10 tips for social media monitoring

The full document can be downloaded via Slideshare but the guide's co-ordinator, Simon Collister, has 10 top tips for social media monitoring to get you started.

1. Be clear about what you're monitoring

First and foremost there is a huge range of social media platforms on the market. Many of these new tools present a big overlap between traditional media monitoring, social media monitoring, platform specific analytics (e.g. Facebook) and social content management. Make sure you know what you want to achieve before rushing in to pick the tool with the best dashboard or sexiest name. Knowing what your objectives are is key to picking the right platform (see tip 4)

2. Do you need a business case?

On the one hand it seems superfluous to need to to build a business case for SMM. As contributor to the Guide, Michelle Goodall, argues: "Did you have a board meeting to allow your communications team to read, watch or listen to media for industry information and your brand or competitor mentions?" Probably not. But given the relative newness of social media and the often not insignificant cost of some commercial tools think about what SMM can deliver might help ensure there's senior buy-in.

3. Make sure you get the right pricing model for your needs

One key consideration when selecting your monitoring technology is to think carefully about the different pricing models many providers have adopted. For example, volume based pricing rates charge according to how many results you access, perhaps good for small or niche brands but not great for popular brands or during a crisis. Search based charge users based on the number of searches they make, but return unlimited data while the 'per login' model charges per user. Each of these bring a range of Pros and Cons depending on your brand or organisational needs.

4. Set objectives

Key to getting SMM right (and helping with the buy-in issue) is setting clear objectives. From a communications perspective SMM objectives could include Identifying risks and issues at an early stage, identifying existing and emerging influential online voices and benchmark and measure sentiment (against competitors). But SMM provide insights for the wider organisation (see point nine below) and so additional objectives should be set in conjunct with other departments, such as Customer Service, Marketing, Sales and HR.

5. Who should monitor?

While different organisations will have different internal structures, roles and responsibilities it is important to think clearly about who should have responsibility for monitoring. For example, Guide contributer, Dan Tyte, Director at Working Word PR, suggests that a Community Manager might oversee monitoring strategy, Community Engagers might directly track and engage in conversations and Analysts might work at the SMM coal-face, making sense of data, analysing sentiment, identifying longitudinal trends and liaising with Managers to inform ongoing strategy.

6. Automation is over-played

Many commercial tools offer a rang of automated functions, including sentiment, demographics, etc. While these often claim to be between 70-80% accurate experience indicates that they generally fail to understand the full nuances of human conversation. Instead, be prepared to undertake good, old manual analysis to determine the real meaning in social media content.

7. How do you keep on top on monitoring?

The flow of social media data is relentless and this can often pose challenges for organisations with limited resources and a 9am-5pm operation.Getting SMM right will mean deciding how often you check in on monitoring content and what sort of response times you give to different channels. For example should you respond to Twitter (a more real-time conversational medium) sooner than, say, Google Plus?

8. Spend time getting your monitoring set-up right

Social media monitoring is not a magic bullet. Technology's ability to return meaningful results is highly dependent on ensuring you pick the right search terms to conduct your monitoring. In the Guide Head of Social Media at Walmart UK, Dom Burch, gives the following example: "a search term such as, ‘Asda’, refers to both the UK-based supermarket, the Adriatic Sea Defence and Aerospace 2013 exhibition, and the American Student Dental Association … taking time to create relevant search terms and removing inappropriate content is essential to ensure monitoring tools return high quality results."

9. Think about how monitoring can impact on the wider organisation

PR is a strategic management function and the insights gained through SMM can help the wider organisation understand and adapt to the external environment. You should think about creating workflow processes to help identify key internal stakeholders and ensure monitoring insights can be moved through the organisation for relevant departments to act on. As Dom Burch asserts: "Understanding the touch points and hand over points is almost as important as spotting the content in the first place, as institutional inertia or simple duplication of effort can exacerbate the issue rather than fix it"

10. Review your tools and technology regularly

Monitoring tools and the technology they use is evolving rapidly. All brands and organisations making use of commercial tools shouldn't just rely on update emails from their providers. They should be continually checking out the monitoring landscape for new tools or improved features of competitor products. More importantly, they should be testing them out and not simply relying on the marketing promises.

Simon Collister MCIPR is a senior lecturer at London College of Communication, University of the Arts, London and a PhD researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London's New Political Communication Unit. Before academia Simon was consultancy director for We Are Social and prior to that worked in the digital teams of Weber Shandwick and Edelman. He tweets at @simoncollister and blogs at www.simoncollister.com