Social media monitoring should be a top priority on any corporate strategic agenda. This medium of communicating and marketing is surging at an unprecedented rate. What’s more it can be overwhelming if you simply jump in without any filters.
This begs the frustrating question most corporate executive are pondering: What is social media monitoring and why do I need it?
1. Social Networking Platforms - The best place to start understanding how to listen into social media is to understand where all the conversations are coming from. Social networking platforms are simple web-based software tools that fundamentally do two very important things: connect related people and facilitate their communication.
This is the starting point of monitoring social media. You need to identify where your community or customers hang-out. Then you need to put your ear to those places.
2. Social Media Aggregation - Fortunately, for those in the listening business RSS (Really Simple Syndication) has already built the pipes to flow these conversations into a central location or dashboard. RSS a technology built originally to help syndicate blog content is now a default protocol for moving nearing any kind of content from place to place.
In monitoring social networks, RSS is the preferred way to aggregate these channels into software that can sort, analyze, and report.
3. Conversation Sorting - One of the biggest challenges in the social media environment is sorting the signal from the noise. This makes keyword monitoring and sorting a critical element to any social media listening strategy. Keywords are not only your trigger mechanism to identify interesting conversation, but it is also the sorting mechanism to make sense of them.
Using keywords and keyword clusters can make your monitoring much more productive.
4. Keyword Monitoring - Keywords are important elements to identify trigger events and sorting out value. Unfortunately, this is the language of search engines, but not aggregation strategies like RSS. Therefore, you need to do a little work to get this working. Simply aggregating a bunch of sites only amplifies the noise in your monitoring strategy.
The key to monitoring effectively and efficiently is aggregating only the streams and conversations triggered by your keywords.
5. Social Engagement and Reporting - All of this social networking and monitoring is for not if you can’t do something with it. That means engaging in or reporting on social media channels when opportunity or crises arises. Social media monitoring is not a strictly passive pursuit. Getting positive return out of your investment in monitoring comes with efficiently organizing your engagement strategy.
About Bill Rice
