Creating and posting content on your business’ social media accounts is not enough anymore. Although we all wish it was that simple, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and put it in the work if you want your socials to be successful. You need to find out what your audience has to say about your brand, your products and services, and even your competitors’ products and services. So how do you find out all that information? The answer is through social media monitoring.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and staying up to date on any social media conversations pertaining to your industry, brand, or product. The process includes keeping track of hashtags, keywords, mentions of your brand, and responding to any engagement. Social media monitoring is more than just being aware of accounts that directly tag or mention you in their posts. As a business, you will want to stay mindful of all conversations revolving around your industry and brand.
How Do You Social Media Monitor?
If you want your social media accounts to actually help your business grow and reach new audiences, you will need to monitor your socials. When you have proper and accurate data in front of you, you can analyze and retrieve information about your target audience and how they are responding to your account as well as your competitors. Social media monitoring allows you to make informed decisions about your future marketing strategies.
To social media monitor, you will want to track and analyze…
- Brand Mentions
- Brand-Adjacent Terms
- Keywords
- Hashtags
- Customer Questions
- Customer Sentiment
- Competitors
Now, this a lot to try and keep track of on your own. Luckily, there are numerous tools that assist in gathering and analyzing this data.
What Tools Can I Use to Help?
Social media monitoring tools make the process much faster and easier for you (thank goodness). These programs and software gather everything about user behavior, including engagement, keywords, hashtags, and more. Each website and tool will monitor your socials a bit differently, so be sure to choose the one that best suits you and what you are looking to track.
If you’re looking to start monitoring or want to change up the software you’re already using, check out some of the tools below.
- Sprout Social
- Hootsuite
- Keyhole
- Talkwalker
- Mentionlytics
- Reputology
Tips and Tricks
Keep in mind that these tools won’t do all the work for you. You will still have to dive deep into the results and adjust your future content to truly improve your social game. Take a look at some of the simple tips and tricks below to get the most out of social media monitoring.
- Choose the tool that’s best for your purposes and goals
- Brainstorm your keywords and search terms
- Check your accounts and analytics frequently
- Feed your hashtag and keyword strategies while you’re monitoring
- Identify brand influencers you may want to partner with
If you need assistance monitoring and analyzing your social media accounts, contact us at Bad Rhino!
