One would think that if you want to social monitor your audience, you might begin with social media. That may have made sense about ten years ago. With the amount of data pouring into social every day, you might find that other places besides the obvious prove better results.
Social Media Impact
Social monitoring has become an essential part of collecting online behavioral data for demand forecasting and other business needs. Also referred to as “social listening” it is simply a way of putting your ear to the wall to see what people are saying. Only that wall is the vast digital internet, so you’re going to need some help. Here are a few places you may not have thought to look that yield effective social monitoring:
Location-Based Monitoring Tools
Any SEO expert will tell you that location is “hot, hot, hot” right now. In other words, the more defined your audience can be, the better the results. It’s like casting a smaller net. Geo-specific social media monitoring tools are very different from the conventional keyword-based search tools. These types of tools can paint a much clearer picture of local audiences.
Gobabl
Location-based monitoring tools also allow you to easily connect with local influencers and build a community. It’s about starting small and working your way up with trust. These platforms will also help you leverage local hashtags and provide other insight like real-time social feed searches, monitoring multiple locations, and archiving content. Geofeedia is a good tool to start. Just entering an address gives you access to all the social content in the area. You can then use this to create campaigns and analyze local social data.
Geofeedia
Google Alerts
You can’t have a list of effective places to social monitor without including Google Alerts. The search engine king has provided a tool that will give you access to its little search spiders that will find everything related to your brand. Google Alerts will monitor competitor brands, and every time they post, you’ll receive a text or e-mail.
The platform is one of the easiest social monitoring tools on the web, so if you’re new to social learning, it’s probably the best place to start. You simply enter a keyword (your business name) and the system is set up to send you an “alert” every time you pop up on social. You will need a Gmail account to enable this tool, but those are free. Google Alerts can be used to monitor everything from news sites to forum discussions; YouTube videos or blogs.
Social Dashboards
The ability to stay organized means effective productivity. A social media dashboard is a great place for social monitoring, but it also takes it a step further by reporting on analytics.
By now, there are hundreds of these tools on the market. Here are some standards that you should look out for when choosing a dashboard:
- Tracking and social monitoring
- Analytics and reporting
- Saves time and increases productivity
- Scheduling abilities
- Collaboration and task management
This is just a short list of the tools out there that will help to automate processes and define the audience. The most important tool in modern marketing is motivation because we have everything to do the rest. A little research and some trial runs should help you establish a strategy and find the ultimate place that yields the most effective social monitoring for your business.