You can be a seasoned company or a new establishment trying to market your products or services, and are looking to grow yourself and your brand a social media (SM) presence, or just testing the waters to see what the whole hype around this new type of marketing is about. Whichever type of institution you represent you are bound to understand and become aware that it is rather important to monitor and measure all aspects of this process. There are many approaches and methods to monitor and measure the SM presence of a brand, but it is important to fully understand the core elements of monitoring and measuring first.
Monitoring
Also known as listening is merely the process of nonstop garnering of conversations happening in the now, with the sole purpose of having the ability to be able to learn, engage and collaborate while keeping in mind the improvement of a particular institutions marketing and PR aspects. As opposed to measuring, the process of listening has a real-time value. For instance, if certain words are being tracked on a site such as Facebook or twitter, as soon as they are posted it can be acted upon.
Keywords are the basis of listening. Usually the name of the brand, product and service provided are all used as keywords, and thus which ever media monitoring application or system is used to track these words that can be included in different types of articles or even messages that go around on SM, thus making it easier to browse through and sort accordingly. This type of listening is important because there are millions of people that converse, and share information and queries on online platforms, and this can be about your company or product. The information can be helpful to your brand, or hurt it. To be able to handle situations accordingly, these have to be listened to.
Measuring
The process of measuring is looking into how the said keywords are performing within a particular timeframe, how the received data can be compared to that of the competitors’ ones, and how the feedback put out can be used for the betterment of the product. As mentioned previously, this process focuses on the metrics rather than using a social media monitoring app to gain real time data.
Similar to using systems to monitor SM, measuring too uses these systems to look for articles with the given keywords, and then puts together a report which includes tables filled with information such as, the amount of times the keywords occurred, the dates and on what platform. Why such measurements are important to be made is because you may have to shows these figures to stakeholders, showing them where you stand with regards to your presence on SM. Not only this, you will also have the opportunity to build benchmarks and work towards retaining them, thus providing competitive advantages.
SM is now a major part of millions of people’s lives, and one such way to incorporate this to your company’s marketing strategies is by monitoring and measuring SM constantly.