Social Media Monitoring: Everything You Need to Know

A social media campaign involves countless hours of hard work and a team of people trying to come together and reach the same goals.

But nobody would know if those goals were truly met if not for social media monitoring. It’s yet another time-consuming yet essential process that can reveal key insights into a brand’s social media efforts.

If you’re not sure how to get started monitoring your social media efforts, this guide can help.

Understanding Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is the practice of tracking and analyzing what’s being said about a company, brand, campaign, or any other topic relevant to you.

It’s a different process from monitoring a specific social media campaign, which often involves making sure it has met a specific goal, such as more sales, phone calls, downloads, or other key actions.

Instead, social media monitoring looks beyond a specific campaign and helps brands gain even more insights into how their efforts are paying off. This data can then be used to enhance social media efforts, improve reputation management, and even increase engagement.

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

Having a media intelligence strategy and monitoring activity closely can provide:

1. Better Understanding of Audiences

Social media monitoring can reveal the sentiments and preferences of your customers.

Tapping into this social discourse can reveal how people feel about your brand, whether they display negative or positive emotions towards it, and even the key needs or desires they think you address.

2. Improve Targeting for Future Campaigns

A deeper understanding of your customers means you can better tailor your advertising efforts to their specific wants, needs, and desires.

This could mean higher conversion rates just from small optimizations regarding ad copy or visuals.

3. Spot Emerging Trends

Social media monitoring may also help you notice some changes in your customers’ preferences and adapt to them before they become widespread.

For example, through monitoring, you may notice an increased interest in a specific product. Then, you can double down on promoting this product to a wider audience with special offers or even just prepare inventory to avoid potentially unfulfilled orders (and frustrated would-be buyers).

4. Discover New Actionable Insights

Social media monitoring is yet another way companies can gather essential data to fuel all stages of the marketing funnel.

Data helps your company make better, more effective decisions, as the information uncovered will include several potential new pathways, such as new products or services to offer, changes in customer behaviors, and more.

5. Manage Brand Reputation

Social media tracking may also help you avoid a PR issue or, better yet, leverage a positive change in the customer’s attitude toward your brand.

These efforts can reveal new trends in how customers talk about your services or overall brand, and some tools allow you access to this data in real time. As a result, brands have plenty of time to make essential moves to protect their brand reputation.

Key Elements of Social Media Monitoring

Effective social media monitoring should include:

1. Social mentions: These are posts on social media that reference your brand. They can be posted by customers, influencers, competitors, and more. Knowing what’s being said about your brand helps you determine everything from the strength of your brand to how successful a specific campaign is.

2. Engagement metrics: These are the stats that tell you how your audience interacts with your social media content. You can learn about user behavior as well as which type of content is most effective.

3. Customer sentiment: This metric determines how people feel about your business in general, meaning if they have a positive, negative, or neutral attitude. It again points to how strong your brand is and whether it needs a stronger PR approach.

Social Media Monitoring vs. Social Listening

Social listening requires brands to take another step back and look at the bigger picture.

Through social media monitoring, you’re gathering essential data related to your brand, from mentions to engagement metrics.

In social listening, you’re looking at the industry as a whole to spot emerging trends, analyze your competition, and gain a better understanding of your brand’s placement in the entire industry.

Both can provide key information you can use to improve your future marketing strategies.

Mandala AI’s Social Media Monitoring Tools

Mandala AI takes a slightly different approach from other tools by combining both social media monitoring and social listening features. This helps brands access social media intelligence that empowers them to make better decisions.

Some of the most beneficial tools to assist companies with social media listening include:

1. Ripples
2. Mandala Analytics
3. Mandala Insights

Through these tools, companies can monitor specific campaigns to monitor performance and tap into the wider array of information available to spot emerging trends and even learn more about their competitors.

Other Helpful Tools

In addition to Mandala AI’s advanced social media tools, there are a host of other solutions you may want to consider using, including:

1. Sprout Social provides a comprehensive suite of social media tools, including listening and tracking;

2. Monday.com: helps teams track project processes and enables collaboration between a team to improve social media effort outcomes;

3. Hootsuite facilitates social listening to help companies gain insights into their customers and competitors.

Tracking Analytics and Engagement

Analytics and engagement tracking are the foundation for establishing whether a specific social media campaign or account’s efforts are paying off.

In the context of social monitoring, these key metrics are also essential, as they can reveal a key part of the wider conversion of a brand. Specifically, it reveals how likely customers are to actively engage with your content.

Some key metrics you can follow for social monitoring are:

1. Post reach
2. Post Impressions
3. Number of likes, shares, comments, and other engagement metrics
4. Customer sentiment
5. Direct messages, etc.

Outside of social monitoring, knowing this information enables you to change your social media marketing approach in real-time. But in the broader scope of social intelligence, this data empowers brands to make better decisions for their future, whether it concerns marketing efforts, customer support, or even sales.

Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts

Social media monitoring can yield several benefits, but learning everything about what’s being said around you when it’s too late doesn’t help your bottom line.

It’s why looking for solutions that can help you access this data in real time is so crucial. For example, if one of the benefits of social media monitoring is avoiding a PR scandal, then managers and team members should have access to present social information to spot an emerging issue and adequately prepare.

Of course, social media managers or team members cannot always refresh their dashboards to see emerging trends and issues to focus on. Instead, they can set up alerts and receive notifications when a specific topic pops up in social discourse.

Social Media Monitoring Made Easy With Mandala AI

Social media monitoring is an essential task on a manager’s to-do list. It’s part of a wider approach to finally leveraging key data to make more effective decisions at all levels of a strategy.

Without monitoring, brands may be in the dark regarding what consumers think, emerging new trends, and even the boiling PR issues that lie ahead.

Mandala AI strives to make social media monitoring simpler for companies of all sizes. Our suite leverages AI technology to help brands gather key insights in real time.

Get started with social media monitoring by signing up for a free account today, or choose one of our paid plans to get full access.