Exploring Social Media Monitoring Best Practices HBR, November 14, 2023 Social media has become integrated into our lives, and now it is inevitable to isolate yourself from it. It is so incorporated that there are 4.8 billion social media users around the world. This number expresses 59.9% of the global population. You should use social media monitoring to stay relevant and continue your engagement with your customers effectively. Using the correct social media monitoring tools, you can achieve success. In that way, you can create a crisis management plan for the potential undesired situations that can harm your brand’s reputation and develop marketing strategies. Lastly, you can manage your online brand image. You will have a solid understanding of social media monitoring at the end of this article. Let’s explore together social media monitoring best practices together! 1. Identify Your Audience Knowing the demographics of your audience is crucial for your overall social media strategy. You should know your audience’s location, gender, age, etc. These valuable insights will significantly improve your social media monitoring strategy according to your target audience. In that way, you will know who is engaging with your brand, and they become subjects of your strategy. They will work as a filter when you use monitoring tools and you are improving your reach to your customers. 2. Run a Social Sentiment Analysis Viewing customer approach must be considered to create a solid social media monitoring strategy. It is one of the social media monitoring best practices. It has great importance since customer feedback and general sentiment analysis will pave the way to successfully create campaigns and enhance your presence on different social media platforms. It is much more than simply gathering the data of how many people and how many mentioned you, which is also essential. It is more about measuring opinions, emotions, and customer satisfaction. Both positive and negative sentiment helps you to figure out which strategies work best for you and which ones you should give up, adapt to your future plans, etc. Also, you can monitor customer complaints instantly and take action to fix them. There are lots of social media monitoring tools that you can choose in accordance with your needs. There are different kinds of social media monitoring tools in terms of features, interface, and tracking of various social media platforms. With these tools, you can gain insights to improve your key metrics, improve your strategies, and identify emerging trends. For instance, with Views4You‘s YouTube Video Region Restrictions Checker, you can review in which countries your video is restricted and create a plan or adapt your already existing strategies according to the insight that Views4You will provide. Plus, it is one of the free tools that you can use easily! This social media monitoring tool provides information about countries where your YouTube content is restricted. Using geolocation and IP addresses, it finds the location. Then, it compares that information with the database’s global availability. Another example is Sprout’s Social media monitoring tool that provides sentiment analysis. Thus, you can measure the tone of the relevant conversations which will allow you to understand the customers better. It will help you to observe social media conversations. 4. Limit Your Search You need to reach relevant conversation, so other than using relevant keywords for your social media strategy, you should also use longtail keywords. This will save hours for you and you can get the most relevant information to develop your plan. Also, in that way, you will have a better understanding of your online presence on social media platforms. 5. Monitor Brand Mentions One of the vital elements of social media monitoring best practices is tracking brand mentions. It includes monitoring the comments and posts that mention your brand. You will have no difficulty tracking them as long as they are linked. If there is no link or tag, you need a social listening tool to notice your brand mentions. You can filter out the irrelevant mentions with these tools and effectively manage your time. Also, these are helpful for your measuring audience sentiment strategy. While it would be better if you track branded hashtags, your brand mentions overall, and terms to analyze the success of a campaign or event, you shouldn’t restrict yourself since most people don’t tend to join branded hashtags. Still, a significant amount is using them, keep in mind that. They are useful for your marketing campaigns that create great excitement. Hashtags also help you explore more content that might have restrictions on your country. You can also check if people give a reaction and are satisfied with any promo or discount coming with your hashtag. Look for the engagement metrics and enhance your strategy. This is one of the social media monitoring best practices. Even though you shouldn’t limit yourself to it, remember that they are a priority for social media marketers, so observing them is an undetachable part of your social media strategies. 7. Connect with Your Customers Customers will feel heard and supported when you track and respond to the mentions. Also, it will make your brand look more relatable. You can also answer the customer inquiries. Also, observe how your customers communicate and interests so that you can develop or improve your brand voice, which will result in your customers’ relating more to your brand. Additionally, you shouldn’t disregard negative comments or positive feedback since it will also improve your social media performance. All the data matters for your strategy, so don’t skip anything. You will also promote your brand online by interacting with people. 8. Identify Influencers After tracking suitable and other keywords adjacent to your brand to expand your research, you can find the key influencers consistently posting content about the subjects you searched for. You can collaborate and level up your social media marketing strategy with them. What are the benefits of social media monitoring? In our digital age, social media monitoring is essential for businesses to track and improve their online campaign and strategies following the gained insights. There are several benefits of social media monitoring: It improves customer engagement and service. Easily and quickly interfere with a crisis and prevent a potential problem. Influencer recognition and collaboration will allow you to reach a wider audience and build trust. You can manage your reputation by monitoring and interacting with customer feedback and brand mentions. Understanding your customer sentiment will enable you to reach key insights. So you can improve your services, and identify, and get the right target audience. What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening? Although the two terms can be used interchangeably, there is a difference between them. Social media monitoring is observing social media mentions from customers and responding to them. What are other social media monitoring tools? Here, we listed some of the best social media monitoring tools other than Views4You’s YouTube Video Region Restrictions Checker and Sprout Social media monitoring tool we mentioned above: BrandMentions: With this tool, you can gain valuable insights across social platforms. Also, you can monitor your competitors’ social media activities. Mention: It is one of the social media monitoring tools that you can monitor most of the major social media channels. It can measure the sentiment of comments. It also categorizes them, so it is an excellent solution for reputation management. Brand24: It has AI technology, which enables it to provide you with insights into major social media platforms. Hootsuite: It allows you to follow your social media data and review your performance. It has a schedule feature. Blog