How to Achieve Social Media Monitoring?

 Two-thirds of the world’s Internet users are now on social media. The social networking has evolved not only as a new marketing channel but a perfect platform to listen to the customers and unveil the customer’ unmet needs. As marketers, we need to understand what people are saying about us and our competitors through the platform of social media. This is social media monitoring.  

Social media monitoring is to listen to the conversions online and to understand the sentiments. Marketers might like to consider how many mentions of your brands/campaign have been talked on social media, which would be the metric of volume in social media monitoring; how do people like or unlike it, or how customer perceive your brand against your competitors, which would be the content analysis to determine mentions online as positive or negative sentiment. After understanding how customers talk about your brand, measuring effectiveness, through social media monitoring, marketers could further identify the influencers online and tailor a marketing plan to engage customers. 


In the landscape of monitoring tools, Radian6’s social media monitoring software helps businesses listen, discover, measure and engage in conversations across the social networking. Radian6 tracks most of the social networking, including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, forums, news sites, forums, discussion boards, and video and image sharing sites. Through the interactive dashboard, marketers could have quick overview from the monitoring perspective.

On the other hand, Netbase has the strength of sentiment analysis, which allows markets to measure the social media mentions by its basic sentiment coding of emotions and behaviors. Monitoring through Netbase benefits marketers to answer the why question during social media monitoring, accordingly, marketers could discover consumer insights and innovate products and services. 

Here are some tips of social media monitoring. Understand the objective of social media monitoring. The tool alone won’t help you solve the problem. Marketers should have a clear view of what to achieve through social media monitoring. Secondly, always listen first, in the social networking, a smart marketer always knows the best solution is first give and then take. 

Stella Chang, MS Candidate Medill IMC

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