Social media monitoring involves tracking content and activity across social media platforms to help you understand how users perceive your brand. These insights can then be used to enrich your branding strategy and customer interactions.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about social monitoring, including its definition, benefits, a five-step process on how it works, and how it differs from social listening. Our experts also share five best practices and tools to help you get started!
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring tracks any social media content related to your brand, products and services, industry, and competitors across various platforms. It involves promptly responding to posts, comments, or messages where your brand is mentioned.
By monitoring platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and other alternative social media, you can gain insights into conversations about topics that matter to you, particularly those related to your brand. Additionally, this process helps you stay attuned to customer preferences, changing needs, and dislikes.
The Importance of Social Media Monitoring
Social media monitoring is important for several reasons:
- Reputation management. Social media monitoring ensures brands are always aware of what customers say about them. Brands can promptly address and resolve negative feedback, complaints, or issues, protecting and managing their online reputation.
- Customer insights. Social media tracking provides valuable insights into customer opinions, preferences, and behaviors. A better understanding of your target audience will help you deliver a more personalized and resonant approach.
- Crisis management. Monitoring helps brands detect negative feedback and potential issues, respond quickly, and manage crises effectively. A proactive approach minimizes reputational damage and maintains customer trust.
- Competitor analysis. By monitoring competitors' activities, brands can gain insights into their strategies, campaigns, and customer interactions. This information helps identify competitive advantages and helps brands stay ahead in the market.
- Influencer collaborations. Monitoring conversations and engagements enables brands to find potential brand advocates or influencers who can amplify their message to a broader audience.
- Content strategy and engagement. Social media data shows what content the audience likes the most. By analyzing engagement metrics, sentiment analysis, and topic trends, brands can improve their content strategy, create more engaging content, and enhance audience interactions.
Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring: What Are the Differences?
While these concepts are fundamentally related and sometimes used interchangeably, social media monitoring and listening are two entirely different things.
Let’s start with semantics. We know that “monitoring” involves watching and observing passively from a distance. Meanwhile, “listening” urges you to actively hear, interpret, and understand the topic at hand. Now, apply these meanings in the context of social media, and we’ll see an even clearer distinction.
Social monitoring involves simply watching and observing conversations on various platforms to keep track of your brand or campaign’s perception and progress over time. It involves collecting online data that’s readily available. The process enables you to revisit events that have already happened using metrics like:
- Brand mentions
- Product reviews
- Relevant hashtags
- Competitor mentions
On the other hand, social listening involves hearing and interpreting online conversations to understand customers in the long run. It goes beyond simple information and interprets what is behind the data, commonly known as social media market sentiment.
It is more than simply analyzing customer feedback about your brand. Social listening involves actively identifying industry trends and seeking valuable insights about your competitors to improve your brand’s edge. Then, you can integrate this analysis into your branding and marketing strategies moving forward.
How Social Media Monitoring Works in 5 Steps
Social monitoring helps businesses gain insights into customer opinions and emerging market trends, enabling data-driven branding and advertising decisions in a competitive landscape. Here are five steps to monitor your social content:
- Choose the relevant keywords for your search
- Look for data in the right places
- Leverage social monitoring tools
- Analyze your data
- Collect historical data
Step #1: Choose the Relevant Keywords for Your Search
First, select the best keywords and related phrases to track conversations and gather valuable insights. Consider the following:
- Brand and product names: Monitor mentions of your brand and product names along with variations and common misspellings to keep an eye on relevant online conversations.
- Competitor keywords: Track your competition’s names and products to gain insights into their strategies.
- Industry terms: Monitoring trending topics, hashtags, and specific jargon will show you how audiences discuss your industry in general.
- Customer inquiries: These are keywords related to common customer problems in your niche.
Step #2: Look for Data in the Right Places
Before initiating your search, identify where your audiences are and direct your focus there. Social media platforms cater to different audiences and types of content and interactions, which can lead to variations in how people perceive your brand. For instance, you may find that conversations about your brand on Facebook might differ from those on LinkedIn.
To help you differentiate each platform and the data they provide, here are some key differences to consider:
- Audience demographics: Each platform attracts different user demographics. For instance, Twitter has a diverse user base that participates in real-time conversations, while LinkedIn is more popular among professionals and businesses, leading to more formal and business-oriented interactions.
- Content format: Platforms have different formats and content styles. TikTok’s short-form videos allow for fast-paced sharing of bite-sized moments and viral trends. In contrast, YouTube's longer video format allows for more in-depth video content such as tutorials, vlogs, reviews, and educational videos.
- User intent: Users choose social platforms based on their intended purpose. For example, on Facebook, users may share personal experiences and community-based interactions, while X’s (formerly Twitter) is preferred for short, frequent, and real-time posts or quick updates.
- Engagement levels: This also varies across platforms. Fast-paced and interactive platforms like Twitter and TikTok tend to drive higher user engagement, compared to LinkedIn or YouTube which focus on more in-depth discussion and exploration of topics.
Step #3: Leverage Social Monitoring Tools
Once you’ve entered your keywords, your chosen tool will continuously look for data on public social media platforms and index them. Once the sources are indexed, it will automatically search for specific brand mentions. All the information retrieved will then be consolidated on one platform for analysis.
The most important features of social monitoring tools are:
- Brand mentions: Track all instances where your brand is mentioned online.
- Keyword tracking: Monitor specific terms and phrases related to your brand and industry.
- Sentiment analysis: Categorizing positive, neutral, and negative mentions will help you better understand brand perception.
- Competitor monitoring: You can also keep an eye on your competitors’ social presence and mentions for SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis.
Step #4: Analyze Your Data
Most social media monitoring tools provide comprehensive data analysis and visualizations to help you make informed decisions about your current strategies. These include:
- Sentiment trends: Track how brand sentiment evolves over time and determine the direction of your social media strategy moving forward.
- Conversation themes: Identify highly discussed aspects of your brand and gain insights on specific consumer needs.
- Crisis detection: Monitor sudden increases in conversation volume or negative sentiment to mitigate issues before they escalate.
- Competitor benchmarking: Compare your metrics to your competitors and determine what you can do better.
- Audience segmentation: Identify specific audience segments that engage with your brand the most and tailor your messaging accordingly.
Step #5: Collect Historical Data
Most social monitoring tools allow you to save results as historical data, which serves as the baseline for analyzing trends, patterns, and changes in audience behavior over time.
Tracking shifts in public perception before, during, and after major brand-related events (e.g., product launch, brand refresh, or a PR crisis) helps you better manage your online reputation and maintain a positive brand image.
Historical data can also reveal how consumer preferences and behavior change over time. You can more easily adjust to shifting trends and identify strategies that have consistently driven engagement with your brand.
Manual Social Media Monitoring
If you have the time and prefer a hands-on approach, social monitoring can be done manually. You can simply browse your chosen social media platforms to keep track of any brand-related content. For example, you can monitor Twitter notifications to catch direct mentions of your brand or use Facebook Pages Manager to respond individually to incoming queries.
While manual monitoring is a viable option for many companies, especially small businesses and startups, others prefer a more modern and automated option. A dedicated social monitoring tool with competent AI capabilities can help streamline workflows, measure social sentiment, and alert you about cases that require action.
6 Main Benefits of Social Media Monitoring
Tracking consumer sentiment through social media scans can help you more precisely target your marketing strategies and keep up with industry trends.
Aside from this general principle, implementing a social monitoring strategy also offers the following benefits:
- Boosts customer engagement: Social monitoring allows you to promptly respond to customer inquiries or concerns and address their problems. This enhances customer satisfaction and builds stronger connections with your audience.
- Gauges brand visibility: You can monitor how often people mention your brand and how they perceive your offerings. This insight helps you assess your brand’s visibility and reputation within your market.
- Improves advertising strategies: Social media monitoring can help you measure the effectiveness of your ads by tracking audience feedback and reactions. This information can help you refine and tailor future campaigns for your target market.
- Identifies potential brand collaborators: We live in an age where social media influencers have the power to sway purchasing decisions. Monitoring consumer-based content will help improve influencer management and spot prospective creators and thought leaders to elevate your brand.
- Provides valuable insights into your industry and competitors: By keeping a close eye on industry trends and competitor activities, you can spot trends to improve your branding strategy and maintain a competitive edge in the market.
- Assists you with crisis management: If you know how your brand is perceived on social media, you can avoid problems before they even happen. You can spot early warnings that will help you deal with an emerging crisis.
5 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools
While manual social monitoring is doable, many online tools can provide automated and efficient solutions. Here are some great examples of software that can handle the complex task of monitoring brand-related content on social media:
1. Keyhole
Keyhole is a powerful social media management tool with monitoring and listening capabilities. Its features span event monitoring, influencer management, market research, and social media insights for Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
In addition to these core features, it’s equipped with account trackers that will help you keep an eye on conversations about your hashtags, keywords, and posts by your brand and your competitors.
Key Features
- Real-time monitoring across multiple platforms
- Competitor analysis
- Sentiment tracking for brand reputation management
- Historical data analysis
Pros
- Deep audience insights
- User-friendly interface
- Latest rising trends
Cons
- Relatively expensive
Pricing for Social Listening Plans
- Start: $189/month (billed monthly) or $157.50 (billed annually)
- Grow: $249/month (billed monthly) or $207.50 (billed annually)
- Scale: $449/month (billed monthly) or $374.17 (billed annually)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the most popular tools for monitoring keywords, mentions, conversations, hashtags, and other critical social media metrics. With Hootsuite, you can respond to customer interactions directly from your dashboard — removing the need to switch between different social accounts to address queries and messages. The platform also offers modules for identifying and reaching out to influencers who could be potential advocates for your brand.
Key Features
- All-in-one solution for social media management
- Multi-platform social monitoring
- Customized analytics dashboards
- Integrations with over 150 apps
Pros
- Ability to respond in real time via the dashboard
- Robust collaboration features
- Flexible pricing plans
Cons
- Social listening features are not as advanced as other tools
Pricing
- Professional: $99/month (billed annually) for 1 user and 10 social accounts
- Team: $249/month (billed annually) for 3 users and 20 social accounts
- Enterprise: custom pricing
3. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is excellent for real-time social monitoring and listening. It draws data from millions of sources, including social media, blogs, websites, forums, and so on. It’s a premium solution, but the Free Social Search option can work wonders if you’re on a tight budget.
On top of monitoring conversations about your brand, you can analyze customer engagements and identify the sentiment behind them.
Key Features
- Social listening beyond social media (blogs, forums, news sites, etc.)
- Advanced analytics
- Influencer identification
- Crisis management
Pros
- Custom dashboards and reports
- Robust competitive analysis features
- Global coverage
Cons
- Complex features require a learning curve
Pricing
- Talkwalker does not disclose pricing. Book a demo to learn more about its paid plans.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform with powerful monitoring, engagement, analytics, and team collaboration features. It is designed to help businesses manage their social media presence and improve customer interactions across various social channels.
The platform is particularly suited for teams that manage multiple social media accounts.
Key Features
- Trend and sentiment tracking in real-time
- Unified inbox for social media messages across different platforms
- Customizable and branded reporting
- Role-based permissions and collaborative tools
Pros
- Intuitive and clean interface
- Advanced reporting for data-driven decision making
- Responsive customer support via multiple channels
Cons
- Expensive
Pricing
- Standard: $249/seat/month (billed monthly) or $199/seat/month (billed annually)
- Professional: $399/seat/month (billed monthly) or $299/seat/month (billed annually)
- Advanced: $499/seat/month (billed monthly) or $399/seat/month (billed annually)
- Enterprise: custom pricing
5. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is designed to help businesses gain deep insights into ongoing social conversations and customer sentiment. It is one of the best tools for understanding brand perception, tracking trends, and analyzing data to improve campaign performance.
Key Features
- Advanced Boolean search capabilities
- Detailed audience insights
- Sentiment and emotion analysis
- Trend analysis and forecasting
Pros
- Comprehensive data coverage
- Customizable dashboards and reporting
- Image and video analysis
Cons
- Complex setup process
Pricing
Brandwatch does not disclose pricing. Book a demo to learn more about its paid plans.
5 Social Media Monitoring Best Practices
Social monitoring is essential for understanding customer sentiment and staying ahead of industry trends. To make the most of your efforts and tools, follow these best practices:
- Define SMART goals
- Analyze sentiment and context
- Engage with your audience
- Monitor and update your monitoring strategy
- Comply with privacy regulations
1. Define SMART Goals
Goal setting is crucial for the success of any business strategy, as it ensures the data you collect is aligned with your business needs. Establishing specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound goals will direct your social monitoring strategy and give you a clear roadmap for success.
For example, suppose one of your business objectives is to increase engagement metrics by 30% in the next quarter. In that case, your social monitoring strategy should center on identifying content that resonates with your audience.
2. Analyze Sentiment and Context
Merely tracking the number of mentions across social platforms is not a productive strategy for any business. Instead, you should also understand the sentiment behind these mentions and the context of these social conversations.
Sentiment analysis tools use Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to process and interpret text from collected brand mentions. They detect sentiment indicators and assign scores to words or phrases based on the expressed emotion.
For example, “love” and “great” are scored positively, while “disappointed” and “mad” are scored negatively. Some advanced tools can also identify mixed sentiments (positive and negative emotions in one post) or levels of intensity (mildly negative vs. strongly positive).
Through real-time sentiment analysis, you can:
- Monitor how audiences react to new marketing campaigns, product launches, or emerging crises
- Capitalize on positive reactions by using them as social proof
- Quickly respond to negative feedback and address emerging issues.
- Consistently gauge public opinion to maintain a positive brand perception over time.
- Identify emerging audience needs.
3. Engage With Your Audience
Social monitoring involves responding productively to your audience, whether they have good or bad things to say about your brand and its offerings. Engage consistently and promptly to demonstrate that you value your audience and are eager to provide what they need.
A tool like Buffer consolidates all unanswered comments on one dashboard and highlights the most important ones for you to answer. Maintain a consistent brand voice in all responses and focus on providing what customers are asking for.
4. Monitor and Update Your Monitoring Strategy
Social media trends and audience behavior change drastically over time, so your monitoring strategy should adapt accordingly:
- Keyword refresh: Add or remove tracked terms and phrases to reflect industry trends, new product lines, and ever-changing customer discussions around your brand.
- Sentiment analysis: Use advanced tools that can detect more nuances in online conversations, like sarcasm, memes, and mixed sentiments.
- Platform coverage: Ensure your monitoring strategy covers new platforms that your audience shifts to.
- Crisis management: Apply the lessons you’ve learned over time and regularly update your crisis management plan to handle negative shifts in audience perception.
Regular reviews and updates help you capture relevant audience data and guide your adjustments.
5. Comply With Privacy Regulations
Nowadays, having robust data privacy is crucial to establishing and maintaining consumer trust. To provide user privacy and avoid issues, comply with the following laws and regulations:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): Businesses must obtain explicit consent from users before collecting, processing, or sharing personal data. It applies to any company that processes the personal data of EU citizens.
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA): Users can request to know what personal data is being collected and how it is being used.
- Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA): Businesses must obtain consent for the collection, use, and disclosure of personal information.
Social Monitoring Takeaways
Social media monitoring is an essential business practice that helps you stay in the loop with how billions of online users perceive your brand. By tracking relevant social media conversations, you can elevate your branding strategy and improve how your business interacts with both prospective and existing customers.
Outsourcing the services of the top social media marketing agencies can help you with this.
Social Media Monitoring FAQs
1. Why do brands use social media monitoring?
Brands use social media monitoring to:
- Manage their online reputation
- Gain insights into customer opinions and behavior
- Analyze competitors and stay ahead in the market
- Identify influencers for broader brand reach
- Improve content strategy and engagement
- Handle crises and emergencies
2. What is an example of social media monitoring?
An example of social media monitoring is using a tool like Sprout Social to track brand mentions across various platforms, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. This allows businesses to discover and analyze what people say about the brand, identify emerging trends, and respond to customer inquiries or concerns in real time.
3. How can I monitor my social media for free?
Many social media monitoring tools provide free trials or basic plans. You can also monitor social media manually, which is entirely free. Simply look up your brand or product name on different platforms to find and assess people’s opinions and feedback.
