Social Media Monitoring & Measurement

What is social media monitoring?

It generally refers to the tracking of blogs, podcasts, videos, and other forms of social media for mentions and references to a topic. Often, companies use social media monitoring to track how people are talking about their brand, products and services on the web.

Why is social media monitoring important?

It’s important to know how people are talking about your brand, what exactly they’re talking about and who the people are leading these discussions. This information can dramatically help shape and inform a company’s communications strategies and plans.

How does Voce approach social media monitoring?

Using a variety of best practices and tools, we act as both the eyes and ears for our clients online. Everyday, we scour and scrape for relevant conversations across a mix of mediums and relay the most important and actionable information back to the client team. One example of a social media monitoring and response workflow is represented here (see illustration). For additional detail and explaination on this workflow and others we use for Voce clients, please contact us.

What companies does Voce work with for social media monitoring?

For most social media monitoring projects, our recommended partner is Radian6 Technologies. To understand exactly how we use Radian6 to discover and analyze information for Voce clients, we have created a simple four-part video series, beginning with this introduction.

Please also listen to David Alston, vice president of marketing at Radian6, share his thoughts on why Radian6 is a good alternative to other social media monitoring services, including many of the free web tools. Click flash player below to listen.

What companies does Voce work with for social media mining?

For social media mining, we recommend Nielsen Buzzmetrics and TNS Cymfony.

What is social media mining?

Social media mining looks at conversation themes and patterns and analyzes how the volume and tonality of discussion is changing over a period of time. For companies that are less concerned with the day-to-day impact of social media, this is a great way to measure and weigh larger shifts in brand perception and sentiment.

How is social media mining different than social media monitoring?

Social media mining is focused on extracting insights from the conversational web over long periods of time (e.g., months/quarters/years). Social Media Monitoring is focused on the real-time (e.g., hourly/daily) analysis and response to online conversations.

Which is more important? Monitoring or mining?

It depends on your needs. Mining provides you with a heightened understanding of how conversations are impacting your brand reputation, but given that mining looks at data over a long period of time, there is little to no immediate action or recourse that can be taken. Monitoring, however, is focused on near real-time conversations, so you can quickly pivot and respond to information online — but you have less hard data, insight or understanding of how these efforts are impacting and shaping your brand reputation over time.