Social Media Monitoring 

What is social media monitoring?  

Social media monitoring or social listening is the continuous monitoring of the social media activities of competitors, customers, target groups and influencers relevant to the organization. 

It helps you stay aware of what user-generated content related to your brand is circulating on the web and assess public sentiment. This information can be important for sales and marketing activities and for product development–for instance--to identify trends, develop campaigns, or protect your reputation. 

If negative comments are picked up early, a crisis that could damage your reputation can usually be mitigated or even averted. In addition, social media monitoring enables you to keep track of your competitors and initiate a prompt response when necessary. 

While social media analysis is performed occasionally or on a one-off basis, monitoring takes place in real time. The data gathered during monitoring forms the basis for an analysis.  

Analyze user generated content   

A huge amount of user-generated content is created daily on these social channels and many other social media platforms. From individuals, celebrities, politicians, influencers, or companies. 

Social networks often report the current events faster than traditional media. While you wait for information from the newspaper to the next morning, social networks give you information and pictures about political events, sporting events, catastrophes, corporate scandals, positive customer experiences, or emerging crises, and much more in a short amount of time.  

Reasons to monitor social networks 

Monitoring social networks has a variety of benefits, including:  

• Protection of your reputation
• Brand management
• Identification of trends and topics
• Monitoring competitors’ activities 
• Customer acquisition
• Identification of potential influencer partners  

When to get started with social media monitoring 

Start social media monitoring as soon as possible. Don’t start by actively posting articles in social networks and then thinking about social monitoring later—do both at the same time. Ideally, you should start with monitoring to identify the social platforms on which your target group is active. 

Even if your organization isn’t active in social media, your target audience is. Even a small number of users can pose a risk if comments go unnoticed and unanswered. Don’t let such arguments deter you from social listening. 

What teams should do social media monitoring?  

Social media monitoring can help all teams across your organization. For example, different teams can learn the following:   

• Sales: What are our customers or business partners interested in?
• Marketing/PR: How does the market respond to our campaigns and press releases?
• Customer service: How can we provide the best customer services and support?
• Market research: What current trends can our products and service pick up on?
• Communications: What are customers and stakeholders saying about us?
• Product development: Can we adapt our products in accordance with customers’ wishes? 

What data can you get from social media monitoring?  

A good tool for monitoring social media activities does not just deliver data. It evaluates and structures it to make media management and analysis easy. Ideally it will be possible to identify trends in the specified KPIs at a glance. The metrics you track will depend on the organization’s goals and strategy. 

These include: 

• Posts over time: When was what published about my brand or topic?
• Share of voice: What is my brand’s share in the mentions of a particular topic?
• Types of posts: How are the various shares distributed over the different contribution types such as texts, pictures, and videos?
• Engagement: How much interaction of what sort have the contributions evoked?
• Tonality: Do reports tend to be positive, negative, or neutral?
• Influencers: Who are the people who have posted, and where have they shared information? 

Do you compile the relevant key figures depending on the desired analysis? For example, are you targeting market analysis or reputation management? A dashboard helps you to keep track of all relevant figures and developments. Different graphic evaluations are possible: from tables over different diagrams up to maps which represent the distribution of tonalities or channels. 

When to respond on social media 

When it comes to social media monitoring, timing is everything. If you discover a negative review on a social network on a Friday evening, a response on Monday morning may be too late. If every post and every response must undergo a time-consuming authorization process before it is published, you will lose valuable time in averting a possible crisis.  

How LexisNexis supports social media monitoring  

These days, social media is critical to how you both receive and respond to information. Never miss a conversation about your company, your brand, your products, or your competitors with Nexis^® Social Analytics. Our powerful social data intelligence platform lets you listen in on the continuous stream of social media conversations taking place online. 

This real-time monitoring and social-listening tool enables you to: 

• Quickly and easily analyze billions of social posts and conversations to track your brand, manage problems, measure campaign effectiveness and gain insight into your social audiences.
• Pinpoint patterns, follow trends, assess performance gaps and track return on investment of your campaigns.
• Take advantage of social media reporting to highlight successes and areas worthy of attention.
• Share insights quickly and easily across your organization.
• See where your audience is coming from and track how you’re performing on different social media networks.
• Monitor the impact that influencers and media mentions have on your website traffic.
• Leverage analytics tools, such as image recognition, virality mapping, geolocation tagging, sentiment analysis, hashtag tracking and more.
• Turn data from social conversations into meaningful insights from more than 10 social networks and 150 million websites. 

Additionally, our flagship media monitoring tool, Nexis Newsdesk^® helps you stay on top of the social media buzz surrounding your business. 

Spanning such social networks as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, as well as thought-leadership blogs, podcasts, photo-sharing sites, industry forums and premium print, web and broadcast news, Nexis Newsdesk™ is our flagship media intelligence solution. The tool lets you monitor what people are saying online about your company, your brand, and your competitors in near-real time so you can quickly and agilely respond to developments. 

What’s more, Nexis Newsdesk™ adds an average of 2.3 million social media posts every day, in addition to an average of 2.4 million news articles, and it enables you to instantly evaluate more than 300 million articles. 

Armed with these social insights, you’ll be in a prime position to make more intelligent decisions that will help you successfully drive your business forward. 

 

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