Businesses that have jumped on the social media train will do well to make sure that they monitor their social media efforts. With social media monitoring you can see which of your marketing strategies are the most efficient so that you can refine them and have a more direct approach to social media marketing and advertising rather than potentially waste your time, energy, and money on approaches that aren’t effective.
What Do You Need to Monitor?
Before you start monitoring your social media platform, you’ve first got to know what you should be paying the most attention to. Just like your marketing and advertising strategy has to have solid objectives and quantifiable outcomes, the same is true of your social media monitoring campaign. Some of the most popular metrics are reach, engagement, competitive data, and sentiment.
When it comes to reach, you’ll want to consider measuring how many subscribers, fans, and followers that you have in order to get a measure of your social media influence. Engagement includes comments, retweets, bounce rate, average amount of time spent on your site, white paper downloads, and video views. As for your competitive data, this will include your overall business influence on the web or the number of mentions for competitors’ brands. The number of mentions that have negative and positive connotations is your sentiment.
What’s Your Budget?
Now that you have a better idea of what you need to monitor, you can start to form your budget for social media monitoring. Larger businesses and a lot of online brand mentions means that you will more than likely pay more for social media monitoring.
The costs involved with monitoring deal with the tracking and storage of large amounts of data. Not only that, but there are certain functions and tools that you might be interested in, which also cost more. Always be honest with yourself when it comes to determining the cost of social media monitoring. You may or may not have the internal resources at the moment to manage, sort, and monitor all of the data you think that you need.
No matter how large or how small your business is, chances are good that there’s the perfect monitoring strategy available. That being said, you shouldn’t be afraid to pay for quality monitoring and monitoring tools. It’s a good idea to steer clear of any tools that cost less than a hundred dollars a month and guarantee to do everything. While they may actually do everything, they may not do them especially well.
Additional Questions to Ask
Examples of other questions that you should ask while planning your social media monitoring strategy include:
- How many people will have access to manage and monitor your social media accounts?
- Would you rather only keep an eye on social media mentions, or would you also like to manage your profiles with the monitoring platform?
- Which of your profiles do you use the most?
- How long do you see yourself holding onto this data? Will you need reports every year or every month?
- Will you need sentiment analysis?
If your social media marketing efforts seem to be fluctuating from month-to-month or if you’d simply like to maximize your efforts, consider social media monitoring with Unified Social.
Image Credit: Jason Howie
