What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media marketing

Business today rely on social media websites and online platforms to promote, market and brand their product or service. These platforms give a solid foundation for businesses to communicate and reach out to target audience easily. Because 96% of people perceive the brand via other consumers experience, Social media Monitoring becomes significantly important. In this article we will cover the basics of Social Media Monitoring.

What is Social Media Monitoring

To put it simply, Social Media Monitoring is a strategy to assess your brand reputation by gathering information and data from various social media networking sites and other online sources. It also provides deeper insights on the market trends and how successful a brand is in the market. It can also be referred as Social Listening.

For instance, when visiting the online platforms, what are people speaking about your brand; which product or service is the most talked or sought after; frequency of your competitor’s mention; defamation or fake comments; and lastly, likes, dislikes and suggestions.

Having said that, the AI driven, and Machine Learning tools are equipped with sophisticated algorithm that perform analysis and present you with the performance metrics. Metrics give a holistic picture of your brand reputation.

How does it work

The fundamental aspect for social media monitoring is acquiring data. Data can be retrieved from anywhere.  There are few ways to acquire data. As explained by Wikipedia, Network Traffic Analysis, Ad-hoc applications and Crawling are some of the major processes to gather and collect information.  These techniques analyze the security and network management to identify any potential threat like privacy. It also helps gather information of page-per-click, average time spent on the site, most-viewed page and comments. It basically crawls the websites and indexes them.

Which areas are influenced

Monitoring continuously can prove beneficial in the following ways-

  1. Assess Brand reputation- The data collected answers questions that mostly haunts everyone. Is my brand well recognized in the market?  Are people enjoying the services or products? To what extent the campaigns have successfully generated leads? What are the expectations of clients? The data allows a business to create a roadmap as per the statistics and have a clear picture of the expectations.
  2. Improvisation- As per the marketing strategy defined, if the result did not come out as expected, the data received will place the brand in a position to improve based on the inputs and feedbacks by the various stakeholders. Because change is constant, and we need to be agile in order to excel today, adapting as per the market needs is the clever move.
  3. Refine social media platforms- Another aspect that social media monitoring touches is the refinement of the social media platforms. Merely posting a photograph without any message doesn’t suffice the purpose behind the photograph. While some take this lightly, others make sure to maintain social media etiquette and standards that match everybody’s tastes without hurting anyone’s sentiments.

Lastly, stepping into social media platforms without understanding its essence is sheer wastage of time, money and effort. Therefore, monitoring and listening to the what the world speaks about your brand and their expectations is first step towards success.  



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