6 Social Media Monitoring Questions You Were Too Embarrassed to Ask

?6 QUESTIONS ABOUT SOCIAL

MEDIA MONITORING YOU WERE TOO EMBARRASSED TO ASK

Social Media Monitoring is the active monitoring of social media for information about a company or organization, usually tracking social media conversations and content on blogs, mainstream news sites, microblog sites such as Twitter, social networking sites like Facebook, video and photo sharing websites such as YouTube and Flickr, forums, message boards, and user-generated content.

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WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING?

THAT’S INTERESTING, BUT HOW DOES IT WORK? AND, PLEASE, JUST GIVE ME THE SHORT VERSION.It’s like watching a baseball game from high-up in the stadium - you can see everything going on in one single view. But, with social media, it’s like 200 (or 2 million) baseball games at once on a single field; too much to keep track of. So, it becomes necessary to use something to filter out the noise.

That’s where social media monitoring tools come in. Generally, social media monitoring begins with entering a keyword - typically a product, company or brand name. From here, you might glean some sense of how the metaphorical baseball game is going, and maybe identify strengths and weaknesses that you didn’t know existed before.

Sophisticated monitoring solutions, like Synthesio, can help you get more robust and sophisticated insights. They can help you discover appropriate keywords as you do your research (which languages, regions, types of social media, etc...) – revealing share of buzz and undiscovered social trends around your product or brand.

If you prefer, tools can let you guide the monitoring - instead of worrying about a specific brand, you can track certain ideas or trends you care about. To use our baseball analogy, you can filter to only see games that end in a home run.

Some solutions use “machine learning”; algorithms that learn how humans classify data and copy our behavior. Once a sufficient number social media posts are manually tagged, the system starts classifying posts - and the social influence of their authors - automatically.

6 QUESTIONS ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING YOU WERE TOO EMBARRASSED TO ASK

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HOW CAN SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING DETERMINE IF A SOCIAL MEDIA CONVERSATION IS POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE?Solutions like Synthesio can determine sentiment around your brand through a special type of machine learning mentioned above. Natural Language Processing (NLP) analyzes language in terms of its meaning and patterns to understand social media conversations. NLP offers valuable insights by tagging the sentiment of posts — the tone of a social media post, tweet, LinkedIn update, etc - as positive, negative, neutral, or even ambivalent. Synthesio’s NLP has seven years of learning already, so it does a pretty good job on its own, but we still keep teaching it both to improve accuracy and to learn new languages.

By using analytics tools, dashboards and charts, it is possible to keep an eye on the public’s mood around your product or brand and measure the sentiment around how the public responds to your marketing campaigns. Essentially, you now can see the baseball games and hear the different crowds, too.

Among many other things, NLP gives you the opportunity to seek out the negative mentions of your brand, to prioritize your engagement and manage your reputation – but also find positive and negative mentions of your competitors, for competitive intelligence and lead generation. For reporting purposes and market research – you can get a high level global snapshot of the sentiment around all your marketing campaigns, or drill down for more detail and context. In other words, you may want see how a rival’s baseball game is going even while you’re focused on your team.

All that said, no social media monitoring vendor would dare say NLP and sentiment analysis is 100% accurate. However, the industry is changing and growing at a rapid pace - we still need the human touch for 100% accuracy (for now), but as an industry, we are well on our way to more sophistication and accuracy in the near future.

GIVE ME A REAL EXAMPLE OF A BRAND USING SOCIAL MEDIAMONITORING, AND HOW DID IT HELP THEM?Accor, a leading hotel operator worldwide and number one in Europe, approached Synthesio to take a closer look at satisfaction-related comments for both Accor’s and competitors’ hotels - a total of around 12,000 hotels worldwide.


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Synthesio implemented a tool dedicated to monitoring the reputation of 12,000 Accor hotels and their competitors – directed at marketing and operational managers for each brand. Designed in partnership with Accor’s corporate marketing team, the tool analyzes the satisfaction of users at all stages of the customer journey. The results obtained by Synthesio are systematically combined with other internal quality indicators such as online satisfaction surveys and on-site guest feedback.

Within the Accor group, the Novotel brand has seen the volume of positive feedback increase by 55% in just 1 year while the number of negative comments has stagnated. This has played an important role for the double-digit growth in online sales.

OKAY, SO THERE ARE A FEW SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING SOLUTIONS ON THE MARKET. HOW DO I KNOW WHICH SOLUTION IS RIGHT FOR MY BRAND?This depends on your brand’s size, global reach, and business objectives. If you are an enterprise-level global brand, you may need to invest in a tool that provides your company with vast channel coverage - beyond Twitter and Facebook - and global reach to local social networks.

SO, I HAVE ALL THIS DATA AND INSIGHTS FROM MY FANCY NEWSOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING TOOL. NOW, WHAT DO I DO WITH IT?Social intelligence gleaned from social media monitoring provides valuable insights into a brand's overall visibility on social media, allows them to measure the impact of marketing campaigns, identify opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and share of voice, and be alerted to impending crises. It can also provide valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and clients think about specific topics, brands or products.

Social media monitoring allows companies to react to these conversations about their brands and products and engage with consumers in real-time. They can connect these insights to achieving business results in sales, communications, crisis management, PR, marketing, customer service, and HR initiatives.

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