Views, comments, shares, likes: every social media interaction matters to your brand. But every marketer knows that, regardless of industry, their brand is just part of a much larger conversation on social networking sites.
If you want to make the most of your platform presence, the best social media monitoring tools provide more than just response tallies or link tracking functionality. They give you the hard facts about everything from public sentiment to customer feedback.
Social media monitoring may not catch every last detail, but it can reveal behavior patterns you may have missed. If you want to know how to run a successful social media campaign, we dive into what’s available and how to harness the technology for more valuable insights.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring refers to keeping an eye on the collection of conversations about your brand on social media platforms. This can include direct responses to your brand’s content and relevant industry discussions.
You might use these tools to analyze customer sentiment, identify trends, and track competitor content. Monitoring can also improve your social listening efforts, AKA the process of understanding what customers are really saying in their posts.
Social media monitoring can sometimes be an inexact science. For example, if the point of your posts is to increase brand awareness as opposed to direct sales, how can you ever really measure your content’s impact?
This may explain why about a third of marketers express uncertainty when estimating social media ROI. But this doesn’t make social media monitoring a waste of time. Without more context, you risk wasting time and money on the wrong demographics.
Here are just a few examples of how to use these tools:
- A financial marketer tracks industry keywords to determine if their target demographic is happy with their current money management options.
- An e-commerce retailer tracks brand mentions across social media, blogs, and forums to see where they’re popping up most.
- A catering company deploys social listening tools to see how people are talking about their competition.
Is social media monitoring different from social media management?
Social media monitoring refers to how customers and potential customers respond to digital content, while social media management refers to your general social media strategy.
As you monitor what’s being said online, whether directly or indirectly, you can identify your most successful platforms and start fine-tuning your content for your followers.
How social media monitoring tools work
Social media monitoring tracks multiple platforms, giving you insight into all your content’s performance. We’ll look at how these tools gather and analyze information for better results.
Collecting social media data
Data collection starts with identifying which data matters. For most marketers, this includes brand name mentions, competitor names, or industry jargon.
From there, the tools crawl and index the web, combing through digital conversations that match the criteria. In addition to social media platforms, you can open this collection to all online spaces (e.g., blogs, websites, etc.). So, if you set “toothpaste” as a keyword, a crawler might search for “tooth paste,” “toothpaste,” or “oral paste.”
Social media tools can also perform hashtag analysis, identifying relevant hashtags and clarifying the overall positive or negative sentiment of their posts. To improve accuracy, many tools rely on APIs to streamline collection. By adding a layer between the tool and the social media platform, the functionality allows for direct platform requests and, as a result, more reliable and comprehensive benchmarking.
Analyzing data
Social media monitoring tools incorporate natural language processing to extract real meaning from conversations. So, instead of having to read through dozens of comments to understand customer sentiment, analysis tools take cues from the grammar, context, and overall language.
When social media is flooded with everything from irony to emojis, these tools are carefully designed to identify these constructs to interpret the real feelings underneath. If you’re interested in influencer marketing, data analysis can help you identify which personalities and niche audiences would connect most with your brand.
Visualizing and reporting
Social media monitoring tools typically present their findings in official reports. The general layout will vary based on the tool, but the most popular products prioritize user-friendly formats.
The comprehensive reports usually reveal general performance data, whether it’s in the form of graphs or pie charts. But these tools should also give you the ability to click into different metrics to better understand their conclusions.
If you’re using Bitly, you can access insightful reports about campaign performance with Bitly Analytics. With Bitly Analytics, you can get click and scan data all in one place, including click/scan history, county- or city-level data, and device information, depending on which Bitly plan you have.
AI and machine learning
Social media monitoring tools are increasingly incorporating AI and machine learning for sentiment analysis, trend prediction, and anomaly detection. By definition, these tools continuously evolve alongside your consumer base.
These valuable insights can also give you a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. For example, let’s say you’re marketing a smart sprinkler system, and you deploy AI to monitor sentiment about smart home technology. Should AI detect a negative shift in public sentiment due to security concerns, you can adjust your social network content to reassure buyers that the product is safe to use.
Key features to look for in social media monitoring tools
Social media monitoring tools are a must for successful marketers, and the high demand makes for a very competitive industry. With all the new tools on the market, it’s not always easy to choose the right one for you. Here, we look at the most important features so it’s easier to narrow down your selections.
Real-time alerts
Real-time alerts provide immediate notifications for marketers. Whether it’s brand mentions, product complaints, or industry news, these alerts enable you to jump into the fray.
For example, let’s say that a customer responds to a tweet promoting a new product with negative feedback about a different product. This sparks multiple responses from people with similar feedback. Real-time alerts allow you to assure these customers that you’re on the case.
Your customers care about the efforts you make to right wrongs. Social media monitoring can help you preserve your relationship with individual customers, but it’s even more effective at helping you manage and maintain your larger brand reputation.
Sentiment analysis
Public sentiment has a huge impact on your customers’ decisions. And while their actions may not always match up with their words, it’s still important for marketers to understand how people feel about the products and services they offer, as well as the general industry they represent.
For example, if the FDA comes out with a negative report about vitamins, a protein supplement marketer should have a general idea of the public’s reaction to the news and how that may bleed into their purchasing decisions. The best social media management tools will reveal what’s being said and how it’s being said so it’s easier to speak to your audience.
Comprehensive coverage across platforms
A social media monitoring tool should have broad coverage across all spaces, including niche and emerging networks. Since social media platforms can appear and disappear at any time, it’s not always possible for marketers to keep up with every last change.
Broad coverage allows you to see the big picture so you can get in front of problems and identify profitable opportunities before they dry up. For example, a social media monitoring tool can reveal brand mentions on a new platform, giving marketers an early opportunity to set up a business profile on what could be the next big thing.
Integration capabilities
A social media monitoring tool should integrate seamlessly with your existing digital marketing tools and customer service software. From CRM systems to email marketing to content management platforms, integration ensures a consistent customer experience.
If you’re used to siloed tools, integration can feel like a tall order. But the most comprehensive tools are flexible enough to track data and give department heads the gist before they segment email lists, map out content schedules, or forecast sales.
Competitive analysis
Monitoring tools also track your competitors’ social media activity so you can understand their strategy and audience engagement. For example, if your top competitor has more followers but almost no engagement on its pages, you might conclude that its content isn’t resonating with the platform’s demographics.
This insight can lead to more targeted posts based on your customers’ needs. We should note that there’s no need to copy your competitors, regardless of how popular they are. Instead, use the analysis to identify gaps and adjust your strategy.
Advanced filtering and segmentation
Social media monitoring tools provide advanced filtering and segmentation capabilities, allowing you to group users based on language, sentiment, location, and more. These tools allow for in-depth analysis so you can identify nuances between audiences.
In some instances, monitoring tools piggyback off the platform’s features. For example, Facebook Ads are particularly good at dividing audiences based on interests, further improving your accuracy.
When you use different Bitly links for each post, you can categorize the demographics in each channel and track response rates. This way, you’ll get a comprehensive view of how different groups react to your content.
How to implement social media monitoring for business growth
Social media monitoring is a wide-open field for most marketers. We’ll look at how to best implement these tools for growth.
Integrate social media monitoring with marketing strategies
A social media monitoring tool helps you spot broader connections to your larger marketing strategies. For example, if your industry has recently come under scrutiny, you can adapt your reputation management messaging across the board.
These marketing strategies include content creation, such as blogs, social media posts, or brochures, but also the official responses from customer service, PR, or sales teams. When you know how customers speak to one another on social media (and the broader implications of their feelings), you can address their concerns up front before delving into brand promotions.
Set up custom alerts for targeted insights
You can monitor keywords, phrases, and hashtags in real time and set up custom alerts to leverage positive news or mitigate damage. In the volatile virtual world, a brand’s social mentions can swing from one extreme to the other, and dropping the ball on either can negatively impact public perception.
Depending on your demographic, it may not always be easy to predict the precise language to target. However, with a little trial and error, you can strike a balance that catches the most important trends.
Leverage social monitoring information for content strategy
The best social media monitoring tools lead to better content and social media marketing strategies. This doesn’t mean catering to your audience’s every whim, but it may mean tailoring the information to both answer their questions and explain the rationale behind key decisions.
For example, if a key brand value is social justice, you might feature the stories of those you’ve helped. This provides your audience with a real picture of how you accomplish your goals so they’re happy to support the brand.
Monitoring tools also reveal the trending topics and audience interests that lead to more engaging content. This can include genuine and direct social media conversations that reinforce the brand’s transparency.
Respond to customer feedback
While it’s impossible to please everyone, it’s still incredibly important to manage customer feedback on social. When customers are upset, they can frame the situation to put the brand in the worst possible light. Failing to respond leaves the conversation one-sided and gives no reassurance to potential customers that you’ll do the right thing if something happens to them.
Social media monitoring across platforms provides alerts so you can repair relationships, rectify legitimate complaints, and respond to meritless accusations. So whether the complaint is posted on a review site or the company’s LinkedIn page, you can take swift action.
Track and measure your success
Analytics tools are the best way to measure your success across platforms. The numbers tell a story about who your customers are, where they are, and why they care about the brand.
The right social media management tool translates to fewer incorrect assumptions so you can make more informed decisions. Bitly’s tools make it easy to track social media success, both across marketing campaigns and between brands.
For example, Bitly Analytics provides a comprehensive breakdown of link engagement across your paid social ads, helping you correctly identify which content generated the most traffic.
For more effective monitoring, ensure that you have clear KPIs and realistic targets to assess whether your content is hitting home with your audience. For many brands, it’s better to have a small but loyal following rather than a large but peripheral audience.
Try social media monitoring for a strategic advantage with Bitly
Social media monitoring is an opportunity for marketers to strip out all the noise across platforms. With the right tools, you can develop insights rooted in facts that are far less likely to lead the brand astray.
Bitly’s tools were designed to complement social media monitoring efforts, revealing how audiences engage with your content. From click data to brand management, our results are a springboard to refine (or even revamp) your strategies.
We provide clean, intuitive ways to measure the impact of campaigns across every channel, demographic, and content type. With Bitly tools, you can make your investments more strategic and the next campaign better than ever.
Ready to conquer an ever-expanding social media landscape? Try Bitly today!