On Friday, we completed a new set of interviews for our 2014 edition of On Air with Jamie Turner. You’ll see our interviews with some of the top names in digital marketing when we release them in the first half of the year.
One of the industry experts we interviewed was Erika Brookes who is VP of Product Strategy at Oracle Social. Oracle Social helps large businesses manage and scale their relationships with customers on social media channels. In other words, they provide tools to help you with social listening, social engagement, social publishing, social content and social analytics.
Four Steps to an Effective Social Media Monitoring Program
The first step in an effective social media monitoring program is to capture the information, which is not as easy as it looks. If you did this manually, you’d notice two things — first, that there’s a ton of random data that’s simply just noise.
The second thing you’d notice is that it would be labor intensive to manually cut through all of the background noise in order to have viable information. You’d spend hours weeding out the chaos and clutter just to get enough information to make some directional hunches, let alone some statistically sound decisions.
The second step in a social monitoring program is to actually listen in, or monitor, the conversations. If you do this properly, you’ll find insights about customer segments, preferences and intent. You can even find out information about the source of the social media conversation, which can be used to fine tune or improve your media buys or even be used to anticipate upcoming issues with your products or services.
The third step is to engage the prospect or customer who has made the comment. With some of the more sophisticated tools, you can filter conversations for the right action at the right time. You can also route messages to appropriate team members. For example, in some cases, you might route comments to your marketing department while in other cases you’d route them to your customer service department.
The final step is to analyze your progress. The best tools allow you to track your performance across a pre-defined set of key performance indicators; allow you to identify emerging trends, spikes or anomalies; and helps you keep tabs on your competitors by viewing their social media presence, customer conversations and perceptions compared to your brand.
What Questions Can be Answered via Social Media Monitoring?
All of this got me thinking about the questions a good social media monitoring program can help solve. My friends at BKV Digital and Direct Response have developed a checklist of what can be answered when you use a social media monitoring tool, and I thought I’d share that with you below:
- Who are the influencers around our particular topic or brand?
- Are these online ambassadors bloggers, media outlets, loyal fans, or employees?
- How do these influencers rank?
- Where does our customer base reside in the social properties (blogs, forums, microblogs, etc.)?
- What volume of conversation is there around our target keywords or brand?
- Where are those large volumes of conversation taking place?
- What is the seasonality of conversation around our topics of interest?
- What time of day do people discuss our topics of interest?
- In which context are the keywords of interest used?
- Are brand keywords skewing more negative or positive?
- Which clusters of conversations tend to gather the most interest, volume of attention and influence?
- Which clusters of conversations are more important to our marketing campaign’s needs? To PR? to HR? To the reputation of the brand?
- Which insights give a deeper understanding of the customer or competitor?
Action Steps for You.
This wouldn’t be a 60 Second Marketer blog post if we didn’t give you some actions steps to do coming off of this post, so here goes.
- Understand what Social Media Monitoring is: Social Media Monitoring is different from Social Media Management. The former is based on listening to social media conversations and then taking action based on those conversations. The latter is using a tool like HootSuite or SproutSocial to post updates across a variety of social media platforms. They’re different and it’s important to understand the difference.
- Ask Yourself if Social Media Monitoring is for You: Typically, but not always, social media monitoring tools like Oracle Social are for large corporations. If you have a business with more than $100 million in revenues, or if you have a variety of brands within your company, you might want to invest in a social media monitoring tool to keep track of the conversations going on about your brand on the internet.
- Analyze Your Options: There are a wide variety of options available for you to choose from. Many of them are outlined in our free e-book on the topic called “The Best 83 Social Media and Mobile Marketing Tools for Business.” You can download it today by clicking through on the link.
- Execute Your Plan: There’s no point in doing a bunch of analysis without actually taking action. So once you’ve developed your plan, get an accountability partner to hold you to your schedule. You’d be amazed how easy it is to get things done when you have an accountability partner to report to.
Hopefully, this post has given you some tips on social media monitoring and how it can be of value to your business. If we’ve missed anything about social monitoring that you’d like to add, feel free to do so in the comments section below.
Jamie Turner is the CEO of the 60 Second Marketer and 60 Second Communications, a marketing communications agency that works with national and international brands. He is the co-author of “How to Make Money with Social Media” and “Go Mobile” and is a popular marketing speaker at events, trade shows and corporations around the globe.