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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