Social Media Monitoring – A Breakdown

For those who use social media for marketing, whether they are big businesses or small businesses and entrepreneurs, it is essential to monitor your social media site and posts. Why? You have to know just how well your efforts are paying off, after all.

🌟 You need to know just how well your social media marketing goals are being met.

🌟 You need to know which social media marketing campaigns are working and which aren’t so you can adjust your strategies accordingly.

🌟 You need to know which social media channels are paying off. Then you can either focus on those channels more or see what you are doing on them that’s working well and try to incorporate those ideas on your other channels.

To effectively monitor your social media marketing efforts, the first thing you need to do is know what your objectives are.  Are you trying to gain leads? Are you looking to earn sales? What are your goals for your posts and campaigns? Once you have that figured out, you can monitor and know exactly what you are looking for when you analyze the data to see what is working.

When you are ready to monitor, you will need to keep an eye on various things, such as social mentions, post shares, which posts are converting into leads, which posts are converting into sales, who you are attracting (demographics), etc. There is a lot of data you will have to sort through. Thankfully there are a wide variety of tools available to help with it. Here are a few great ones to try.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great free tool to help monitor social media. It will cover a multitude of social channels, including the popular ones like , , Foursquare, , WordPress, and . It provides weekly analytics reports and can also help with team management (delegating tasks, private messaging, etc.).

2. Social Mention

Social Mention is a tool that is extremely helpful with tracking social mentions and interactions of your brand name. It will help you see the strength (how often your brand is mentioned), passion (likelihood of someone repeating/sharing the mention), sentiment (positive or negative mentions), and reach (the measure of influence) of your brand according to the mentions. You can also see the top keywords, users, hashtags, and sources as well.

4. HowSociable

HowSociable it a great little free tool to help you monitor social media and measure your brand’s visibility on social media. You can use to measure your brand or keyword at 32 different social networking sites. You can also compare your brand to competitors and other similar businesses.

4. Google Analytics

You may not think it, but you can use to monitor social media as well. You can see data of which social channels are directing people to your site, and see data on them, such as their demographics.

So, there you have a brief look at some social media monitoring and some useful tools to use. Which tools are your favorite?

4. Addictomatic

Addictomatic is a neat little search tool to help you monitor buzz about your brand on the web. You can get results   in an RSS feed, and get any mentions from both news and social sites. You can monitor a wide array of sites, including , , , Flickr, Technorati, Ask, Digg, Newsvine, Topix, and more. And it’s easy to use: enter a keyword to track, select where you want results from, bookmark it, and come back.