos are shared across millions of online sources. You can monitor key publications, regions, and influencers, and Identify emerging opportunities and challenges, even when your brand is not mentioned directly.
YouScan was founded in Kyiv in 2009. Over the last decade, it’s built a solid reputation and attracted clients like McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Nestle, and Google. At its most basic, YouScan is a listening tool, able to scan social media and the rest of the web for brand mentions, and then analyze those mentions for its larger social impact. The real selling point of YouScan, however, is its image recognition capabilities, which allows users to get decidedly specific in their visual searches.
YouScan offers five plans, ranging from $500 to $5,000 per month. Each plan permits you to analyze five topics per month but varies in terms of the number of rules and mentions per topic, as well as additional features offered in the higher-level plans. Five topics should be sufficient for most people, as each YouScan search provides ways to include and exclude a variety of factors and apply rules to them.