Social Media Monitoring - Best Tools and Proven Tactics | brand24 (2023)

You are talking about your company. Yes, right now someone is posting something about your product, brand or service on social media platforms. Do you want to know what they say? Is it a positive or negative mention? You can get to know him easily. All you need is a great social media monitoring tool.

Social media monitoring is a game changer. Especially as consumers have shifted from offline to online shopping and e-commerce has moved to the forefront of retail.

More and more brands and online businesses are focusing on improving their online presence on the web. And this is where social media monitoring comes into play. Sounds interesting? Let's dive in!

Here is the media monitoring guide:

• Was it social media monitoring?
• How does social media monitoring work?
• What can you do with your surveillance data?
• Social Media Monitoring Best Practices
• What are the best social media monitoring tools?
• Summary

What is social media monitoring (and analytics)?

Social media monitoring is the monitoring of keywords on social media platforms to search for mentions of pre-defined keywords. we also call itsocial listening, as it allows you to track every social mention your brand includes.

What keywords are worth tracking? In business, they may be associated with:

• mercado
• Product
• Service
• Industry
• CEO
• competitors
• marketing campaign
• Hang tags
• Anything business related

The sources of social media mentions depend on the tool you choose. Brand24 monitors Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.

Thats not all. The tool also crawls podcasts, newsletters, platforms, and websites like news sites, review sites, discussion forums, blogs, and other publicly available sources.

Also, social media monitoring tools come with numerous analytics features that give you tons of data and insights about the monitored keywords.

Some of them include:

• volume metrics
• Engagement Metrics
• sentiment metrics
• Influence Metrics
• Reach and online presence metrics
• + more!

Thanks to analytics, you can draw the right conclusions and implement them in your social media strategy.

There are various applications for monitoring social networks in companies. The best thing about this is that it helps in many areas of the business:

• Brand reputation management
• PR Crisis Management
• marketing analysis
• Social media analysis
• market research
• competitive analysis

Many Brand24 clients use it to find relevant conversations, build strong fan relationships, produce better content and generally promote their brand online.

How does social media monitoring work?

The word surveillance can have some negative connotations, but don't worry: social media monitoring is completely legal and RODO compliant. Some tools, like ours, have been reviewed and certified by Facebook to meet privacy and security standards.

On the technical side, social media monitoring tools, in a nutshell, use something like a Googlebot to crawl social media platforms for pre-defined keywords in near real time.

For me, there are three main aspects to social listening:

• furnish. First of all, it starts with creating a project. You need to provide the keywords you want to track on social media. There are often advanced required and excluded keyword settings that can be used to make your search query even more specific.
• Gather. Second, the tool collects mentions on a board. There are usually many filters you can use to clean, group, tag, and remove the collected mentions. In addition to the dashboard, you can receive mentions in different forms and amounts directly to your inbox: daily, weekly or real-time reports.
• Analyze. Third, there is analysis. It depends on a tool, since different tools analyze different data. Some tools look at metrics for volume, engagement, reach, sentiment, and impact of mentions on social media.

What can you do with your surveillance data?

A lot. It's a matter of perspective and how you use the data. Of course, tracking brand mentions is one of the most common reasons social media marketers use social listening tools. But you can do so much more with it.

Here are some things you can do when monitoring different terms:

• Monitoring your brand or company name: Find out where your audience is talking about you and distribute more content and ads there. Learn more about your audience type. See what your audience is saying about you and manage your reputation.
• Monitor Your Product – Gauge what the public thinks about your product. See how it is used. This will help you find the right approach to promote your product or, if necessary, reposition it on the market.
• Thought your inflatable pillow would be a hit with the campers? Your customers may think it's a better pillow for road trips.
• you thought it was yoursmarked personalitywas found funny? Your audience might think you are "sassier".
• These insights can help you identify whether to reposition your product or rebrand your business in your marketing strategies.
• hashtag tracking– A social media marketing campaign is incomplete without a #hashtag. Keep an eye on your #hashtag to see how often it's used and what the conversation is about.
• Browse Similar Products - See what people are saying about products similar to yours. they are better? are worse. These are key insights your R&D team needs to see.
• Find important influencers– There are people who set trends and people who follow them. If you're not a trendsetter (yet), at least keep up to date by following key industry influencers.
• Analyze the competitors – see where they are falling short and you may be able to cover this with your own business.
• Key leaders in your company: Your CEO or public relations specialist is likely to talk a lot about your company. Watch what they say and see how people react.

Social Media Monitoring Best Practices

Wondering how to get the most out of social media monitoring? Too easy. Here are my top tips to help you set up and capitalize on the perfect project.

01 Decide why you are monitoring

Social media listening is used in many areas, including customer service, collecting customer feedback, and tracking the progress of your hashtag campaigns.

Can it be used for all of the above purposes? Of course, you can use social monitoring data for much more than that! This is just a reminder that it's a good idea to have a plan (perhaps multiple plans, one for each different use) or you'll be overwhelmed and confused by all the information.

Trust me, it happens.

So first set up a social media monitoring strategy!

02 Choose a tool that fits both your budget and your needs

There are many social listening tools on the market.

Free tools (like Google Alerts, TweetReach, etc.) are options, while cheap tools (likemarca24) even costs $69/month. Mid-range tools can cost around $800 per month, while more expensive full-service tools usually come with personal consultants, but usually cost around $1000 per month.

We all like free tools because they are free. But unfortunately they won't get most of the results either. i saw the bookOrix y Crakewith both the free social media monitoring software and the paid tool Brand24 (try it free).

Within 24 hours, the free tool retrieved 4 results forOrix y Crakewhile Brand24 retrieved 14 results. That's a 350% difference. A free tool may be enough for some users, but it is not for most companies.

My big advice to you is to sign up for free trials and ask questions if you have any.

Different tools and different levels of service offer different features, so it's best to shop around. Sign up for free trials (and actually use the tool). Then arrange a consultation and ask questions.

The point is to make sure you choose a tool that suits both your budget and your needs.

03 Choose relevant keywords

When choosing keywords, the usual suspects are your brand or company name, your product, and your #hashtag. It depends on why you are monitoring.

To provide customer service, you must monitor all of the above. Your company or brand isn't always mentioned in a question or complaint, and you don't want disgruntled customers to feel ignored. Also, a quick response to acknowledge your frustration might help, like this:

Monitor the above keywords and your social listening tool will notify you of all conversations and complaints where you are not tagged.

If you are monitoring for other reasons, other keywords may be required to retrieve relevant data.

Choose your keywords carefully. here are someSocial Media Keywords to Track.

04 Check spelling and punctuation

You may be a good speller, but the same is not necessarily true for your audience.

Also, some terms are just plain confusing. BetweenTofurkeyYTofurki, are you sure which spelling refers to the brand and which refers to the meat substitute in general?

To keep track of all brand mentions, check spelling and punctuation. Also, add misspelled keywords as well as correctly misspelled keywords and popular nicknames.

05 Keywords required by the user

This is especially useful when you want to find out what people are saying about your company or product in relation to other companies and products.

For example, to get results from conversations comparing Nike to Reebok, you would create a project that monitors conversations about Nike. I would then enter Reebok as the required keyword. This would yield results that both Nike and Reebok dispute.

06 Think Twice About Long Tail Keywords

The language is varied. There are many different ways to say the same thing. New words can be used in place of others to communicate the same message.

I just expressed the same thought in 3 different sentences. And I am just one person. Imagine all the different ways different members of your audience could be talking about you or asking for recommendations:

• Looking for recommendations for good walking shoes
• I need recommendations for good walking shoes.
• Where can I find good walking shoes?
• Where can I buy good walking shoes?
• Can you recommend me good walking shoes?

Using long-tail keywords severely limits your results and you could end up excluding results that are also relevant.

Eg Surveillance“I need recommendations on good walking shoes”excludes the results of“Where can I buy good walking shoes?”. Unless you control both sets.

07 Clean up your social listening results

This part is important as it will help your social monitoring tool to collect more accurate results.

Develop good "cleaning habits" and practice them consistently to ensure you get the highest quality endorsements.

How does it work? The following steps provide best practices for cleaning up your results.

Take a day or two to observe your results

It's not enough to choose your keywords, enter them into your social media tracking project, and then log back in a week later. Social listening is, at least in part, an active process.

Start any social monitoring project on time. This not only gives you historical data, but also allows you to spend the first few days looking at your results and looking for ways to fine-tune and optimize your project.

See what results your current keywords and settings are getting. Set aside a day or two to observe.

Look for irrelevant results

Irrelevant results can take many forms, especially when the keywords you are monitoring are ambiguous.

For example, I set up a project to monitor the Dove brand.

Being the hands-on robotic human that I am, I made it a point to log into my project at least once a day for the first few days. And good thing I did!

When I first logged in after setting up the project, my social media monitoring tool had already gotten a lot of results.Taube.

Most of these revolved around the brand.Taube. But some of them looked like this:

How can you cleanse your results of irrelevant mentions like these?

Use excluded keywords

I quickly entered cameronas as the excluded keyword. This ensures that your project does not return results containing dove if the cameron keyword also appears in the same result. (The results on Dove Camerondo make this project more fun to watch, but unfortunately these are not relevant results.)

Manually remove irrelevant results

Sometimes it's faster and easier to manually remove irrelevant results.

Block domains and mute authors that give you irrelevant results

If you notice that some of your irrelevant results are coming from certain domains or websites, block them!

For example, in myDoveproject, I got results using "dove" as a verb, and found that they come from a sporting domain ("He dove to catch the ball, traveling at lightning speeds").

I blocked the domain and the tool stopped getting irrelevant results from that website.

Use the required keywords to clean up your results

Add the required keywords related to your product or #hashtag to clean up your results.

For example, to get more targeted results from Dove, you can add required keywords like moisturizer or any Dove #hashtag campaign to get more targeted results.

08 Discover all the functionalities of the social listening tool

He played around with the tool during his free trial and asked any questions he had. Now that you've chosen the best tool for your business, take the time to learn about it. Do not leave any function unused.

You might miss out on powerful analytics, helpful filters, quickly generated PDF reports, and important metrics like these:

I highly recommend that you explore all the features that your social tracking tool has to offer. Also, it pays to look for the latest updates and features. For example, since 2021, Brand24 has introduced a new metric calledattendance score:

This metric helps you understand your brand awareness, your competitors, or your topics of interest. It's a great way to gauge whether your social media marketing efforts are paying off.

09 Prioritize your results

Prioritize your results by importance so you know what to take care of first.

Brand24 includes features like sentiment analysis, engagements, and influencer score filters to help you prioritize your results.

10 Create a benchmark to compare your results

Evaluate or compare your latest results with results from previous campaigns or other time periods. This will give you a better idea of ​​how far you have progressed over time.

11 Label your results to make them easy to find

They will collect social media monitoring data for a while. Make sure you have a system for marking the important ones.

Create groups for specific types of results, or at least label them in some way so you can easily find them later when you need them.

12 Customize your project and set up email notifications

Whether you're interested in real-time monitoring or initial monitoring to have historical data at your fingertips, take every opportunity to personalize your notifications.

If you can decide when and how often you'll receive email notifications, set them up. Your inbox will thank you later.

13 Customize your storm alerts

Storm alerts let you know when your results suddenly increased or the number of conversations containing your keywords suddenly increased.

Customize your storm alerts to notify you when it matters most.

If you're a small business that only gets a few mentions a day, you can create storm alerts that will notify you if you suddenly get 12 mentions in one day. (See what suddenly gets people talking and if it's positive or negative.)

If you're a medium or large business, you can set the limit to 50 mentions per day, 250 mentions per day, or 1,000 mentions per day. Make the number significantly higher than your average number of mentions so you can get alerted to real rumours.

14 Get the free mobile app

Again, not all social media listening tools also offer a mobile version. If that's your case, download it so you can take your results on the go; it is the perfect complement to the desktop version.

15 Collect historical data

Most social media monitoring tools provide limited historical data. If you need historical data, it's important that you start monitoring as soon as possible so that you have your own set of historical data that you can then compare with more recent results.

This requires some patience and careful monitoring of social media, but then you'll have historical data that you can use to compare against new data to identify sources of spikes, dips, patterns, or irregularities in your results.

16 Developing and Maintaining Good Watching Habits

The most important part of social media monitoring is consistency. Check in constantly. Clean your results consistently. React and react coherently.

Monitoring different social media platforms saves you a lot of time (you don't have to search the web for results), but it should also be an active process on your part.

Otherwise, it would be like buying a pair of glasses, hoping to see better…and then constantly tripping over the corners of the table because you keep your glasses in the drawer.

What would be the point of that?

There are some social monitoring tools worth checking out. You can find them here:The best social media monitoring tools.

Most of them offer a free trial period that gives you a few days to play around with the tool.

The best way to find the right tool is to try it out and choose the one that meets your expectations. The choice depends on your needs. Each tool is a bit different in terms of interface, usability, features, or social platforms tracked.

Price is another important factor. I'm sure you want to choose an affordable tool. Social media monitoring costs range from a few dollars to thousands per month.

Summary

We've gone through each of the 16 social media monitoring tips I've put together for you. I tried to cover different parts of the process.

In my opinion, social listening is something every social media marketer should try. It is very helpful to track online conversations about your business, perform brand sentiment analysis, write engaging social media posts, develop better content marketing, and enrich social media analytics.

Of course, there are many more benefits!

Finally, let's take a look at a brief synopsis:

• Create an overall social media monitoring plan before creating a project
• Choose a tool that suits your needs and budget
• Sign up for a free trial
• Choose your keywords carefully
• Clean up your results
• Take advantage of the features your tool offers
• Check the results regularly

I hope you found this post helpful and use these tips to get quality results from online media monitoring.