Social Media Monitoring for Your Company’s Online “Health”

What’s worse than no online chatter about you or your company? That’s easy: when the chatter is all about your competitors. Ultimately, both are bad. The former means you might be irrelevant. The latter means your competitors are eating your lunch.

Whatever your situation, you need to start monitoring social media, and you need to do it now. I’ll walk you through the why, the when, and a few tools to consider.

Monitoring social media informs strategy

Social media monitoring is a “listening” practice that gives you insight into what is being said online about you, your competitors, or your industry. This practice is becoming increasingly important because the talkers out there are shaping the readers’ opinions. If they’re talking about topics you care about, it’s very likely that these groups are your customers, and the pressure is mounting to keep up with their needs. Regular monitoring gives you the information to respond and interact with these influencers in a timely manner. Once you have a handle on what is being said, you can develop a highly targeted social media strategy that takes you directly to the places your customers are gathering online.

Nightmare scenario

Picture this: You’re a VP of sales. One of your top distributors has called to say her customer saw a discussion that positioned your company as cruel and uncaring. That customer is threatening to stop doing business with your distributor. It is at that moment when knowing what is being said about you online spells the difference between losing income and protecting it. If your competitors aren’t already out there trying to chat up your customers, they soon will be. Online, you can be right there pacing them blow for blow.

Proactive response

When you employ social media monitoring, you become aware of where conversations are happening and what is being said. With this knowledge, you are able to develop and implement relevant responses, direct the responses toward the most impactful channels, and evaluate the results of your efforts. For one of our clients who undertakes daily monitoring, our team regularly identifies something as small as a tweet that deserves a response from the company. In the next day’s monitoring, we see exactly how a 140-character post can cause a ripple effect through Twitter, blogs and other channels frequented by the targeted audience.

I strongly encourage you to plan how you’ll measure the results of your actions before you execute on them – how else can you tell if you’ve succeeded? Measurement might be as simple as questions asked and answers given, or growing numbers of followers for your Twitter account or Facebook fan page.

Okay, but no one is talking about me. What now?

The fact that no one is talking about you is an opportunity to act just waiting in the wings, and social media monitoring can help. But before you jump into the deep end and start tweeting, commenting, making videos, or performing some other activity, it’s important to know who is saying what. Social media monitoring can help you identify who the influencers are and where they are conversing. So equipped, you can determine how best to proceed with a proper social media plan that might include a simple tactic such as commenting on external blogs of interest.

What tools can I use for social media monitoring?

Good news: There are plenty of free and paid tools to choose from. They all net similar results, but the paid tools will save you a tremendous amount of time.

Some examples of free search tools are Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com), forum search tool OMGili (www.omgili.com), and Twitter Search (www.search.twitter.com). Depending on the size of your organization, industry, and online audience, using free tools to compile a comprehensive social media monitoring report requires running them all and harvesting their results in a single session that can take anywhere from 30 minutes to several hours. Even after you’ve harvested the results, you’ll have to compile and evaluate them using metrics tools in order to determine how influential a blog or Twitter user is.

The paid tools trawl all of the sources (and some additional sites) of the free services, and give the results to you in one place. Each paid tool is different, and the companies behind these tools are constantly updating and tweaking their programs.

I have yet to find the perfect paid tool, but each one can benefit a company in its own way. CMD has chosen to use Radian6 as the backbone behind our social media monitoring program. Radian6 has great reach, and the interface is intuitive and easy to use. We have tested many paid tools, but none seem to come as close to the total package as Radian6. There are tools that use an algorithm to determine whether a blog post is positive, negative or neutral, but these automated programs still seem to have kinks and can’t quite pick up on linguistic nuances, such as sarcasm.

In the end, regardless of the tools you choose, your results will only be as good as your strategies, which will in turn only be as good as your information.