Social Media Monitoring: Guide, Best Practices and Tools

An active presence on major social media channels is the key to generating online traction and engaging the right audience.

Social media allows you to reach out to over 5.04 billion users around the globe and convey your message to an audience profile that resonates with your goals.

People leverage social media to learn about their preferred brands and explore the solutions they offer. They also use different platforms to seek answers to their questions and access helpful information to make intelligent buying decisions.

So, being active on relevant social media platforms can help you connect with your target audience and generate awareness about your brand.

In this guide, we will discuss social media monitoring benefits and best practices and recommend tools that may help you easily access the required information from relevant platforms. Let’s get started.

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Let’s start by learning about social media monitoring and exploring its significance for growing businesses.

Social media monitoring is gathering relevant insights from social media platforms. These insights may encompass your campaign performance, the latest trends, audience sentiment, and customer feedback.

Social media monitoring lets you track relevant conversations about your brand, competitors, or industry and access useful insights. It enables you to identify areas for improvement and gives you access to valuable data that you can use to cultivate high engagement.

Social media monitoring makes it easier to manage your reputation online and establish a strong bond with your target audience.

You can easily identify market gaps and discover new opportunities to outmaneuver your competition and grow your business.

Through social media monitoring, you can stay up-to-date with your target audience’s changing needs or preferences and tailor your solutions accordingly. It helps you ensure continuous improvement and be better than you were before.

Social Media Monitoring Benefits

There are several benefits associated with social media monitoring. The following are a few noteworthy ones:.

Engagement

Social monitoring gets you acquainted with the interests and preferences of your audience.

Since you become familiar with the changing interests of the intended audience, it becomes easier to boost social media engagement by leveraging relevant platforms.

You can personalize your messages and share content on topics that appeal to your current and potential customers.

It helps you generate more traction compared to your competitors and acknowledge an enhanced online presence.

Reputation Management

Social media monitoring helps you manage your reputation online and maintain a positive image of your brand.

By tracking your brand mentions, you can easily assess the sentiment of your target audience and take measures accordingly.

Not everyone says positive things about you. People may also share negative experiences associated with your brand.

The best action is to make things right with them and regain their trust. If left unchecked, your audience’s negative sentiment may devastate your reputation and lead to potential social media crises.

It may severely affect your ability as a brand to capture quality leads and retain your existing customers.

Enhanced Audience Segmentation

Social media monitoring enables you to create diverse audience profiles based on demographic and psychographic characteristics.

People openly talk about their expectations from brands and experiences from past purchases on social media platforms.

These insights facilitate efficient audience segmentation and help you devise highly effective targeting strategies.

Competitor Analysis

Social media monitoring makes it possible for you to keep an eye on the performance of your competitors and draw inspiration from their winning strategies.

By analyzing how your competitors operate, you can outmaneuver them by devising better strategies.

Furthermore, you can learn from your competitors’ mistakes and continue offering seamless experiences to your audience.

You learn what’s working and what’s not, saving you a lot of time and effort in testing different strategies.

Growth Opportunities

Social media monitoring facilitates monitoring industry trends and gathering useful data to scale operations. These insights help you explore market gaps, adjust your social media campaigns, and identify new growth opportunities.

The process lets you uncover exploding topics, which help you anticipate the demand for certain products or services.

With this data, you can master the art of pivoting and devise solutions that meet the expectations of your target audience. This will make it easier for you to hack growth and unlock new revenue streams.

Easy Collaboration

Collaborating with influencers, celebrities, and content creators is an effective method of expanding your social media presence and interacting with the right audience.

However, identifying the prospects that align with your brand’s values may not be as easy as it sounds.

When you collaborate with someone, your reputation is at stake. So, you wouldn’t want to join hands with someone who doesn’t believe in your values.

Social media monitoring helps you identify the right people and boost awareness about your brand by collaborating with them.

Efficient Customer Service

Social media monitoring streamlines your process of offering a seamless customer service experience.

It enables you to uncover the pain points of your audience and issues reported by your customers.

You can discover what people have been saying about your solutions and act upon their feedback. The process helps you establish a strong bond with your target and acknowledge customer loyalty.

Social Media Monitoring Best Practices

Now that we’ve talked about the benefits of social media monitoring, let’s explore the best practices that you may want to consider.

Set Clear Goals

Social media monitoring is an intricate process. It requires you to monitor your activities on all relevant platforms where you have an active presence.

Each platform may facilitate your access to a variety of useful insights. Without knowing exactly what you need, you may end up overwhelming yourself.

Hence, you need to set clear goals before initiating the monitoring process and identify the right metrics that align with those goals.

It will maximize your efficiency and enable you to track things effortlessly. Plus, it helps you select the right social media monitoring tools that may facilitate the process.

Choose the Right Platforms

It’s essential to have a multichannel presence in your social media strategy to engage your target audience. Still, it’s not viable to be active on all social media platforms.

It’s important to identify the platforms that your audience prefers to get optimal results from your social media initiatives and campaigns.

Being active on all leading social media platforms may be overwhelming, let alone monitoring your performance and accessing relevant insights. Hence, you should only monitor social media platforms that align with your goals.

Identify Relevant Keywords

It’s important to create a list of keywords that you should use to collect relevant information through social media monitoring.

These keywords may comprise your brand name, product line, competing brands, the latest trends, industry-specific terms, your audience’s interests or queries, and so on.

These keywords will help you weed out unnecessary details and focus on the information that’s useful to you.

You should revise the list of keywords periodically to keep up with the changing dynamics of your respective industry and audience preferences.

Track Brand Mentions

Tracking your brand mentions enables you to access useful insights through social media monitoring.

It paves the way for you to be familiar with your audience’s sentiments and see how people perceive you as a brand.

By tracking your brand mentions, you can discover your customers’ positive and negative experiences.

You can easily explore the reviews your customers share online and cater to the pain points of the intended audience.

Not only does it help you make things right with your unhappy customers, but it also allows you to leverage social proof and capitalize on the positive experiences shared by your audience.

Interact With Your Audience

Social media monitoring doesn’t mean you have to act as a silent spectator. You shouldn’t miss an opportunity to interact with your audience and strengthen your bond.

When someone shares positive experiences with the solutions you offer, thank them for their kind words and let them know that you cherish them.

When someone posts negative feedback, don’t throw it under the rug. Addressing negative feedback is essential for effective customer relationship management. Inquire about their experiences.

Even if someone mentions your brand in a thread, consider it an opportunity to interact with your audience and ensure effective communication.

Learn from Your Competitors

Monitoring social media channels and observing your competitors’ tactics can help you develop efficient growth strategies.

Your competitors can help you identify new audience segments and discover effective ways to engage them.

Furthermore, you can learn from their mistakes without facing the consequences and constantly refine your strategies.

Furthermore, it’s best to check how your social media strategies perform compared to your competition.

Explore Market Dynamics

You should leverage social media platforms to keep up with the market dynamics and access relevant information about your respective industry.

The insights will help you pivot and tailor your strategies to your audience’s changing preferences and track trends.

Exploring market dynamics ensures continuous improvement and enables you to offer an enhanced customer experience.

Knowing exactly what your audience wants makes it easier to cultivate loyalty by meeting their expectations.

Leverage Social Media Monitoring Tools

Managing social media monitoring efforts isn’t as easy as it seems, especially when active on multiple platforms.

All leading social media platforms have built-in analytics capabilities. However, they generally use standard metrics to assess your performance.

Not all of their indicators may align with your goals. Plus, for advanced-level insights, you may have to perform manual calculations to access useful data. Even tracking your brand mentions may be troublesome.

This is where social media monitoring tools come in handy. They enable you to access all relevant insights that you need to assess your performance.

The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social media monitoring tools make tracking your performance on relevant platforms easy to access useful insights.

However, choosing a suitable social media monitoring solution may be challenging, as there are a variety of options available.

That’s why we have compiled a list of the best social media monitoring tools on the market.

Mention

Mention is one of the best social media monitoring tools to help you effortlessly access relevant insights and track your performance on leading social media platforms.

The tool makes it easier to gather useful data by analyzing 1 billion sources daily and monitoring the latest trends.

It enables you to receive real-time notifications for specified branded and custom keywords, as well as relevant topics and queries.

The tool easily tracks brand mentions and reviews of your audience’s sentiment, simplifying reputation management.

Mention helps you track negative feedback and make things right with unhappy customers. It can also locate the positive reviews shared by your target audience and fuel your social proof.

With Mention, you can access advanced insights and track key metrics that align with your goals. The data helps you make informed decisions and better connect with your audience.

Start your free trial! Or book a demo.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another viable social media monitoring tool that comes with social listening capabilities and allows you to easily monitor your social media performance on various social media platforms.

Hootsuite also comes with a social media advertising dashboard for easily tracking the performance of your campaigns on relevant channels.

You can easily manage all your social media accounts through a single dashboard and set access permissions for your team.

The tool allows you to leverage AI to design your content calendar and recommends an ideal time to schedule your posts.

Sprout Social

With Sprout Social, you can easily track brand mentions and access useful information from different social media platforms.

You can track the performance of your campaigns, identify room for improvement, and make the necessary changes.

The tool helps you monitor engagement on relevant threads and assess how your target audience interacts with your brand.

Although Sprout Social is originally a social media management tool, it also has social listening capabilities, helping you to learn the interests and preferences of the intended audience.

With advanced and customizable reporting tools, you can track relevant metrics and consistently improve your performance.

Agorapulse

With Agorapulse, you can streamline social media monitoring for different platforms without having to consider different solutions.

It’s a one-stop social media tracker with advanced monitoring and social listening capabilities.

Agorapulse helps you track audience engagement and keep an eye on your brand mentions.

The tool facilitates access to actionable insights and helps you devise data-driven strategies.

Not only can you stay up-to-date with the latest trends but also with your audience’s expectations of you as their preferred brand.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is one of the social media listening tools you should consider if you want to access useful information.

The tool helps you track the performance of your social media strategies and assess audience sentiment.

You can also keep an eye on your competitors’ performance and effortlessly monitor your brand’s share of voice.

The tool enables you to set automatic alerts, making it easier to explore brand mentions, the latest trends, and popular topics.

You can easily measure the effectiveness of your social media campaign and access useful data to devise high-performing strategies.

Over to You

Social media monitoring helps you understand your audience, familiarize yourself with competitors’ tactics, track engagement, manage your online reputation, and identify new growth opportunities.

Now that you know the main benefits, the best practices to make the most out of social media monitoring, and the tools you can use to start monitoring, it’s time to put this information into practice!

If you want to discover how Mention can help you monitor the web and social media, check it out here.