10 steps for successful social media monitoring
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Transcript of 10 steps for successful social media monitoring
10 STEPS FOR SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING
Learn the best way to monitor
and analyze social media.
INTRODUCTION
For some years now, we have seen businesses adopting social media and integrating them in their business processes. While some have reluctantly outsourced, some are experimenting with it and making it a part of company culture.
Fundamentally, social media consists of 4 different stages
| Listen, Analyze, Act and Optimize
Social media is all about conversations, interactions and value addition, thereby building a strong business and reputation.
SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
At the core of social media strategy lies the Social Media Monitoring process. Without a strong social media monitoring strategy, it’s almost impossible to keep track of all the relevant conversations and engage with them. But how do you create a strong social media monitoring plan? How do you understand what is right and what is not?
1. Define business goals
2. Define KPIs for your business problem
3. Carry out preliminary social media buzz research
4. Identify where you would want to monitor
5. Prepare a keyword strategy
6. Develop an action plan
7. Setup a team and define roles
8. Implement the strategy
9. Review the output of your strategy and iterate accordingly
10.Scale and Evolve
Using our professional experience with many
brands and agencies we have identified 10
crucial stages of social media monitoring.
They are as follows:
CONTENT
DEFINE BUSINESS GOALS"Until input (thought) is linked to a
goal (purpose) there can be no
intelligent accomplishment."
Paul G. Thomas
It is impossible to ignore the basics of business, or
skip it. You have to ask what you want to achieve
using social media. As of now, success stories of
social media range from customer acquisition to
brand building.
There are many areas where social media can be
of great help:
ANSWER THE WHY OF SOCIAL MEDIA
• Creating your marketing plan
• Gaining industry and competitive intelligence
• Building reputation and brand
• Measuring the success of your marketing plan
• Supporting online customer queries and complaints
• Identifying and reaching out to influencers in your industry
• Identifying leads and reaching out to them
• Finding new hires for your company
• Feedback from your customers, users and so on.
USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
It is important that the business goals for your
organization are laid out properly. It should be
understood well before what you want to achieve
using social media.
KNOW WHAT YOU WANT
DEFINE KPIS FOR YOUR BUSINESS PROBLEM
"Most people use statistics the way a
drunkard uses a lamp post, more for
support than illumination."
Mark Twain
Once the business goals are clear and well
communicated, it is time to know how you want to
measure it. For instance, if building reputation is
your goal than how are you going to measure your
success? Or if supporting online queries is your aim
than how are you going to measure it?
QUANTIFY YOUR SUCCESS
Hence KPIs are really important to quantify your
actions and results. Most businesses are stuck over
ROI and how to measure it. But through many case
studies and success stories, it is very clear that ROI
is not always an important KPI for your business.
KPIs need to be measured based on your business
goals.
For example, the best way to measure your
reputation would be to count how many new
influencers have mentioned your business. By
monitoring your mentions and keeping track of new
people mentioning your brand, you can see the
success of your activities and know that things are
going well.
BREAK THE TRADITION OF ROI
For leads, you can come up with KPIs like how many
people online have I reached out and how many
showed interest on weekly basis. It is important to
know what KPIs are relevant and what are not.
Intermediate KPIs like these are very important.
Furthermore, never let industry standard KPIs fool
you because all KPIs have their limitations. Nobody
understands your business like you do, hence, if it is
required to sway away from a standard KPI and
make your own than it needs to be done.
FIND YOUR OWN WAY
CARRY OUT PRELIMINARY SOCIAL MEDIA BUZZ RESEARCH
"If we knew what it was we were
doing, it would not be called
research, would it?"
Albert Einstein
After laying out the foundation for your social
media monitoring strategy, it is now time to do some
hands on work.
By implementing Google search, Facebook search
or Twitter search, you can see what kind of buzz
exists around your industry. How actively are
people talking about it? How are your competitors
being talked about? All these preliminary exercises
will be able to benchmark your expectations
around social media.
DO YOUR HOMEWORK
IDENTIFY WHERE YOU WOULD WANT TO MONITOR
“The successful warrior is the
average man, with laser-like focus.”
Bruce Lee
Preliminary research helps you get a feel of what
you are going to put yourself up to. This could also
be a stage of revelation which would require you to
change your business perspective. Understanding
your customer base and their activity is important, it
helps you focus your monitoring activities.
Facebook and Twitter is not the whole of social
media. Preliminary research is hence necessary to
make sure that you discover more about your
customer base. There are thousands of groups and
active communities outside of Twitter and Facebook
which could be of high impact for your business.
FOCUS YOUR SEARCH
PREPARE THE KEYWORD STRATEGY"However beautiful the strategy, you
should occasionally look at the
results."
Winston Churchill
Preparing keywords strategy for your social media
is very similar to that of keyword strategy for your
SEO campaigns. Just like understanding what
people are searching about, you need to
understand what people are talking about. These
two factors can be either different or same
depending upon your industry.
The preliminary research can help you identify
relevant keywords for your business. It is important
to make an intensive list of your keywords and keep
iterating it.
KEYWORDS ARE YOUR CLUES
DEVELOP ACTION PLANS“Everyone has a plan 'till they get
punched in the mouth.”
Mike Tyson
• Setup relevant social media reporting structure
• Create standard communication template
• Create relevant content to share
• Create better landing pages to redirect people
Action plans are crucial for successful execution of
the social media monitoring campaign. This would
include many to-do items like:
MAKE A TO-DO LIST
• What are you going to do with the data collected?
• How are you going to manage the stored social media data?
• How do you plan to response to influencers in social media?
Everything boils down to what you want to say and
how in social media. Both are important aspect of
business and reputation building in social media.
Action plans for Social Media Monitoring activities
need to encompass following questions:
SETUP A PROCESS
Monitoring social media is going to bring huge amount of data, hence
data management in itself can be a daunting task. But with a proper
action plan, it is possible to take care of it.
SETUP A TEAM AND DEFINE ROLES“Coming together is a beginning.
Keeping together is progress.
Working together is success.”
Henry Ford
Social Media Teams mainly consist of the following basic structure:
• Social Media Strategist
• Content Writers
• Social Media Response Team
Setting up a social media team is as important as
setting up your sales teams or product team.
Dedicated social media teams and make-shift social
media teams have a huge difference in their
performance and results.
DEFINE, ALLOCATE AND MONITOR
Besides any other complicated organization charts,
these are the basic need for your social media
monitoring project.
You need to have a strategist to make plans,
identify trends, do back ground research and look
after the whole project. Content writers are crucial
so that fresh and relevant content are published
regularly for your whole social media team.
Response team are responsible for communicating
and distributing these content in social media and
interacting on social media. The roles and
responsibilities can overlap.
BUILD A TEAM
IMPLEMENT THE STRATEGY“What you do is what matters, not
what you think or say or plan.”
Jason Fried
With team and strategies in place, the next phase is
the implementation phase. For effective
implementation of your social media monitoring
strategy, you need to invest in better social media
monitoring tool that can help you execute your plan
properly.
In addition to this, the team needs to be well-
trained to generate as much value as possible from
the tool. Most often, we have observed that using
social media monitoring tool is a skill set, like with
any other tool, which needs to be developed.
DRIVE YOUR PLANS
• Social Media Management
• Social Media Monitoring
• Social Media Analytics (sentiment and demographic
analysis)
• Channel Analytics ( In other words Facebook and
Twitter Analytics)
• Social Media Activation ( social media apps like quiz,
survey, contest app etc)
• Social Media Ad Management
• Community Management
There are different types of social media
applications and it is really easy to be confused
between them. Basically, there are following types
of tools in the market:
All these tools are designed for different purpose
and are not same in terms of features and value to
your business. For your monitoring purpose, you
need to look in the tool which provides social media
listening capability, some analytics, management
and reporting.
TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS
REVIEW THE OUTPUT OF YOUR STRATEGY AND ITERATE ACCORDINGLY
“Failure is simply the opportunity to
begin again, this time more
intelligently.”
Henry Ford
Once planning is done and execution is initiated, it’s time to keep track of your strategy and measure its performance. This is where the KPIs will play a major role. The social media strategist need to keep track of all the relevant KPIs and make changes to the plan accordingly.
Social media changes rapidly over time, hence it’s important to be on your toes. One important mantra in social media is PLAN, EXECUTE and ITERATE. In social media one needs to think like a publishing house: creating and publishing new content and creatives.
A solid reporting framework makes a lot of difference when you are keeping track of your performance. It helps you reduce your effort and increases efficiency. It is important to remember that without proper tracking of your social media activities, all the hard work will be futile.
REVIEW! REVIEW! REVIEW!
SCALE AND EVOLVE“Move fast and break things. Unless
you are breaking stuff, you are not
moving fast enough.”
Mark Zuckerberg
In the end, when your business is getting somewhere
with your strategy, it is time to scale and evolve.
Once you are confident about what works and
what doesn’t, you can scale the process for more
aggressive social media initiatives. This would mean
hiring more people, investing more on content
generation, innovating your product or service
offerings, investing in more sophisticated social
media applications etc.
GROW
START MONITORING SOCIAL MEDIAC O N TAC T U S AT C O N TAC T @ S I M P L I F Y 3 6 0 . C O M
L I K E U S O N F B / S I M P L I F Y 3 6 0 O R F O L LO W U S O N T W I T T E R @ S I M P L I F Y 3 6 0
LISTEN, ANALYZE, ACT & OPTIMIZE
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