Social media monitoring is the art and science of listening to various social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. as well as more obscure parts of the web in order to gain an understanding of what is being said about an organization or individual online. As the Internet, in general, becomes increasingly important in all aspects of society, so does social media monitoring.
A business or organization can use social media monitoring to get a sense of what their customers are and aren’t happy about and then respond accordingly. In addition to popular platforms, a good social media monitoring campaign monitors blogs, wikis and pretty much any corner of the web where the organization or entity in question has been written about. Social media monitoring goes by many other names, including social media listening and buzz analysis.
Web crawlers and other tools
Web crawlers, data mining software, and other tools help social media analytics companies keep track of their clients’ brands online and give them hard numbers as feedback. While there are many strategies, the process usually starts with web crawlers, which are used on heavily visited sites more than on others. On a platform like Twitter, crawlers will constantly be monitoring and indexing, while on sites that are less popular, they will monitor every ten minutes or so.
Once areas of the web have been indexed, they can be searched for the desired keywords. It is extremely important to get the search query as specific as possible for the desired outcome. Good software combined with an excellent query can cut through the spam to find the exact data required out of the vast amounts of information on the web.
Reputable social media analytics agencies never search through private data. They simply sift through what is publicly available on behalf of their clients. If a Facebook page is set to private, for example, they won’t look at it, but everything else on Facebook related to the query is fair game.
Where social media monitoring can be used
Businesses can search for different platforms depending on what they are looking for. Sites like LinkedIn can yield information on potential job candidates, for example, or online industry forums on Reddit can help give a sense of what the buzz is around a particular brand. Social media analytics can be used to monitor the effectiveness of a crisis management campaign online, get feedback on a project launch and much more. The possibilities are as unlimited as the Internet itself.
Netbase
Netbase is social media monitoring and analytics company that has won awards and has represented brands all over the globe. From public relations to research, they comb through the Internet quickly and efficiently to develop a sense of how their clients are coming across online.
What makes them stand out is their use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to learn in real time and gain insights about customer behavior while mining data. They do comprehensive searches, and then they scale what they have found to provide reports that conclusions can be drawn from readily. This is why their clients include Coca-Cola, Credit Suisse, Edelman, and many others.
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