Ahead of this weeks Edinburgh Social Media Meetup, where there is the potential for me discussing Social Media Monitoring (SMM), I thought I would put some ideas (mostly other peoples!) and links down for people to check out. Having in a past life worked in SMM, it is an area that still interests me and which I am passionate about, in terms of the benefits for individuals and businesses of all sizes.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
If you’ve ever searched twitter for tweets about your football team, your favourite band or your business, then you’ve already carried some SMM of your own! If we go to the font of all knowledge that is wikipedia and search for SMM it redirects you to ‘Social Media Measurement’ and defines this as ‘the tracking of various social media content such as blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, social networks, video/photo sharing websites, forums, message boards, and user generated content in general as a way for marketers to determine the volume and sentiment around a brand or topic in social media” I think this definition is just about right but I think that monitoring social media benefits more groups than just marketers.
Benefits of SMM for individuals
- Career/job – I search for content around marketing and advertising to keep up to date with what’s happening in my industry; top stories, best people/accounts to follow
- Find Content to share – if you are monitoring for a certain topic you can find interesting content to share and use to build your own following
- Networking – find people and events for networking
Benefits of SMM to businesses
- New customers – In my past role we would monitor social media for people using the term social media monitoring and potentially contact them if we thought that they could use our services. This works equally well if you are a small business for example an electrician can monitor for the words elecrician and the area that he works in and will find people asking for reccomendations on good electricians
- Monitor your market place – keep up to date with what is happening in your market place
- Monitor competitors – what mentions do your competition get in social media? what are they doing in social media?
- Monitor Own Mentions – are people talking about your business in social media? If not why not? is this a good thing? if they are what are they saying about your business?
These are just a small selection of the benefits, Radian6, one of the biggest SMM companies published an article about 100 ways to use SMM which can be seen here
How I monitor Social Media
As I said before If you have ever gone on to Twitter and searched for tweets about your football team or favourite band then you’ve already done some social media monitoring of your own, taking this a step further there are some great free tools that you can use. Social Brite put up a good list of their recommends and how they can be used.
Google Alerts – I run the twitter account for my Rugby Club so I set up some Google alerts and this tells me whenever the rugby club gets mentioned in the news, twitter etc this gives me good content to share and highlights tweets/mentions I might have missed. Check out the video below
Hootsuite – I use Hootsuite to monitor my own social accounts and at work I use it to monitor mentions of my clients. Hootsuite allows you to set up searches,which are there waiting for you when you log in to hootsuite. At work I use this to monitor mentions of my clients and for the rugby club I use this to monitor hashtags and conversations to find people that I might want to engage with. Hootsuite is more than just monitoring though as it allows management of your social profiles including scheduling and link tracking. The best place to find out more is at the Hootsuite Website
Social Mention – This is a social search tool which can help you see where you’ve been mentioned but also offers some sentiment, keyword and influencer analysis.
Topsy – I use this in conjunction with Social Mention as it offers some different analysis like graphs of mentions over time.
Hopefully these ramblings and the links included will be a good starting point for having a chat later this week! Always keen to check out new things not covered here as well so leave a comment if there’s something you think I might be interested in.
scotttfraser 