Simple guidance in monitoring Social Media

Snoopreport
Aug 22, 2017 · 4 min read

Social Networks are widely used by businesses to expand their presence on Internet: they can reach more customers by their posts on Instagram, news on Facebook, announcements on Twitter.

But Social Media offers other great opportunities for brands as well. If you want to get all the benefits, you should start Social Media Monitoring immediately!
Social Media Monitoring is the collection of data that can help you to listen to the audience’s sentiments about your product and services, understand your customers interests and needs, track the influencers and bloggers engagement strategy and many more. To learn about the reasons of monitoring users on social media, read our article.

If you want to get good skills in Social Media Monitoring, acquaint yourself with the guide below.

Step 1. Why you monitor

First thing to do is to set an aim. You should understand clearly what goals you want to achieve and what data do you plan to get as an output results. The best way is to make a list, as e.g.

I plan to monitor Instagram users to:

  1. get mentions about my products, positive and negative reviews
  2. find discussions about my brand so I could join the conversation to bring positive image
  3. be aware of the competitors growth and marketing strategy so I could apply some tactics to my campaigns
  4. find new influencers that will help with promotion
  5. understand customers needs and preferences so my services could fit them perfectly

Above you can find only some examples of the targets, don’t hesitate to set your owns! The successful result of your monitoring highly depends on this first step.


Step 2. Where you monitor

When you’ve decided on the goals of social media monitoring, you’ll have to choose the social networks that will be monitored. Of course, your first thought will be to cover all of them especially the biggest ones, but it will consume the great amount of time and efforts maybe won’t give you the expected results.

Try to be more selective: make a preliminary research of where your target audience is presented the most, your customers are the most active or your competitors have the biggest influence.

It will help you to distribute your resources on the most essential social media and not to miss any valuable data.


Step 3. Who and what you monitor

This step highly depends on the goals you’ve set in the beginning of your monitoring.

By ‘who’ means what kind of users and how many of them will be the object of your research. It can be your brand’s competitors, your customers and the potential ones, influencers and bloggers you want to deal with and so on.

By ‘what’ is supposed the information you will gather during the monitoring: your company name discussions, your brand’s products mentions, popular hashtags related to your industry, competitors and customers actions on social media.

Choose the most suitable people and data required so they would fit to the results you planned to receive in Step 1.


Step 4. How you monitor

To set up an effective monitoring process, you need one more thing — the plan of monitoring. First of all, benchmark your “normal” brand’s indicators so then you can follow the changes. If you’re unsatisfied with the results of monitoring got, you can work on them so after a period of time you can compare the stats and make conclusions on the effectiveness of your actions.

During the monitoring, don’t hesitate to be active: involve other users if you see that you can influence the negative buzz about your company name or support your customers if they are in trouble using your services.

After monitoring you should decide what you will do with the results: analyze them in a way you got them, or you can convert the data in a more handy formats to get in-depth analytics outputs.


Step 5. What tool you use for monitoring

The last point but not least is the service you use for social media monitoring. Of course, it depends on the goals you’ve set and the social networks you’re targeted on. But the choice is still too wide and there is no confidence that you’ll pick the best one.

Here are some characteristics of a tool you should pay attention on:

  1. Price — there are free, cheap and quite expensive platforms. Decide what amount you can afford to spend
  2. Dashboard — of course, the tool that has an user-friendly dashboard and intuitive interface is much better that the unclear and complex one
  3. The results format — put your mind to the outputs the tool provides, what kind of reports you will get so you could understand how easily you can analyze them, share, print.
  4. Service — study if the platform providers offer you some help, customer support, bonuses, referral programs, and so on.

For monitoring user actions on Instagram we would like to suggest the new platform Snoopreport. It tracks user activity as likes, comments and follows of an unlimited number of users even if you don’t follow them. The data is provided in handy weekly and monthly pdf reports and all user actions in csv for possible in-depth analytics.

To get valuable insights of the user behavior on Instagram, click here: http://snoopreport.com

The last step is …

Start monitoring! We hope this guide will help you to make effective research and get all fruitful data you need.

)
Snoopreport

Written by

Instagram monitoring tool. Monitor what users do on Instagram. Track users likes, comments and follows on Instagram. https://snoopreport.com

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade