Social Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide

Did you know that social media now has around 4.76 billion active users worldwide? Social media is now a busy place where people talk, make friends and share information.

In just a few years, it has changed a lot. From Facebook and X (which used to be called Twitter) to Instagram and LinkedIn, these sites have made a big difference in how we connect and share things every day.

It has also proven to be a useful asset in promoting businesses. Many small and well as reputed businesses have considerably expanded due to their influential presence on social media.

If you also want to know how to use social media to promote your business, this blog is the most suitable for you. Now, let’s begin.

What is social media monitoring? 

Social Media Monitoring is the process of effectively tracking customer conversations, opinions, insights, and discussions across various social media platforms, discussion forums, online channels, and so on to gain valuable insights on customer sentiments, current trends, campaign effectiveness, and competitor’s success.

It is done by actively tracking and analyzing comments, mentions, hashtags, and overall consumer sentiment related to a specific brand, product, or individual.

Some popular social media monitoring tools

Some popular tools used to monitor social media are as follows:

1. Brandwatch
2. Sprout Social
3. Buffer

1. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is considered to be a leading social media monitoring and analytics platform used by large-scale companies, data scientists, and market research analysts to gain insights on current trends, and deep market and consumer sentiments.

Brandwatch collects and tracks data from millions of online sources, such as social media platforms, review sites, news websites, etc., in real-time.

It allows marketers to track customer’s age, location, interests, and behaviors. It also allows benchmarking to identify the company’s strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.

Brandwatch also offers customizable dashboards that make visualization of key metrics like audience sentiment, customer engagement, and trending topics easy.

Using Brandwatch, companies can monitor their social media presence, competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, progress, campaign performance, and overall brand positioning to enhance business growth and sustainability. 

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another powerful social media monitoring tool mainly used by mid-sized businesses, digital marketing teams, and agencies to manage social media presence across multiple platforms, actively engage with customers, and perform comprehensive analysis.

Sprout Social provides a central hub to manage multiple social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.

It also provides a comprehensive set of tools, such as social listening tools, engagement tools, and CRM tools for effective customer service and social listening.

Furthermore, the platform is designed for collaboration. Thus, users can collaborate on tasks and streamline content publishing, measuring ROI, tracking key metrics, and customizing analytics and performance reports. 

3. Buffer

Buffer is regarded to be a popular choice for businesses that prioritize basic social media analytics and scheduling. Since it is more budget-friendly, it is mainly used by small businesses, solopreneurs, freelancers, non-profits, and start-ups.

Buffer enables performance tracking with minimal complexity and a visual content calendar that helps users see and organize scheduled posts across different platforms.

The Buffer browser extension allows users to schedule and quickly share content while browsing the web. Users can automate posting content and maintain a consistent presence without manual effort.

Hence, Buffer makes social media management easy with its numerous advanced tools, better content planning, improved team collaboration, and data-driven decision-making. 

How does a social media monitoring tool work?

Step 1: Selecting Monitoring Tools

An appropriate social media monitoring tool must be selected and customized according to a company’s needs, such as tracking brands, analyzing sentiments, benchmarking competitors, and so on. Here are some different types of monitoring tools:

All-in-one tools: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Buffer

Social listening tools: Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Mention

Sentiment Analysis Tools: Lexalytics, Awario, MonkeyLearn

Competitor Monitoring Tools: Rival IQ, Socialbakers, Unmetric

Influencer Monitoring Tools: BuzzSumo, Traackr, Klear

Step 2: Data Collection 

A large amount of data is collected from various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok, as well as blogs, forums, and other online communities in real-time.

Step 3: Identify Keywords

The data collected consists of comments, hashtags, customer reviews, or brand mentions. The social media monitoring tool then filters out the data and comments that don’t meet specific keyword criteria.

Step 4: Data aggregation and analysis

The filtered-out relevant data is collected, organized, and stored in a designated database. After that, various tools and algorithms are deployed to carry out analysis. 

The algorithms for Natural language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and deep learning are used to carry out sentimental analyses, time series analyses, social network analyses, and clustering and trend detection.

Step 5: Visualization and reporting

Some tools have dashboard features that enable the users to visualize key metric features such as customer engagements, customer preferences, brand reach, brand sentiment distribution, and source of mentions better. 

Once the results are clearly visualized, reports are generated to track content performance, competitor performance, and the impact of social media campaigns.

Step 6: Engagement and response

Social media monitoring tools enable users to set up real-time alerts for specific activities, such as viral posts, mass backlash, and so on, enabling businesses to respond quickly to crises. 

Constant customer review management and customer relationship management are carried out to retain and attract customers.

What are the benefits of social media monitoring?

Any entity, be it a brand or an individual, who wishes to promote themselves must highly value the consumer’s words.

They must be aware of customer satisfaction as well as dissatisfaction to improve customer engagement and stay long in the market. Some of the benefits of social media are as follows:

1. Brand Reputation Management

Businesses can monitor comments, reviews, and feedback about their products and services in real-time. The feedback may be positive as well as negative.

By doing so, businesses can quickly address any major concerns and apply necessary changes before the situation escalates out of control.

This maintains a good brand reputation and stable customer engagement. Furthermore, social media monitoring, if done properly, can make even an average brand as visible and hyped up as a top-notch brand.

2. Customer Engagement and Support

Social media monitoring helps us identify our target audience. By actively interacting with existing as well as potential customers and responding well to their queries, complaints, and appreciation, the brand can improve customer satisfaction and experience. This, in turn, attracts numerous new customers and builds customer loyalty towards the brand.

3. Competitor Analysis

Social media monitoring helps companies find new trends and do market research. By keeping an eye on social media, businesses can see what their competitors are doing well and where they are struggling, and use that information to get ahead.

Companies can also check their own plans, spot new chances in the market, find new trends, and see where they need to improve. They can even hire influencers, just like their competitors, to help promote their business.

4. Informed Decision Making

Effective monitoring of social media provides companies with data-driven insights which enables the executives to make informed decisions.

Marketers, social media managers, and customer service teams can effectively monitor the effects of brand campaigns on their target audience.

Understanding their sentiments, desires, behavior, and preferences can help the marketing team craft more compelling content, campaigns, and services. 

By constantly monitoring social media, businesses can easily identify oncoming crises early and mitigate the damage before it’s too late. 

5. Lead Generation and Sales Opportunities

Businesses can track their campaign performance and sales records using various social media monitoring tools. This enables businesses to create more personalized and relevant strategies that resonate with their audience and optimize future initiatives.

This effort maximizes the impact on the market in real time and leads to more and more customers discovering their services and products.

What are the best practices for social media monitoring?

1. Choose the right monitoring tools

The marketing teams, PR professionals, social media managers, and data analysts must choose the most suitable social media monitoring and analytics tools based on their business needs and goals.

2. Set up real-time alerts

Real-time alerts must be set up to know about incoming crises beforehand, which makes it easy to deal with them. Also, a company can know what products or services of theirs are going viral and for what reason. 

To do this, one can configure notifications for spikes in activity for sudden or unusual sentiment changes.

3. Track the market and competition

The team in charge must constantly monitor their own and their competitors’ social media to gain insights on industry trends, customer feedback, campaigns, and engagement metrics to improve competitive strategies and identify any opportunities or threats.

This can be done by constantly monitoring social media platforms, web pages, customer review sites, and other similar sites.

Since brand advocates and social media influencers help build positive rapport, a company must acquire them and use their influence to attract consumers and develop long-term partnerships.

4. Sentiment analysis

Understanding a customer’s sentiment, whether positive, negative, or neutral, helps brands understand how a customer feels about their products and helps build a more effective and specifically targeted marketing strategy. Sentiment analyses can be performed using rule-based approaches, machine learning, or a combination of both. 

Sentiment analysis is mainly carried out during product launches or PR crises to see how public opinion is evolving.

5. Create regular reports

An organized and trustworthy report must be created to help executives fully understand the market scenario. Reporting tools can be used to generate weekly or monthly reports that track customer engagement, audience sentiment, brand mentions, and social media campaign performance.

Since social media is constantly evolving, periodic reviewing, auditing, and monitoring of your approach and business strategy ensures you stay relevant and effective. 

What are examples of social media monitoring?

Now, let’s look at how some of the biggest brands in the world used social media to their advantage to promote their services and achieve success.

1. Netflix

Netflix is a popular streaming service that offers a wide variety of movies, TV shows, and documentaries of various genres. It operates on a subscription model with different pricing tiers based on streaming quality and the number of devices that can access the service simultaneously.

During the release of Stranger Things, Netflix tracked fan conversations and emerging trends on Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, and TikTok to measure viewer engagement and capitalize on viral moments.

They used tools like Hootsuite and Social Sprout to monitor the comments, conversations, and opinions. 

Hashtags for #StrangerThings helped track and understand audience reception. And so Netflix focused more on sci-fi and nostalgia-driven content from then on.

2. Samsung

Samsung is a South Korean multinational conglomerate that is best known today for its technology, particularly Samsung Electronics. Today, Samsung plays a critical role in shaping the modern tech landscape with its cutting-edge inventions.

The most popular Samsung tech that a person uses is its phone. So far, Samsung has released 6 phone series, namely:

• Galaxy S
• Galaxy Note
• Galaxy Z (foldable)
• Galaxy A (mid-range)
• Galaxy M (budget)
• Galaxy Tab (Tablet) series

During the launch and promotion of each of these, Samsung extensively monitored social media to track user feedback on product features, issues, and user experiences.

It particularly used social listening to identify consumer reactions during product launches and analyzed the hashtags and mentions to see what features consumers were discussing most.

Tools like Talkwalker and Mention were used to monitor real-time conversations. They also used popular celebrities like BTS’s Suga, Lionel Messi, Blackpink’s Jennie and Adam Levine.

Since social media monitoring was done right, Samsung rose to a strong competitive position in the market, so much so that people now prefer Samsung Galaxy phones over iPhones.

3. Uber

Uber is a popular ride-hailing company founded in 2009. Uber allows users to book rides from nearby drivers using their personal vehicles. In addition to this, it also provides food delivery services (Uber Eats) and freight services (Uber Freight).

Uber effectively used social media monitoring to promote itself in several ways. Uber used social discussion platforms to identify the areas where there was high demand of transportation services.

It took on to platforms like websites, review sites, and Twitter to receive customer feedback in real time and respond promptly. Tools like Sprinklr and Brand24 helped Uber monitor conversations across multiple social media channels.

It monitored social media to know the causes of backlashes, offered explanations and solved any issues before they escalated. In doing so, Uber managed to improve its brand reputation, expanded to multiple countries, and created child companies.

Conclusion

Brands that do not consider social media as a platform for marketing are making a huge mistake.

Not only are they going to have no insights into the competitor’s activities and potentially lose market shares, but they would also damage their reputation due to not being able to deal with crises on time.

Further, they would lose customer support and engagement. Thus, it would be highly beneficial for companies to carry out social media monitoring.

FAQs

1. What is social media monitoring best described as?

Social media monitoring is best described as the real-time monitoring and analysis of social media platforms to track mentions, discussions, and conversations about a specific brand, product, individual, or trend. Social media monitoring is key for business growth, maintaining online reputation, and constantly refining marketing strategies.

2. What are the three stages of social media monitoring?

The 3 vital stages of social media monitoring are the 3 A’s:

1. Analytics: The analytics phase involves gathering and visualization of data and metrics to observe trends and patterns.
2. Analysis: The analysis phase involves processing the collected data using analytic tools to identify key insights and information.
3. Assessment: The assessment phase involves producing the final results of the evaluation and taking necessary action to address crises and marketing strategies.

3. How do you conduct social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring can be done in the following steps:

• Define objectives clearly
• Select the right monitoring tools
• Set specific keywords and customize filters according to the need
• Collect real-time data
• Analyze the data
• Take action
• Evaluate, optimize, and monitor continuously

4. Which would be a form of social media monitoring?

A form of social media monitoring would be monitoring the public reactions, comments, and trending hashtags on Tiktok for a new TV show reception by the audience. Tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch can be used to collect data and analyze user feedback to gauge public opinion and respond promptly. 

5. How is media monitoring done?

Media monitoring is done by using tools to track, analyze, and measure metrics across various media channels in real time. These channels can be traditional media like newspapers, magazines, televisions, or digital media like websites and apps. 

6. What are the best social media monitoring tools?

Some of the best social media monitoring tools are as follows: Hootsuite, Bandwatch, Sprout Social, Mention, and BuzzSumo.

7. What is the difference between social media monitoring and listening?