Social Media Monitoring for Marketing Professionals

Always listen to social media channels

There has been a lot of buzz around social media monitoring in the last year or so. If you don’t know, social media monitoring is technology (software) that tracks “conversations” in the social media channel and formats the data, in dashboard form, similar to Google Analytics. The software “listens” to most public posts on blogs, discussion forums, video (YouTube), photo sharing sites, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The challenge, is how to make the data actionable for marketers.

Why monitor?
We (I work for an advertising agency) encourage businesses, almost without exception, to listen to relevant conversations in the social media channel before beginning any social media engagement. Why? Your business will profit by understanding existing conversations about your company/brand, relevant marketplace issues/needs, and what target audiences are saying about your competitors. This information will also help you develop needs-based marketing communications (both offline and online), communicate the benefits of your products/services (relevant to your competitors) and establish your company as an all-important thought leader.

Business Cases for Social Monitoring
It is not uncommon to hear, “Sounds great, but how is it going to impact my business and create a good ROI?”

As others have said before me, think of social media as the world’s largest real-time focus group. Almost without exception, the information we have found for our clients has been exceptionable and very actionable. I think the following business cases can be made for both B2C and B2B marketers.

• Retention
• Lead/Sales Acquisition
• Corporate Reputation Management
• Customer Service/CRM
• Competitive Intelligence
• Much more

Free vs. Paid Social Monitoring Tools
Social media monitoring tools run the gamete from free, to thousands of dollars per month. As far as free social monitoring tools, there are literally hundreds out there. I recommend doing a few Google searches and find the ones that best fit your needs. In general, my top free social search sites are Technorati.com (blogs), Delicious.com and Google Social Search. Google Alerts can also come in handy.

There are also plenty of social monitoring/analytic companies that charge a (monthly) fee.  Social monitoring software vendors usually offer web-based services that can range from Google Analytic style dashboards with no support, to enterprise-level solutions with in-house analysis to help interpret the data.  The average fees range from $100/mo to $10,000/mo+.  Keep in mind, these tools can take significant time and resources to implement and manage (like CRM), but the ROI can be significant.

In future posts, I will go into more detail on the technology and marketing/business applications of social media monitoring and social media topics in general. I will also try to incorporate more visuals.  Thanks!

Chris Kovac
@chriskovac