Social media monitoring: how to implement strategic monitoring on social networks?

Every day, billions of data points flood the web and social media. Businesses and brands can leverage these valuable sources of information to guide their business decisions. In today's fiercely competitive social media marketing landscape, strategic social media monitoring is essential. This article offers some tips for setting up effective social media monitoring to support your business objectives.

What is social media monitoring? 

By definition, social media monitoring consists of monitoring blogs and social networks in a structured way in order to stay informed about the news of a profession, a sector of activity, a technology, the competition in a market (competitive intelligence), its community (reputational monitoring), or even one's own company and the people who work there.

The different types of strategic intelligence

There is not one but several types of strategic monitoring depending on the priorities and needs of the company: reputational monitoring or e-reputation, competitive monitoring, commercial monitoring, trend, technological monitoring, image monitoring…The list is long!

As an example, let's look at the one that a social media agency usually carries out for its clients: e-reputation monitoring.

isreputation management essential for brands that want to develop their image and increase their visibility on social media. Essentially, it involves monitoring everything that followers and subscribers say. But above all, this social media activity aims to limit the negative consequences of poorly managed communication: the infamous "bad buzz."

Having a presence on social media does indeed carry risks of vulnerability. Therefore, implementing reputation monitoring allows for the launch of positive viral campaigns to counter or anticipate these potential negative buzzes.

Who is in charge of strategic monitoring on social media?

Often, within an organization, it is the people working in the digital communications department who handle monitoring. In some cases, there is even a unit specifically dedicated to this activity.

These "monitors," as they are sometimes called, are often experts in social media management. These professionals are skilled at listening for strong and weak signals, detecting trends, and analyzing data. In short, with the help of the numerous tools they use, they are essentially the eyes and ears of a company on social media.

But these strategic intelligence specialists are also tasked with outlining scenarios to adjust a brand's or company's social media strategy . By formulating practical advice, they also help community managers guide their work. That's what we'll look at right now.

What is the purpose of social media monitoring? Some examples

Now that we understand what social media monitoring involves, the right question to ask is what all the collected information is used for in practice.

In general, social media monitoring will help a brand or company make the best decisions to achieve its marketing and commercial objectives.

For example, monitoring work will be used to measure the visibility of a brand within a community at a given time. It can also be used to analyze the impact of marketing campaigns launched around a specific product or service.

Conducting strategic monitoring will also allow a company torefine its knowledge of its target market and discover new market opportunities.

Monitoring the habits of your community and the use of a specific product helps to guide the development of a product or service.

Monitoring social media will also allow you to identify influencers and contact them to establish a partnership.

For content creation, monitoring social media platforms will also generate original content ideas . Researchingnew engagement and interaction techniques is also an important area of ​​focus.

Finally, competitive intelligence will allow us to benchmark competitors and implement strong and rapid actions in areas where they are less strong.

Steps to building effective social media monitoring 

Social media monitoring within an organization is not complicated if the objectives are clearly defined and meet the needs of the brands.

But successful social media monitoring necessarily involves several essential steps :

• Define a monitoring focus: what data interests you? Information, competition, technological advances, or your online reputation?
• set clear and measurable objectives
• Organize the sourcing: list the relevant sources to follow, the data collection, its classification, its storage, its processing
• Use powerful monitoring tools (Hootsuite, Fiddle, Mention) to deliver information via pull (information comes to you) or push (you search for the information) to fuel your monitoring. These social listening tools facilitate the setup of alerts (Google Alerts, Talkwalker, RSS Feed Reader)
• process and disseminate information from collected data in a dynamic dashboard and/or via the regular issuance of reporting files.

Set up your monitoring system with the help of a social media agency

Strategic monitoring on social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok) is an extremely powerful web marketing tool that offers numerous benefits to brands and businesses. In particular, this activity helps them better understand their positioning, their competitors, manage crises, anticipate market trends, facilitate decision-making, and also innovate (R&D).

In short, if we had to summarize what social media monitoring is for a brand or company, we would say that it isa compass that helps to find your way at every moment on social networks.

That's why at So Bang, our social media agency in Paris, we make monitoring a true cornerstone of our collaboration with brands. Each action we implement to support them on social media is therefore tailored to the realities on the ground and current trends.