As one of today’s most powerful marketing tools, social media can increase brand awareness, expose your company to a larger audience, and foster meaningful interactions with customers. However, publishing regular content and responding to mentions will not be enough. Many clients may not even mention your handle when talking about your services with their colleagues. As a result, if you don’t track your audience’s social media behavior comprehensively, you risk missing out on important insights. Effective social media monitoring is required in this situation. It monitors millions of online chats to find out what people are saying about a certain brand.
This process offers real-time social media insights and helps you detect product or service issues and discover new business opportunities. 85% of executives also consider social data a primary source of business intelligence for their company’s progress. In today’s article, I will discuss the multi-dimensional benefits of social media monitoring and what you can do to make it work for you.
Key Takeaways
- Social media monitoring goes beyond tracking direct mentions; it captures untagged conversations and broader discussions about your brand, providing a more comprehensive view of public perception.
- By tracking real-time social conversations, brands can quickly identify and address potential issues before they escalate, helping to protect reputation and maintain customer trust.
- Through metrics like share of voice, brands can see how they measure up against competitors, helping to refine positioning and boost visibility in the industry.
- Social media monitoring supports data-driven strategies, allowing brands to make informed choices regarding product development, marketing approaches, and customer service improvements.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process of gathering relevant social discussions and messages to keep track of your consumers’ preferences, dislikes, desires, and changing demands. Responding to relevant brand-related conversations is another aspect of social monitoring. It is an instant response technique that applies to all types of brand conversation, including reviews, product questions, and service complaints.
Monitoring allows you to respond directly to customers, resolve concerns, and join in brand-specific conversations. In contrast, social listening takes a broad view of your industry and brand, including your audience’s tangential interests. Social monitoring allows you to actively participate in or observe conversations.
Social media monitoring includes more than simply direct mentions and comments on your posts. It includes posts that reference your brand but don’t tag you. These types of posts do not appear in your standard network notifications, which is why you should set up social monitoring tools.
In essence, social media monitoring is more than just keeping track of what people are saying about your business online; it is an important tool for proactive brand management and audience trust building. Monitoring social media can feel like keeping an eye on your brand’s reputation, from understanding customer mood to staying ahead of any PR issues. This guide dives into why social media monitoring is important and how it can give your business the edge it needs in today’s digital landscape.
Understanding Media Monitoring
A few years ago, I worked for a small technology startup. They were making ripples in a competitive market, but one day, I observed an unexpected increase in tweets about our product. Some praised it, but others pointed out flaws we had not heard about before. Within hours, negative tweets began to gain traction. Fortunately, because we were watching social media in real-time, we identified the trend, responded swiftly, and gave a temporary fix.
It taught me an important lesson: social media monitoring is more than just looking beautiful; it is also about remaining informed and prepared. Knowing what people think and feel about your brand is extremely significant, and media monitoring may help you accomplish just that. Media monitoring allows strategic communications and marketing teams to stay informed about what people say about their company, products, services, or competitors and respond to that feedback more effectively. In a way, it allows you to be the proverbial fly on the wall.
While conventional media remains a valuable marketing tool, new media, particularly social media, is where people learn about and are influenced by brands. A recent survey found that 44% of customers use social media marketing to inform their shopping decisions, compared to only 13% who use traditional television advertising.
Given the huge amount of content published by numerous media platforms, from news articles and blogs to online reviews and social media posts (5 billion Snapchat videos and photographs are posted every day), it may appear impossible to keep track of the conversations about your company. But do not worry: This article will lay out how media monitoring can help you follow and understand the most essential talks about your brand’s reputation and business’s bottom line.
Important Metrics to Track in Social Media Monitoring
Tracking the right metrics helps you understand how your brand is perceived and where improvements can be made. Here’s what I recommend keeping an eye on:
#1. Customer Sentiment
This metric reflects how people feel about your brand—whether they have positive, neutral, or negative emotions. Imagine if you notice a surge in positive sentiment right after launching a new campaign. You now have immediate feedback on its success, which can guide future strategies.
#2. Share of Voice
This metric shows how often your brand is mentioned compared to your competitors. Knowing your share of voice can help you gauge your brand’s visibility and influence in your industry.
#3. Engagement Rate
This guide below provides a detailed comparison, feature checklist, pricing insights, and tips to help you choose the right tool to effectively monitor your brand’s online presence.
The engagement rate measures how often people interact with your posts. High engagement indicates a strong connection with your audience.
#4. Response Time
A quick response time shows customers that you’re attentive, which goes a long way in building trust. For instance, when a client shared that our response time averaged only a few hours, it boosted their confidence in our dedication to customer satisfaction.
#5. Brand Mentions And Hashtag Performance
Monitoring brand mentions lets you see how often your brand is discussed, and hashtag performance reveals which hashtags drive the most engagement. This can guide your content strategy, helping you double down on topics that resonate most.
What Are the Three Stages of How the Social Media Monitoring Process Works?
The term monitoring can have negative connotations, but don’t worry—social media surveillance is entirely legal and by RODO. Facebook evaluated and certified some tools, including ours, to ensure that they met privacy and security criteria.
Social media monitoring operates similarly to search engines such as Google and Bing. The robot explores social media channels for predefined keywords. This behavior is entirely lawful and complies with GDPR. Regardless of which technology you use, there are three fundamental steps in social media monitoring:
#1. Setting-up
First, create a project in which you specify the keywords you wish to track across the internet and social media. It might be your brand name, product name, or a combination of the two. Excluded keywords may be required in an advanced configuration to conduct a more focused inquiry.
#2: Collecting
The tool organizes mentions into a dashboard report. It normally includes numerous filters for cleaning up, grouping, marking, and deleting gathered mentions. The social media monitoring application also sends mentions right to your mailbox in the form of real-time, daily, and weekly reports.
#3. Analyzing
Data analysis differs between tools. Some solutions prioritize volume, engagement, and reach analytics, while others focus on the sentiment and effect of social media mentions.
These three steps form the basis of social media monitoring. Once you’ve set your keywords, the service collects mentions and comments from across the internet and gives data to assist you in better grasping the context and responding appropriately.
The following step is to develop a strategy based on social media monitoring information, known as “listening.” Let’s look at the distinction between social media monitoring and listening.
The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools and Platform
Right now, someone is posting about your product, brand, or service on social media platforms. Would you like to know what they are saying? Is it a positive or negative mention? There are countless social media monitoring tools out there. Choosing can be overwhelming, so I’ve done the hard work for you by putting together a list of the best tools you can use. In no particular order, here are some recommended tools to use:
#1. Awario
Awario is a solution for businesses to monitor and manage their reputation on social media and the web. This program is continually crawling major social media networks (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and so on) as well as millions of blogs, news sites, and forums, and it will notify you if your company/brand name appears anywhere.
Awario allows you to understand more about your target market and acquire insights into your competition. You can determine what your customers desire and identify ways to improve the quality of your goods. You may also increase customer involvement by using this service to find product influencers and reviewers to test and promote your product.
The tool allows you to join online forums and debates, leave comments on blogs, and follow accounts and threads related to your business and industry. This enables you to communicate with customers and answer questions from skeptical customers who may have doubts about purchasing your products.
#2. Brand24
Brand24 is an online tool that allows businesses to monitor what potential customers are saying about their products/services, industry, and competitors on social media. The program monitors product and industry-specific keywords across major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
The platform helps you provide a better client experience by allowing you to respond quickly to praises and inquiries about your business. It can also notify you of any bad comments that need to be addressed before your brand’s ratings drop. In addition, Brand24 has market analytics tools and connects seamlessly with Slack.
#3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools for monitoring keywords, mentions, conversations, hashtags, and other critical social media metrics. With Hootsuite, you can respond to customer interactions directly from your dashboard — removing the need to switch between different social accounts to address queries and messages. The platform also offers modules for identifying and reaching out to influencers who could be potential advocates for your brand.
With Hootsuite’s monitoring feature you can set up custom social media streams, search by keyword, hashtag, or location, and also assign multiple team members to the monitoring task.
#4. Meltwater
Meltwater is the Swiss Army knife of social media monitoring tools, with the Meltwater social media management suite, Meltwater audience insights, Meltwater social monitoring, sentiment analysis, and influencer management—all housed in one easy-to-use interface.
Trusted by over 27,000 clients worldwide and ranked as the #1 media intelligence platform by G2, it’s a sophisticated option, ideal for everyone from enterprise teams to SMEs.
Screenshot showing Meltwater Engage platform, displaying mentions, posts, impressions, clicks, and total spend for paid, earned, and owned social media posts
The Meltwater social monitoring platform offers intuitive, highly customizable monitoring dashboards where you can track conversations in real time, pinpoint developments in community sentiment, and capitalize on the most valuable mentions. The Meltwater social monitoring platform covers networks like
- X (formerly known as Twitter)
- YouTube
- Asian Socials
- Message boards
- Forums like Reddit and Quora
- Over 300 million blogs
- Podcasts
- Broadcast
And, while some tools and apps put a cap on how many mentions, Boolean key phrases, influencers, or competitors you can monitor, with Meltwater, you get unlimited searches to filter a mammoth data pool of 200 billion conversations across the globe.
Once you’ve compiled the most relevant searches, you can turn them into drilled-down reports to help you refine and improve your KPIs, or convert them to easy-to-understand visuals to present to the C-suite.
#5. Agora Pulse
Agorapulse is a two-in-one tool: a management platform with social media monitoring features. Agora Pulse is a comprehensive social media management solution that includes scheduling, monitoring, engagement, and analytics functions. All of your social media mentions are collected in the inbox, and the listening tool allows you to search for keywords, URLs and handles on Twitter. Agora Pulse also lets you track comments on your Facebook and Instagram adverts.
You get a simple-to-use monitoring inbox called Social Inbox (similar to Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox), which consolidates all of your brand’s social comments, mentions, and discussions into a single feed for easy response. There’s also a detailed influencer outreach dashboard and an integrated CRM.
Alongside the tool’s reliable publishing and scheduling features, you can measure and improve the ROI of your content strategy thanks to ready-made, easy-to-export reports.
Why Social Media Monitoring Matters
There are several reasons to invest in social media monitoring. Everyone, including their mother, utilizes the internet. There is a 99 percent likelihood that your customers are talking about your business or items online. It could be negatively or positively; if you don’t monitor, you’ll never know.
Monitoring allows you to take control of your brand’s online reputation. Here are several reasons why social media monitoring is important (along with some practical examples), including how it can benefit your business, customers, and overall strategy.
#1. Understanding Your Audience
Social media monitoring provides insights into customers’ needs, wants, preferences, and behaviors. Brands can use conversations, sentiment patterns, and feedback to obtain a better knowledge of their intended audience. This is not about intrusive surveillance, but about understanding the types of content they consume, the influencers they follow, and the discussions they participate in.
For example, Netflix uses social media monitoring tools to acquire information about viewer preferences, allowing it to make data-driven decisions about content creation and acquisition. Understanding their audience’s tastes and interests allows them to make targeted recommendations and engage customers in relevant ways.
#2. Addresses Social Media Crises Quickly
Social media crises can occur unexpectedly. However, if you pay good attention, you will most likely notice the warning signals before they become uncontrollable. Monitoring social media might help you spot unfavorable conversations and intervene before they escalate. We didn’t have sophisticated monitoring tools in the early days of digital marketing, so when a consumer complaint went viral, we realized it was far too late. Since then, I’ve always advocated for real-time monitoring since it’s invaluable when things start going wrong.
Dealing with a negative scenario is an unavoidable reality for most businesses. Whether it’s a customer issue, a brand error, or a cybersecurity attack, you’ll most certainly need to use your crisis management abilities at some point.
Your social media strategy needs to be properly set up at the start to successfully weather a crisis. Social monitoring is a key player here; being able to see conversations about the issue in real time will help you answer individual posts and overall public statements. Social monitoring also helps uncover the early warning signs of a problem for you before it becomes critical.
#3. Finds New Influencers To Partner With
Some of the best brand supporters may be macro- and micro-influencers you haven’t encountered before. Perhaps they are simply outside your space or new to the field. Social media monitoring can help you locate the relevant influencers and contact them about prospective collaborations. They may have mentioned your brand without identifying it or one of your items.
The caption of the next post mentions SRAM Road and the entire post is a good review from a bike micro-influencer. If they weren’t familiar with this influencer before, they are now and can keep them in mind for future marketing initiatives. Furthermore, the piece features excellent photographs, which the business may be able to reshare with permission.
#4. Boost Brand Awareness
When you are constantly aware of what your customers are saying, you are able to respond to their demands promptly. This also raises awareness of your brand among potential clients. When consumers see you responding to legitimate comments or issues from the people they follow, your brand memory will certainly increase.
A brand that interacts with postings, even those that do not directly mention the brand, is more memorable to customers than a business that only sends out advertisements. According to our most recent Sprout Social Index survey, 51% of consumers believe that the most memorable brands on social media respond to customers. In the case below, Wendy’s recognized a compliment for a team member at a specific store.
#5. Tracking Your Competitors
Do you want to discover how the competition is doing and which of their items are successful? You don’t have to wait for industry reports to obtain your tea. Monitoring your competitors’ online mentions provides significant insights into their strategy, allowing you to tailor your own accordingly. You can also detect potential flaws in their strategy and exploit them to obtain an advantage in the marketplace.
Social media monitoring is about more than just your brand; it’s also about keeping track of what your competitors are up to. You may monitor their new campaigns, product releases, and customer reactions to better position your brand. Knowing your competitors’ moves can help you modify your messaging to fit any market gaps they may be leaving open.
These monitoring tools also let you track your competitors’ sentiment and reputation. By examining this data, you can find areas where they are lacking and alter your approach to profit on those deficiencies, or create a product that answers a client demand that your competitors do not meet.
In other words, media monitoring is an essential tool for staying ahead of the curve in today’s fast-paced digital environment. By monitoring online conversations, you may acquire vital insights into your customers’ wants and preferences, detect industry trends and opportunities, manage your brand reputation, and remain competitive.
What’s the Difference Between Social Monitoring and Listening?
You’ll hear people talking about social media listening tools when they mean social media monitoring tools, and vice versa, but technically they are different things. The key distinction lies in how close you are to the action: think zoomed-in vs. zoomed-out.
Social media monitoring means dealing with the day-to-day of managing your social monitoring platform feeds and reacting accordingly. It’s liking a comment on Instagram, getting into a conversation on Facebook, or replying to a tweet. It’s responding to queries, compliments, and complaints.
Social listening shows you the bigger picture. If you have all those likes, comments, and posts gathered into graphs and categories, you’ll see patterns at play. You can then make decisions based on your understanding of what your customers or competitors are doing, within the context of industry changes.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring is essential for every brand that wishes to remain proactive, connected, and competitive in today’s digital market. By tracking client mood, monitoring for potential crises, and responding to comments in real-time, you not only defend but also build your brand’s reputation. Remember that social media monitoring is not about responding; it is about staying ahead, making informed decisions, and developing strong relationships with your target audience.
Ready to elevate your brand management to the next level? Begin by selecting a monitoring tool that meets your needs and establishing a routine to keep your brand’s pulse in check.
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