Start free trial Share this post Facebook Monitoring: Guide, Tools, Best Practices Home Blog Social listening Social listening tools Facebook Monitoring: Guide, Tools, Best Practices Updated on November 7th 2024 Amie Redwood | 13 min read By now, most businesses understand the power of Facebook. It’s the world’s largest social media platform, hosting over 3 billion active monthly users. In many ways, Facebook can be seen as the world’s biggest focus group, offering a direct link to your target audience. But what, if anything, are people saying about your brand? Answering this question is key to building your brand image, making Facebook monitoring an essential source of information. With that in mind, let’s explore how to track your Facebook metrics effectively and how to use them. What is Facebook monitoring? Source In simple terms, Facebook monitoring tracks your ‘brand mentions’. This is when a Facebook user refers to your business in a post on their profile, in a group, or on a page. Brand mentions should increase with each successful campaign you run, but just having an online presence isn’t enough. Customers need to feel positive about your brand and excited to share it with other Facebook users. A key part of Facebook monitoring is sentiment analysis, which determines whether brand mentions are ‘positive’, ‘neutral’, or ‘negative’. This technique monitors all customer communications, from emails to call logs. Regular monitoring ensures that you’re building a presence on Facebook and that your social media strategy approach is helping to build a loyal audience. Of course, Facebook monitoring doesn’t just apply to your brand. You can also monitor mentions of other brands to learn more about your competitors. This can provide various insights to help steer your tactics and help you appeal more to your target market. Why should you monitor Facebook? Many brands use social media monitoring, but why should you focus on this tactic? Below, we’ve listed some of the top reasons for tracking your Facebook mentions. Track your brand’s success If your brand is succeeding, people will be talking about you. This doesn’t just apply to responses to your posts. If customers feel strongly enough, they’ll speak of you of their own accord. They might post reviews or pictures of your products or recommend your items to their friends. Facebook monitoring is the simplest way to gauge whether your business’s tactics are making a splash. When combined with your Facebook page analytics, it can even help refine your Facebook marketing strategy. For example, you launch a marketing campaign focusing on users utilizing a specific hashtag. Following the campaign, your mentions shot up. However, a separate campaign using a different hashtag made much less of an impact. Thanks to Facebook monitoring, you know how to use your successful campaign as a blueprint for the future and which types of marketing to avoid. Boost audience understanding Source Knowing your audience is key to the success of every organization. Modern businesses are expected to know their customers inside out, and while traditional focus groups and market research are great, using a data-driven approach lets you tap into a wealth of data based on how people interact with your brand. These user interactions reveal a great deal of information about your target audience. Who is sharing your content? What are their age ranges and demographics? What Facebook groups do they frequent? What other types of content do they tend to share? Greater audience understanding doesn’t just boost your success on Facebook. It helps you create personalized content across different social media platforms, allowing you to tailor engaging content likely to resonate with users on a particular platform. Improve your image Source Facebook monitoring is an excellent way to learn what customers say about your brand and spot customer frustrations. While it is tempting to avoid this form of feedback, unfavorable reviews, negative comments, and reposts of negative press can help you understand customer pain points. Instead of brushing these complaints under the rug, it’s far better to act on them. By making continuous improvements, prove to customers that their voices are being heard. This should reduce negative sentiment and increase customer loyalty. Understand your competitors Facebook data can also be a helpful window into what your competitors are doing right (and what they’re doing poorly). Perhaps a specific aspect of a competitor’s product is receiving negative feedback. You can use this to your advantage by improving your offering to stand out, potentially encouraging disgruntled customers to try your brand instead of the competition. Monitoring competitors can also help you understand the type of posts that create the greatest boost in engagement. Analyzing the content that other brands successfully use to appeal to their audience can help steer your content strategy. Remember, however, that just because something works for a competitor, it doesn’t necessarily work for you. Best practices for Facebook monitoring Facebook monitoring can be valuable for the reasons we’ve explored above. But what are the best ways to monitor sentiment on social media? Below, we’ve listed some useful best practices in creating your Facebook monitoring strategy. Set goals and establish metrics Your first aim should be to determine how monitoring can help your business. What insights do you need to achieve growth? Your goal might be to develop better products, improve social media outreach, or boost customer loyalty. Whatever your aim, it’s crucial to establish your goals before attempting your social media strategy. This way, you have a clear target to work towards when gathering data. Once your goal has been determined, it’s time to choose a set of brand awareness metrics to monitor your progress. These will vary depending on your objectives. We’ve listed some examples below. Share of voice (SoV) – Measures your brand’s authority against competitors. This is a key metric to improve your standing in your industry. Mentions – Tracks how regularly your brand is mentioned online. A successful marketing strategy should bring steady improvement in this area. Customer reviews – Monitors the number of reviews customers post about your product or service. Brands with more awareness tend to generate higher levels of reviews. Sentiment score – Measures whether, on average, customers think positively or negatively about your brand. Tracking this metric is crucial for improving brand loyalty. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) – Tracks customer opinion on specific products or services. This metric can help you to determine which products are most popular with customers. Track brand-adjacent terms There’s a high chance that customers will post about your brand on Facebook. But remember, the goal is to pull in new shoppers, too. Non-followers likely won’t mention your brand by name, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t interested. To gain new customers, you need to understand what these customers are saying. For that, you’ll need to track ‘brand-adjacent terms’. These are terms that relate to your product or industry. For example, let’s imagine that you sell tech products. You might notice that many users use the term ‘laptop bags’ in their posts. Tracking brand-adjacent terms allows you to monitor certain groups of relevant users in more detail. With more targeted marketing, you can tailor your offering to these users. Identify influencers Source Influencer marketing has become a primary marketing tactic for many businesses – so much so that the influencer marketing industry is set to grow to approximately $21.1 billion in 2023. This form of marketing could represent a big opportunity for your business. A key part of this strategy is finding the right influencer. Your Facebook monitoring strategy should focus on analyzing influencers. Monitoring can help you produce a list of relevant influencers for your industry or product. Once you have compiled this list, you can begin networking and building relationships with content creators. To collaborate effectively with influencers worldwide, you’ll need software that facilitates smooth long-distance calls, such as making it easy to call France from the US. A strong working relationship with influencers, wherever they’re based, can mean more effective and authentic marketing. Track pages and groups Facebook pages and groups are often viewed interchangeably, but there are clear differences between the two. Pages are generally used to spread business information such as opening hours, upcoming product releases, or sales. A Facebook group, on the other hand, focuses on community. Users join groups to engage with content and socialize with people with similar interests. Both are key ingredients in every social media tracking strategy. Tracking your business or a competitor’s Facebook page can reveal many useful insights. How do people respond to new products or other business news? What demographic is most engaged with your posts? Groups allow you to tap into a more general audience. You can join groups related to your industry or niche and learn more about your target market. Your business might also create its group and grow a community. Monitor posting times ‘When should I post on social media?’ is a question businesses constantly try to answer. What’s more, the answer can change depending on your audience and platform. If you get posting times wrong, your content won’t get the attention it deserves from your target audience. Facebook monitoring can help you find the optimum times for publishing new Facebook posts. Make sure to track engagement metrics on every post and compare performance. For example, you might track: Views – How many hits are posts receiving? Likes and comments – Are high volumes of users engaging with a post? Returning users – Do the same users regularly like your posts? Building an active following is key for maximum engagement. Best tools for Facebook monitoring We’ve shared some of our best tips for Facebook monitoring, but you’ll need the right social media monitoring tools to put them into practice. Let’s explore some essential tools for every monitoring strategy. Facebook inbuilt tools Facebook offers a host of free tools that can help with your monitoring tactics. Let’s examine these in more detail. Facebook Business Suite This tool centralizes various Meta channels, including Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram. From here, you can monitor comments, messages, and other activity. It also acts as a social media management tool, enabling you to schedule posts across different channels. Facebook Business Suite is compatible with various application integrations and can be linked with your CRM for greater access to customer data. Ads Manager Ads manager acts as a hub for all your Facebook marketing activities. From here, you can create and monitor Facebook marketing campaigns in real-time. Ads Manager also allows you to access a range of metrics and track audience engagement. You can also use this data as a guide to help alter running ads – you might edit the copy or change ad placement in response to data. Creator Studio This tool monitors the performance of individual pieces of Facebook content. Creator Studio can provide Facebook analytics data for user retention and follower activity. It’s a useful tool for tracking your Facebook metrics and optimizing your page’s performance. Social media monitoring tools Alongside Facebook’s built-in tools, several external Facebook monitoring tools are available. Mention Mention is a social listening tool that tracks over 1 billion sources daily, including Facebook. With Mention, you can track Facebook mentions, monitor any public business page and all the comments and posts from that page. If a post contains the text you monitor in your alerts, it can be included! When you link your personal Facebook business page to Mention via Account Settings, you can interact with the posts that appear in your Mention feed by leaving comments on the original post, responding to a comment, or giving the post a “like”! Want to give it a try? Start your 14-day free trial. Or book a demo. Influencer management tools Influencer management tools can provide you with unique insights into potential influencers. They can analyze key areas such as relevance and engagement levels to find the best influencer partners for your brand. They’ll also assess influencer performance during campaigns to ensure a successful long-term match. Start to monitor Facebook now! Source Caption: Number of daily active Facebook users worldwide as of 4th quarter 2023 (in millions) Facebook’s continuous growth means its relevance isn’t going away anytime soon. With so many active users, there are fewer better ways of gaining a window into your audience than Facebook monitoring. Here, we’ve explored some essential tools, guides, and best practices for setting up and managing your Facebook monitoring strategy. Always set a clear goal and choose metrics to monitor your success. Remember, tracking pages and groups is the best way of getting in-depth insights. By following our tips, you’ll be sure to craft a successful Facebook monitoring strategy. So, get to work! If you want to make it easy to monitor Facebook, try Mention! Amie Redwood Content Marketing Consultant @RingCentral