Twitter has become the ultimate media syndication and distribution platform on the Web. That means one very important thing to you and your business: If you are interested in Social Media Monitoring–it may be the only tool you ever need.
Social Media is and Ecosystem
Fundamentally social media is an ecosystem, an evolving connectivity of people and messages. This makes it not only a rich environment for discussing ideas and concepts, but also a great place to sit and listen. The challenge is that these conversation and people naturally move, pause, and accelerate–making them hard to track.
Social Networks are Hard to Track
Simply following people or searching keywords on social networks is a very cumbersome way to monitor social media. There are so many and most have unique interfaces and nuances. Trying to track your relevant topics would be nearly impossible.
New Social Media is Added Daily
What makes this approach even more impossible is the rate at which new social networks are being added–hundreds daily. This makes it natural to look for a social media platform that is ubiquitous enough to bring in references or aggregate these various social networks. Twitter is the natural selection, one of the top social networks and easily the simplest online messaging network.
Relevance Needs a Measurement
The next challenge is determining relevance. What is important and significant to your monitoring objectives. The first obvious measurement is its presence in your keyword searches. However, Twitter gives you indications beyond simple presence. Using Twitter to monitor social media you get the additional benefit of observing significance and relevance through retweets and trending topics.
Twitter Helps Solve the Social Media Monitoring Problem
Twitter really is the solution to many of the challenges of efficient social media monitoring. First, it is truly an ecosystem–a living and morphing network of website, applications, networks, and people. This makes it very hard to track and monitor everything that may be relevant. Second, even if we could track its changes there are new nodes established everyday. This makes it nearly impossible to add and monitor social media in any effective way. Finally, gauging relevance needs some form of measurement, which is difficult without some feedback.
Fortunately the community and Twitter’s facilitation of that community’s behavior helps. Twitter users like to share (on Twitter) and add meta-data to new things they find, in Twitter and in new social media venues. And the simple frequency and trending of topics on Twitter can point you to significance and relevance.
So, maybe Twitter is the only social media monitoring tool you ever need.
