Social Media Monitoring - Listening to Your Audience

chillibreeze writer — Madhuri Yelamanchili

Social media is a vast network of posts, comments, conversations and viral spread with millions of visitors posting positive, negative and expert opinions. LinkedIn with over 100 million members , Facebook – over 500 million , Twitter – over 200 million accounts are some of the high profile platforms, but they are just a tip of the social media iceberg. Blogs, forums, discussion groups, video platforms like YouTube, industry-specific sites and more add up to millions more posts, impacting company image, what people purchase and where they work.

Why Monitor Social Media
Customers are posting their experience with products and services, potential customers are seeking purchase advice and employees are commenting about their work place. Competitor moves, industry trends, media and investor information are visible over social media. Through this wide range of information, unmet customer needs are discovered while shifts in landscape, emerging trends and crises are identified for companies to act upon.

With people blogging, commenting, tweeting and entering into discussions, social media offers companies multiple opportunities to engage their audience, showcase thought leadership, enhance products, services and customer experience while building corporate and product image. All this requires a sustained and dynamic social media strategy. Social media monitoring or listening is the first step to building this strategy in addition to enabling companies to take offline action based on the social media insights it offers.

Monitoring Social Media
With the millions of mentions over the web and with new sites and forums emerging each day, social media monitoring is a mammoth task. Monitoring tools like Radian6, Trackur, SM2 and more are available to capture the vast amount of data, eliminate irrelevant content to pare it down to a few thousand highly relevant posts and perform analytics, offering actionable insights. Companies can use these monitoring tools, many of which are available as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) in pay-per-license format, or outsource monitoring to an external media or ad agency which uses a combination of automated tools and manual intervention to bring accurate results.
Whether using a tool or outsourcing to an agency, effective social media monitoring takes 3 steps to achieve actionable insights:

1. Setting the Objective
Social media monitoring involves gathering all the available data based on keywords. Identifying the relevant keywords requires a well-defined monitoring objective which could be customer experience, product launch performance, marketing campaigns, identification of potential customers, employee opinion tracking, corporate or product brand monitoring, competitor tracking and so on.

Based on the objective, data gathering can be kept open to all platforms, ensure that relevant sites are not ignored or limit the monitoring to specific social media platforms. Eg., When monitoring employee opinions, employee-related sites like glassdoor need to be included in the search. It also determines the geographical location and language to be covered, making the monitoring highly relevant.

2. Analyzing Data
Multiple layers of segmentation are performed to identify actionable insights – thematic analysis, sentiment analysis, identifying the platforms, influencers and clusters of highly viral topics. Monitoring tools identify commonly used tags to create tag clouds, making high volume topics visible. These tags form the basis for creating broad themes, that is, categories into which the post-related data would be classified. Eg., In case of social media monitoring for marketing, emerging themes could be product reviews, customer experience, potential buyer questions or pain points. Such thematic analysis classifies individual drivers that require different courses of action and engagement.

Tools also perform sentiment analysis, identifying the positive and negative sentiment of the posts. While some offer a three-level sentiment grading, others offer a five-level grading, ranging from very positive, positive, neutral, negative to very negative. Although tools are capable of judging straight forward statements, they don’t always judge sarcasm, wit, humor or idioms accurately, requiring manual intervention. But, they can be trained over time to learn and improve their accuracy.

Tools are capable of identifying influencers and relevant platforms like specific blogs, facebook, etc., over which highly viral or critical conversations are taking place, enabling companies to engage the influencers, advocates and audience over these platforms while continuing to monitor audience response.

3. Deriving Actionable Insights
Volume spikes by dates, lifecycle of conversations, campaigns, key events and viral spread of news offer insights into key topics. All this information and the analysis help companies derive actionable insights of where, when and how to act.

While some insights are related to offline action, many require responding online and engaging the audience. E.g., Competitor tracking and customer pain points may unearth unmet needs that the company can incorporate into their product line even as they engage the online audience. Thus, by using social media monitoring as a critical tool to derive actionable insights, companies can maximize the enormous opportunity that social media offers in engaging the audience, enhancing their loyalty and the company’s image.

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Chillibreeze's disclaimer: This is a contributed article and was published on Chillibreeze in June, 2011. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not reflect the views of Chillibreeze as a company. Chillibreeze has a strict anti-plagiarism policy. Please contact us to report any copyright issues related to this article. The relevance of the facts and figures cited (if any) could change after a period of time.

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—About our writer:

Madhuri is a business and children’s fiction writer with a post graduate diploma in Management from IIM-Ahmedabad. She has worked in the advertising, IT, BPO-KPO sectors, performing writing, marketing and sales functions.

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