Twitter, Facebook and Co. are all the rage. Many companies also have a profile on Google Plus, Google’s social network, or a YouTube channel. However, companies often do not maintain their accounts sufficiently, which means that they become outdated very quickly. However, the social media company profile thrives on active change and exchange in order to achieve an advertising effect. Social media monitoring tools can help to precisely evaluate user reactions and thus monitor, improve and control the appearance in the social media channels.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
In order to define social media monitoring precisely, it is worth taking a look at the term social media marketing. Because social media monitoring uses different tools to evaluate the behavior of users in dealing with the information provided by social media marketing. Social media monitoring tools provide the company that is present on social networks with information about the image it enjoys there. This information gives the company the opportunity to make corrections in affected areas.
What Does Social Media Marketing Mean?
The term describes a form of marketing for which a company uses the usual social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Google. With social media marketing, a company takes targeted measures to pass on information about the company, products or services and to place advertising , as well as to invite users to an exchange. The aim of the measures is to attract attention and lead as many visitors as possible to the company’s website.
The company specifically cultivates its image in the social networks on the Internet. If it gets good ratings from users, then traffic will increase at the same time, while bad customer ratings will reduce the number of visitors.
What Are the Benefits of Social Media Marketing?
Companies that carry out marketing in social media channels ensure that their image is maintained with their activities and they increase their profile. The exchange of information leads to inquiries being made and sales increasing. In addition to the direct opportunity to offer support, social media marketing also serves to strengthen customer loyalty and obtain reviews.
Which Social Media Channels Are Available?
The individual social media channels differ from each other in terms of their target groups and orientations. Common social media channels include, among others, for example:
- Facebook: World’s largest social network
- Twitter: Social network used for B2B communication in German-speaking countries. The scope of the messages is technically limited.
- Whatsapp and Snapchat: tools for quick communication that are mainly used by young audiences.
- LinkedIn and XING: The networks offer niches for industries and special topic groups and are mainly used for B2B networking.
- Youtube: The network for videos is available for both private and corporate use.
- Instagram and Pinterest: The social media channels mainly rely on the use of image material.
- TikTok: TikTok is a video portal that has grown enormously in recent years and has become known for its short videos. Nowadays , TikTok is one of the most famous channels with more than a billion monthly active users worldwide.
In the future, companies will be successful that combine the different strengths of social media channels and use them for their company .
What Should Companies Consider With Social Media Campaigns?
In order to successfully manage social media campaigns, every company should be clear about a strategy and the course of the campaign. The appearance of the company in social networks should be defined before the start of each campaign, as well as the content to be published and the distribution of resources in customer support.
What Characterizes Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring carries out a continuous evaluation of marketing measures. The continued observation of the marketing measures, together with the collection of information about customer opinions and their evaluation, means that your company can react very quickly to initiate changes to the product, service or external appearance. So-called “alerts” are used to promptly identify and eliminate serious problems. In this way, social media monitoring makes an important contribution to avoiding “shitstorms” that are harmful to the image.
How Does Social Media Monitoring Work?
Social media monitoring gives a company an overview of how users in social media channels are reacting to their own marketing measures. Social media monitoring tools filter out, for example, what customers think about a certain topic, how customers rate the company or how satisfied they are with products or services. The company can use the information collected to either improve products and services or to take advertising measures.
In the field of social media marketing, the focus is on maintaining interactive relationships. Therefore, the communication manager – the community manager – has an important task. The social media monitoring supports the community manager by providing him with a lot of important information, for example about his communication partners.
What Are Social Media Monitoring Tools For?
Social media monitoring has the task of evaluating the success of a social media campaign. But how do we measure success? Social media are not “ordinary” online marketing channels, such as SEO , PPC or affiliate marketing , where a profitable model can be quickly calculated with sales or generated leads.
Social media monitoring tools are used to identify and evaluate key parameters that cannot be easily measured and optimized in numbers. Due to the abundance of differently organized social networks, it is necessary to go into very different characteristics.
For example, the number of likes on a Facebook page is a measurable value, but says little about the activity of individual fans. Engagement, comments, messages, requests, retweets, likes and shares are important indicators of the quality of your content and help you to further develop your campaign. However, it is still difficult to directly link advertising activities on social networks to sales figures. Users are very active in social networks. They’re usually having fun there, so they’re not necessarily willing to leave the social network to respond to a purchase request. The aim must be to build up a community of loyal, active users over a long period of time and to convert them at the right time.
What Social Media Monitoring Tools Are There?
In order to monitor and improve social media marketing, one must use appropriate social media monitoring tools. Well-known tools (for small to large companies and self-employed) are for example:
- Hootsuite: The Hootsuite tool facilitates the management of social media content. A cloud, tags, search function and usage statistics are available for content maintenance. Hootsuite displays the impact of the marketing campaigns through comprehensive reports. In addition, the program filters conversations in social media according to various parameters, such as hashtag , keyword or location. In this way, Hootsuite provides information about the brand image, the industry and competitors.
- dirico.io : The dirico.io tool is suitable for small and medium-sized companies to provide a clear platform and an analysis option for social media management and content marketing. For agencies and companies with branches as well as for large companies and corporations, the tool offers good planning options for content that needs to be shared with other teams. The program gives businesses access to keyword mentions across various portals.
- Echobot: The Echobot tool is suitable for use in social and traditional media. The tool automatically informs about events, customer opinions, sales opportunities and risks. It provides analysis for marketing on specific topics, monitors markets and competitors and analyzes target groups . For sales, it selects B2B target groups, finds similar companies, recognizes buying signals and increases sales success. PR departments can use the tool to manage addresses and forward them to distributors. The program takes the German data protection laws into account.
- Radarly: Radarly is very comprehensive and has analysis options and a customer relationship management system. The tool provides information about your own brand, the competition and customer opinions. It provides market trends and informs about important topics of conversations on the net. It also suggests new influencers, critics and communities for the company.
- Brand watch: The Brand watch tool provides detailed insights into customer opinions on various topics. Brand watch uses intelligent alerts to flag information about new marketing opportunities, anticipated issues and emerging trends that are important to your business. The tool makes it possible to track discussions on the web.
Even More Social Media Monitoring Tools
Other well-known tools (for smaller companies and the self-employed) are:
- Sproutsocial
- tweet deck
- Facebook Insights
- Kissmetrics
- YouTube Insights
- Google trending
- google+
- Advanced Web Rankings
- SEOmoz
- Tweetreach
- Twitalyzer
- Raven Social Media Monitor
- Social Mention
- How sociable
- engag.io
How Can You Find the Right Tool?
There are many different tools that can provide insight into the progress of a campaign. Each individual monitoring tool has its advantages and disadvantages and calculates the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) in its own way. Many of these tools simplify monitoring with graphics, automatic updates, task management, and programmed reports.
There are now numerous offers for social media monitoring tools on the market. In order to use the right tool, it is important to clarify in advance which requirements and goals need to be met. Therefore, in advance of your considerations, determine which data, information and characteristics you want to determine by using the tool. In addition, the social media monitoring tools differ, among other things, according to which networks they are to be used for. You should also take into account the requirements for the dashboard and the form of presentation of the evaluation as part of your considerations. Before starting a campaign, you should try one or the other tool to find out which one will help you best in your daily routine. The costs also play a decisive role.
Tips and Tricks for Social Media Monitoring
Less is More
As so often in life, less is more. It is better to only use one or two channels, but make them really active. Because it doesn’t make a professional impression to link to social media channels that are not moderated.
Improve Quality Through Monitoring
But activity alone is not enough, because here, too, quality is worth more than quantity. In order to deliver the best possible quality, it makes sense to keep an eye on the statistics. For example, the Facebook Insights provide very insightful information and demographic data about the users. If you know your target group very well, you can adapt to them better in the future and create content that is relevant to them.
Monitoring of the Brand Name or Relevant Keywords
It’s important to monitor your brand name and respond accordingly to comments about your product or brand name. Unanswered comments, questions or complaints have a negative impact on a campaign and, in the worst case, can even end in a so-called shitstorm .
A Look at Google Analytics
With Analytics , the mega-corporation Google offers a powerful tool for analyzing the traffic on its own website. This data is also informative for social media channels. With analytics, visitors who come via social networks can be precisely found and tracked. This not only applies to clicked links, but is also possible for links that were typed into the browser because they were embedded in videos, for example. This works with a campaign.
Campaigns are certain masked URLs that provide analytics with information about which link was clicked based on certain parameters. They can be used to mask two links on the same page in the same text that lead to the same target page differently, and in this way to understand which of the two links was clicked with which link text. Based on this data, A/B split tests can also be carried out, which provide information about which links bring more visitors or convert better.
This data can be used to gain a lot of information about the target group in order to improve the quality of the social media channels in the long term and to respond even better to the users.