Anpar Research
- Sep 16, 2020
- 4 min read

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

Updated: Jan 1

In a world, where the digital environment is so prominent, it is important for businesses and websites to see what consumers are saying about their brand online and take action. To achieve this, learn the benefits of social media monitoring and how it is used.

Table of contents

So what is social media monitoring?
Why social media monitoring is important?
How to do social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring companies to use

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So what is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring tools allow businesses to listen and track social mentions of their brand name on the entire web, in the form of hashtags, keywords or particular URLs across social media platforms, blogs, forums, review sites, podcasts, news and elsewhere on the web.

These social media monitoring tools can track both positive and negative mentions that businesses or websites may want to respond to, analyse, tackle issues or gather feedback to seek new opportunities.

Although there are strong similarities, social media monitoring is different from social listening or social media listening as they are often referred to as the same thing. Social media monitoring collects and responds to brand mentions, while social listening tools focuses on the collective online data set to draw insights from to drive strategies.

6 benefits of social media monitoring

To understand the importance of this tool to your brand, I have outlined the following 6 benefits of social media monitoring :

1. The ability to respond to customers quickly

The ability to respond to customers promptly particularly any complaints to avoid escalation of the issue on social media.

2. Initiate discussions and promote brands online

Help to initiate discussions and promote brands online to raise awareness of services or products.

3. Optimise products or services

Gathering feedback from social media to help optimise products or services in meeting client needs and wants by analysing comments online.

4. Enhancing a brands image online

To help build the brand's image online by responding to customers who have mentioned the brand online by emphasising the caring side of the brand and how engaged they are with customers.

5. Getting an edge over competitors via tracking

Keep an eye on competitors and get an edge over them by monitoring how the competition are doing amongst their audience, if any of the rivals promotions are gaining traction, identifying gaps in the market that may have been missed and if there are any opportunities that can be exploited that will benefit the brand.

6. Used for promotional purposes

Can be used for promotion purposes by identifying who are the heavy users of the brand and reward them.

How to do social media monitoring?

How social media monitoring works is through specialised software tools sending search bots to crawl and index sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and elsewhere on the web, which is then ready to find opinions, mentions and sentiment on certain brands, products, people and other items that you may be interested in.

This is gathered in real time, all on one dashboard especially as majority of customers expect a prompt response to their issue or query. This is all relevant feedback based on what you stipulated in the social media monitoring tool.

Picking up information daily generated by millions of tweets are one of many social media monitoring examples for decision makers to make an informed critical decision to drive competitive advantages. These tools allow you to understand users and see what they express online, opinions, sentiment, preferences and intent.

However, these tools are only able to access publicly available mentions or discussions on social networks and not private chatrooms, messages or posts. For example, on Facebook you are unable to monitor personal accounts or closed groups, so privacy is not an issue.

Social media monitoring companies to use

There is a range of social media monitoring tools available that serve different needs or all in one social analytics option. Awario and Brand24 are software tools that covers both social media monitoring and social listening, I highly recommend you check them out.

Brand24

Brand24 is a simple, reliable and easy to use platform that is suitable for individuals or a business of any size. There is a 14-day trial available so you can see what is available and how easy you find it. Below are the main product features of Brand24:

You can monitor and respond to any negative mentions promptly

You can track and respond to any negative mentions promptly as it provides automatic notifications and sentiment analysis reports of segmented positive, neutral and negative mentions of your brand.

Capability to track the number of people who have seen the mentions including engagements

Ability to track the number of people who have seen the mentions including engagements such as likes, shares and comments and are provided with an automated daily or weekly report of key metrics.

Track hashtags

Track hashtags and seeing the effects of a hashtag campaign with reach and engagement metrics. Plus, you are able to find relevant industry influencers by social network to be brand ambassadors.

Track social media mentions in order to engage with customers and improve customer satisfaction

Allows you to improve customer satisfaction by tracking and engaging customers on social media mentions, online reviews, message boards, blogs etc. This is covered off in more detail in this post - How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Download the free E-book to guide you on how to get started with social media listening.

Awario

Awario has many of the same benefits mentioned above and crawls over 13 billion web pages daily that will provide you with valuable market and customer intelligence from unlimited historical data set that you can take action on or find sales opportunities. Another feature is the advanced Boolean search option where you can create specialised queries based on groups of keywords. So, in other words, the search function on steroids. Other features includes topic clouds, location based monitoring and offers a social selling tool to follow-up potential leads for those looking people looking for similar types of products or services to yours on social media. There is also a free 7-day trial available you can try.