What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 3

The Advanced Guide

In the Intermediate guide I went through 4 freemium tools that I think could be very beneficial to any marketing team. The have features ranging from scheduling to analytics and can be very useful in monitoring your Social Media. If you need a refresher on the topics discussed in this article, click here to read “What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)”.

Throughout this article series, I have discussed what Social Media monitoring is and I have shown you many tools that you can use to help you hit your revenue targets by monitoring your Social Media. These can greatly help your Social Media efforts. In this article I want to go over a couple of the best practices for not only working with Social Media monitoring tools but also for Social Media listening, as well as give you a couple of tips on Social Media listening.

“When someone says you can’t, that’s the perfect opportunity to prove them wrong.” — Elinor Stutz (Inspirational Speaker, International Best-Selling Author, and Sales Consultant at Smooth Sale) @smoothsale

What Should I Watch Out For When Using Social Media Tools?

In this article I will cover:

#1 Best Practices For Working With Social Media Monitoring Tools

#2 Social Listening Tips For A Social Media Monitoring Tool

So let’s move along…

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#1 Best Practices For Working With Social Media Monitoring Tools

Analyzing the vast amount of data on Social Media has been described as similar to drinking from a firehose. In order to make sense of this data, here is my take on the best practices on using a Social Media monitoring tools.

A Skill and Appetite for Data Analysis
In order to effectively use a Social Media-monitoring tool, a skill and appetite for sifting through large datasets (for example, making sense of over 10,000 mentions of a fashion brand on a given day) will lead to more insightful results. An ability to spot trends, derive insights and themes on how the masses are engaging with your brand will allow you to address these points.

Actionable Insights
To ensure that the insights you’re gleaning from Social Media are useful, it’s best to keep the SMART criteria in mind. Following the SMART criteria will mean insights are Smart, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-Bound.

Meaningful insights and trends are of little benefit unless they can be relayed into actions that can better competitive positioning or audience engagement.

Data analysis can often lead to going down so called ‘rabbit holes’, which can often lead to unthought-of insights. Keeping in mind the SMART criteria and also applying a set hypotheses at the beginning of analysis will lead to a more succinct body of work. In particular, hypotheses setting will guide the analysis in a clear and defined way — asking questions of the data that you want to unearth.

Data and Philosophical Based Insights
Themes unearthed in analysis may be both data based and rooted in philosophical interpretation. Both provide value in interpreting consumer behavior. Data based insights will present themselves through sentiment and frequency in keyword analysis, for example. Insights based on data are concrete and will answer a query set at the beginning of research where the answer is unknown and can help support a hunch.

Philosophical interpretation from Social Media conversation requires human interpretation, or ‘reading in between the lines’. This type of analysis deep brand inference can be applied. For example, inferring why is it that people have an emotional connection with a brand? Why is that a brand provides meaning and a deeper relationship with the audience? These insights are just as important and also require a deeper level of understanding on the relationship that brands have with consumers. Possession of this skill demonstrate strong business acumen and understanding of consumer behavior.

Identifying Niche Communities in Social Media
The most vocal and frequent contributors to Social Media discussion will often be key brand influencers and may be part of niche communities. Much can be learned about these groups as consumer behavior now dictates that niche communities will freely express themselves on Social Media. Analysis will even provide a narrative on the unspoken norms and rules are on the dynamic between the niche community and the brand.

Online Insights Impacting Real World Decisions
Any of the areas above present an opportunity to refine the brand proposition within the domain of the Internet and the real world. The insights derived from Social Media analysis quite often will lead to changes in strategy in the real world.

Consider how Social Media analysis could be factored into strategic decision-making for:

• Product placement
• Demographic targeting
• Future product enhancements
• Advertising placements
• Marketing campaigns
• Celebrity endorsements

Tools that analyse Social Media are only going to get more powerful and intelligent. Further enhancements may centre on more accurate sentiment analysis, photographic interpretation, and the introduction of predictive analysis. And with this, further blurring the line between digital and real-life interactions we have with the brands we consume.

#2 Social Listening Tips For A Social Media Monitoring Tool

Social listening is about finding and understanding key user insights about your product (or company), while Social Media monitoring is the process of gathering all of this data in one place.

Social listening depends on Social Media monitoring data, and both are heavily based on keywords. The way you use your Social Media monitoring data depends on the goals that you want to achieve, as well as knowing what kind of data to look for in the first place.

Simple but true: knowledge creates opportunities. And data from Social Media monitoring becomes crucial business knowledge that will (and should) influence all your business decisions once you apply social listening. However, not all Social Media monitoring projects are created equal. There are definitely a few things that you can do to ensure that your project retrieves high quality data.

I’ve put together a list of Social Media monitoring tips that you can implement to retrieve better results, and they’re universal, so you can use them with ANY social listening or Social Media monitoring tools.

• Tip 1. Create a plan for Social Media monitoring before you create a project
• Tip 2. Decide why you’re monitoring
• Tip 3. Set goals that you want to achieve with Social Media monitoring
• Tip 4. Choose a Social Media monitoring tool that fits both your budget and your needs
• Tip 5. Sign up for free trials and ask questions if you have any
• Tip 6. Know your limits… and surpass them
• Tip 7. Choose your keywords carefully
• Tip 8. Monitor other keywords besides the usual suspects
• Tip 9. Check for spelling and punctuation
• Tip 10. Use Required keywords (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 11. Use language filters (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 12. Think twice about using or monitoring long-tail keywords
• Tip 13. Clean up your Social Media monitoring results
• Tip 14. Take a day or two to observe your results
• Tip 15. Look for irrelevant results
• Tip 16. Use Excluded keywords (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 17. Delete irrelevant results manually
• Tip 18. Block domains and mute authors that are giving you irrelevant results
• Tip 19. Use Required keywords to clean up your results
• Tip 20. Explore all the features that your Social Media monitoring TOOL has to offer
• Tip 21. Prioritize your results
• Tip 22. Use your Sentiment Analysis filter (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 23. Use your Interactions filter (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 24. Use your Influencer Score filter (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 25. Create a benchmark to compare your results
• Tip 26. Explore all the opportunities that Social Media monitoring has to offer
• Tip 27. Learn about the context of discussions containing your keywords by checking the word cloud
• Tip 28. See the story beyond the numbers, see the story behind the numbers
• Tip 29. Check on your results now and then
• Tip 30. Don’t just look, act!
• Tip 31. Interact with your results
• Tip 32. Mark your results, so they’re easy to find
• Tip 33. Customize your project and set up e-mail notifications the way you like them (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool)
• Tip 34. Customize your storm alerts (if available in your Social Media monitoring tool) (Alerts for if there is a sudden increase in your results)
• Tip 35. Share your data so others can also benefit
• Tip 36. Get the complementary mobile app
• Tip 37. Collect historical data
• Tip 38. Develop and maintain good Social Media monitoring habits

“Make each sales rep responsible for monitoring a certain number of competitors on Linkedin” — Jamie Shanks (Author “Social Selling Mastery” | CEO of Sales for Life) @jamietshanks

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In this article set, I wanted to show you how Social Media tools can help your company to hit its revenue targets through automating tasks and being able to stay ahead of what is being said about you in the ever-changing digital world. Social Media monitoring is complex and offers opportunities for a more strategic approach to your Social Media.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article set on Social Media tools. We are always working to bring you new articles on topics related to Marketing and Sales, so come back and visit our publication, Inside Revenue, for the release of these articles and more.

General Business Resources

What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach? — Part 2(The Intermediate Guide)

What Tools Can I Use To Manage My Sales Outreach? — Part 3(The Advanced Guide)

What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 1 (The Beginner’s Guide)

What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 2 (The Intermediate Guide)

What Tools Can I Use To Monitor My Company’s Social Media? — Part 3 (The Advanced Guide)