Making social media monitoring a success!

#socialmedia #monitoring #networks

     Monitoring is a continuous surveillance activity of your environment in an information overload context. Through social media monitoring, you can track, gather and mine the information and data of your target audience as to assess your reputation and discern how you are perceived online. But be careful, monitoring is not spying and is also different from research activity. Indeed, when you are making researches, you are looking for published information in the past. It is useful for sourcing, benchmark, etc. When you are monitoring, you want to receive automatically future information. You can monitor social networks, of course, but also forums, blogs, news site, review sites, RSS feeds and so on.

Why is it important to monitor your social media?

- To follow your reputation online

- To follow the activity of your competitors (competition monitoring), of your prospects, of your customers, or even your partners.

- To follow the trending topics from your activity (sectoral monitoring)

- To follow the evolution of the digital tools, their functions (technological monitoring)

- It can also be content for your social networks, especially as an upcoming startup

Monitoring is a continuous process:

Can you imagine that, “every 2 days, we create as much information as we did up to 2003” (Schmidt, 2010). It is a good news as it means that you can almost find everything on the web. It is a diversification stake for the sources and the information flux.

However, it is also a bad news as finding everything also means that you need to validate your sources and to filter the information.

Step 1: needs analysis and sourcing: know how to lose time in the first place to earn it after

• Define the goals: why you want to monitor?

• Define the monitoring axes thanks to those various questions:

- Who: who is concerned? Who are the stakeholders of this subject?

- What: what is the semantic field of this subject? (synonyms, antonyms, expressions, english terms, etc)

- Where: does it exist websites, media, blogs, influencers we can rely on?

- When: is my subject trendy? When do people most talk about it? Is it a new subject?

- How: how can we decline this subject? Do they already exist solutions to that problem? If yes, do we have to experience feedbacks?

     All of those elements can be gathered into a mind map with tools like mindmeister, for instance. It is a good tool to represent your researches, synthetize them, and not to be lost at the end of this first step. We truly advice you always to think about how to make your results visual.

Step 2: collect and filter your information (CAPTURE)

     You now can collect the data from the right sources and also filter the relevant information you are collecting by using monitoring tools. Usually, they are crawling sites continuously and indexing them in real time (you never miss a thing), every 10 minutes or weekly. You might want to know how does it work? Well, it is very simple.

     You write a query to find the mentions you are interested in (“startup” for instance). The tools aim at showing you the worth looking data and are, therefore, more relevant than a basic google search. We have chosen to tell you about some of the relevant tools you can use as upcoming startuper:

• Hootsuite covers multiples social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Wordpress or Google+. It is a very simple tool to use and also one of the best free social media listening tools available. It is also useful when you are more than one person handling the social media accounts.

• TweetReach can help you to check how far your tweets travel. As an upcoming startuper, it can be very useful as it measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions. Thanks to that, you can find who your most influential followers are and also who you should be targeting when you want to share and promote online content.

• Facebook analytics helps you to measure the engagement of your target audience, the way they interact on your Facebook page and how your ad campaigns work.

• Google Alerts is a tool to monitor the research on Google through keywords. The results of the alert are sent to you via e-mail or RSS flux.

Step 3: storage and analysis (UNDERSTAND)

     Now you know how to collect your data, you need to store it as to understand it properly. It exists tools like Scoop it to do so. It is very handy to use. Then, to understand your social media analytics, you have to access the data and explore it using tables and graphics. This enables you to determine the quality of the data collected and describe the results after. It is considered as the hardest part but also the most interesting one.

Step 4: diffusion of the information collected (PRESENT)

     You can now decide spread the information collected just to your colleagues, but also on your own social networks. You need, first, to make them visual and easy to read to show that it is not just information shared: you worked on those data and you now have to show why they are relevant for you and your target audience. We advise you to diffuse on Twitter, Linkedin or Facebook. But you have to be careful as the publishing approach is different depending on the social network concerned. On Twitter, for example, you really need to be brief. To gain time spreading your monitoring, you can use Buffer: it is a tool which helps you to plan the content found and spread the results of your monitoring. You just need to think about the hours you publish: always chose to put minutes and not “exact” hours. Otherwise, people can feel that it is automatic posts.

    You now have the practical keys to make your social media monitoring a success. If you want to have a more theoretical perspective of how you can analyse your networks, just follow this link to our chapter 2 of our ebook: https://jacobkrommenhoek.wixsite.com/groupsite/copie-de-the-network-society-1



Morgane Casset