To be successful, any business strategy must incorporate social media. Organizations need to be able to hear the conversations taking place about your company and your brand in order to reach the right people at the best time with the most insightful content. Social media monitoring is exactly what you need to achieve this.
Many companies might think that social media monitoring is just tracking mentions and replying when prompted. Nothing could be more wrong.
Social media monitoring is the use of tools to listen to millions of conversations on the web to determine what is being said about a particular brand, issues, people or producst, and to discover opportunities. It is how we monitor the web world. Social media monitoring can be passive, for example, listening to people to discover what interests them, or it can be active, searching for references to your brand, campaigns or actions.
Social media monitoring is not just about social networks, but it the entire web, including forums, blogs, news sites, communities and anywhere that conversations take place on the web.
How does social media monitoring work?
Most social media monitoring tools work by continuously crawling and indexing sites, sometimes in real time, such as Twitter. Once all of those sites are indexed, they can then be searched to find mentions, opinions and sentiment on specific products, brands, companies, people, places, etc.
The unstructured data created by millions of users posting and tweeting each day can fuelcompetitive advantages and help support marketers and other decision makers make more informed, critical decisions. This is possible if you can distill those millions of posts and tweets down into concrete information, and when you are able to understand what the users are actually saying. On social media, users express themselves using their own language: if you want to understand what they are saying, you need to understand all of the ways they communicate: slang, jargon, acronyms, abbreviations and so on.
Using cognitive computing technology, social media monitoring tools can really understand users and what they express on social media, comprehending intent, sentiment, opinion and preferences.
Why is social media monitoring so important?
Customers want to be sure that their opinion is heard by the companies they are targeted on social media, and it is relevant for other people in order to actively contribute to change or fuel improvements for the services and products that they buy.
By listening to conversations on social channels and on the web, companies can identify new opportunities or collect worthwhile feedback and information about competitors. The possibilities for what you may discover using social media monitoring is only limited by your imagination.
