The Basics of Social Media Monitoring

By: Cesar Garzon

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There are more than 500 million active users on Facebook and more than 17 million on Twitter. The amount of conversation and content being generated is astounding.  According to Facebook, there are more than 30 billion pieces of content shared each month on their site – amazingly “25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content.”(Source: Social Media Revolution 2)

These facts show the growing power of social media sites and the great impact their users have on a company’s marketing communication strategy and/or initiative. It is important for organizations to understand what people are saying or sharing online. Social media monitoring,  enables companies to track online conversation, and is an effective tool to capture valuable insight about your brand, service, or organization.

In 2009 and 2010 Chevron conducted research using social media monitoring tools to gather important information regarding energy issues. The company was able to trail online audience conversation and sentiment trends as they evolved over a period of time. Chevron produced and published a series of reports that you can see at the Chevron Pulse Report.

Social media monitoring not only helps you to listen, but also analyze and respond to important and meaningful online conversations in real time.  There are many tools that you can use to track blogs, message boards, forums, social networking sites and micro-blogs such as Twitter and Jaiku. Depending on your resources, capabilities, and budget, you can choose the most appropriate social media monitoring tools for what you are trying to accomplish. Most of these tools are free and easy to use. A few examples are Google Alerts and blog search, Twitter search, Technorati, Addict-o-Matic, and Blog Pulse. However, if you have a budget and would like to use more advanced tools consider Radian6, SM2, or Visible Technologies. These tools will pull content from major social sites and at the same time provide easy to understand aggregated data reports and charts.

As social media usage grows and vast data and resources become available, you can gather useful insight that will help you set the foundation to any social media or integrated marketing strategy.

Please comment and let us know if you are using social media monitoring and how.