Monitoring keeps your brand on top of messages before they might become viral for the wrong reasons. They also help you maintain a positive brand image among consumers and identify potential influencers. Monitoring involves the tracking of online brand mentions and their subsequent responses to them.
Monitoring tools are the best way to find out what people are saying about your brand. And also what they’re saying about your product, your competitors, your industry, your customer service wait times, basically, anything your audience could have an opinion on. In other words: social media monitoring software gathers and presents audience and competitive insights for brands who want to pay attention.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring means tracking hashtags, keywords, and mentions relevant to your brand to stay informed about your audience and industry.
By monitoring this data, you’re doing research that is both quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative (the inspiration for posts and strategies).
For brands, social monitoring is an essential part of being a good social citizen and succeeding on social, period. You’d listen first, and at least figure out what they’re looking for or why they’re in your office.
Likewise, on social media, paying attention to what people are saying is necessary to be relevant, engaging, and to prevent yourself from making off-key blunders.
How do social media monitoring tools work?
Of course, the question above is very basic. In actuality, answering it is a bit more complex.
Most monitoring tools work by crawling sites continuously and indexing them. Some are crawled in real-time, such as Twitter. Other sites might be crawled less often – say, every 10 minutes, or every day if they are less important.
Once all those sites are indexed, they can be searched. Most tools use some form of queries or search strings, that the user writes to find mentions of specific words and phrases on those pages. It will then bring these back into the tool’s interface, which can then be read, sliced, diced, and so on.
Top Social Monitoring Tools
For brands and businesses, social media monitoring goes beyond just typing your name into the search bar on Instagram or Twitter. This is why we’ve compiled this list of our favorite tools:
Socinator
Socinator’s customizable search streams will monitor any social platform you like so that you can see what’s going on at a glance. Zero in on essential topics, trends, and social profiles based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker offers more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks. You can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment.
Nexalogy
Nexalogy’s top-tier data visualizations set it apart. It has interactive timelines, geolocation-based heat maps, lexical cluster maps that show common patterns of the topic. Plus the “basic” stuff that would take human beings weeks to figure out, like popular keywords and most active accounts.
Final Words:
As discussed above social media listening allows you to understand what your customers are talking about, what they think, how they feel, and what they need from your business. Choosing the best tool for your brand can help you achieve all these benefits easily.
