Creating Your Media Monitoring Strategy
If social media is part of your marketing strategy, then it makes sense that social media monitoring should be as well. What is social media monitoring? It’s the process of tracking brand mentions, industry news, competitors’ actions, customer opinions, and much more. Social media monitoring gives you insight as to whether or not your marketing efforts are paying off. It identifies opportunities, leverage press and mitigates problems. Sounds good, right? The first step to monitoring social media is to create your strategy. Here are some things to consider.
1. What Are Your Objectives for Social Media Monitoring?
What do you want to accomplish with your social media monitoring? What marketing goals will media monitoring help you achieve? There are certainly a wide variety of potential goals including: engagement, mentions, sales, and customer perception.
2. What Are You Going to Monitor?
There are a number of different metrics you can monitor with your social listening strategy. They include:
- Your brand name and handles
- Your product name(s), including common misspellings
- Your competitors’ brand names, product names, and handles (including common misspellings)
- Industry buzzwords and trending topics
- Your slogan
- Your competitors’ slogans
- Names of key people in your company and your competitors’ companies (your CEO, spokesperson, etc.)
- Campaign names or keywords
- Your branded hashtags
- Your competitors branded hashtags
- Unbranded hashtags related to your industry
- Audience engagement, location identifiers for those who engage often. (Where is your audience coming from?)
3. Who is Going to Monitor Your Social Channels?
Along with this decision, you’ll also want to identify the social channels you’re going to monitor. Presumably, it would be all of the channels you’re active on. However, you may decide to add some channels you’re not active on just to see what, if anything, is happening related to your industry on that channel. You might choose not to include some channels if you have time or financial constraints.
This brings us back to who is going to monitor your social media. You can outsource it – there are both freelancers and agencies that provide this service. You can also leverage tools like Hootsuite and perform the task internally.
Finally, you’ll want to decide what action you’ll take with the information you gain from social media monitoring and who will take that action.
For example: You may want someone to respond to all brand mentions online and task a different person or department with monitoring industry trends and customer sentiment. Media monitoring has become an important part of marketing strategy. If you’re active on social, then it’s vital that you’re paying attention to what people are saying online, how they’re engaging, and what they think about you. Create your social media monitoring strategy today.
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