5 Best Practices of Social Media Monitoring

5 min read

Using a social media monitoring has three important areas: setting up a project, monitoring mentions and responding to them. They seem pretty straightforward, yet, if handled improperly, can cause a headache. Therefore, I prepared the bestest of the best practices for social media monitoring.

It sometimes happens that social media monitoring tools fall short of customer expectations. There are at least two reasons for it: incorrect approach to the tool and unawareness of how to use it properly.

Such disappointments, however, can easily be avoided with a bit of guidance.

Below you’ll find a couple of social media monitoring best practices you can implement right away – using social media monitoring tools like Brand24 should become more effective now.

1. Project set-up.

What can go wrong here? Trust me, there are some tiny yet significant details that make a huge difference.

Let’s talk about best practices for setting a social media monitoring project – you wouldn’t believe how many customers have problems at this stage.


► Create your free account


Once you create your account, a project creation wizard pops up – providing the right keywords is vital to the quality of data social media monitoring returns and, in the long run, its effectiveness.

Best practices for setting up a project in Brand24 social media monitoring tool

Project creation is extremely important as it sets foundations for your further actions. Only with a correctly optimized project you can bring the most out of social media monitoring.

If you’re a new business to social media monitoring and want to use social media monitoring to monitor mentions about your company from social media, websites, blogs, discussion forums and other publicly available sources online, below are recommended keywords to monitor:

  • Company name
  • Company Twitter handle
  • Company Instagram handle
  • Compay hashtag
  • Product name

It’s worth mentioning,

Here’s what you need to beware of while creating a project:

  • Typos: make sure there’s no typos, spaces or missing spaces
  • Too long phrases: the longer the phrase, the more specific it is – you might unnecessarily narrow down the context and miss out on some mentions.
  • Generic keywords: do you mean Brooklyn the beer company, or Brooklyn in NYC? If any keyword you want to monitor is both a common word and your company / product / whatever name at the same time, you need to exclude / include specific words to narrow down the context.

    To do so, you provide Required / Excluded keywords. Below I added beer as a required keyword so that Brand24 collects only mentions about Brooklyn the beer.Best practices for social media monitoring

  • Language filter: always remember to choose the right language filter. Otherwise, your dashboard might fill with spamy and irrelevant mentions.

2. Monitoring other keywords: industry and competitors.

One of other best practices involves monitoring other keywords relevant to your business – it will give you a broader picture of what’s going on in your industry which basically equals business intelligence, including:

  • New trends
  • New products
  • New competitors
  • Important events

It’s equally important to monitor your competitors. It’s pretty simple – your project has to monitor keywords similar to your own project, namely:

  • Company name
  • Company Twitter handle
  • Company Instagram handle
  • Compay hashtag
  • Product name

    Keeping an eye on your competitors is super important. Knowing what your competitors do, you can:

    • Identify their pain points
    • Spot emerging threats
    • Identify market opportunities

Social media monitoring tools like Brand24 allow project comparison wich comes useful for comparing your and your competitor’s marketing efforts – the number of mentions, social media reach of conversations, hashtags or marketing campaigns.

3. Use notifications.

Always stay on top of your mentions – this way you won’t miss any relevant pieces of content talking about your business online.

There’s couple of options to never skip a mention.

Email notifications

There are at least two types of mentions you need to be notified about:

  • Negative mentions
    To get notified about them, inside a project, go to your Project settings.

    Setting up notifications about negative mentions for your project is a best practice for social media monitoring
    Inside, click the Notifications tab. Then, click Add more notifications.
    One of best practices in social media monitoring is setting up notifications about negative mentions
    Then, a popup will appear. Enter the filter’s name, i.e. Negative mentions, and switch SENTIMENT FILTER to negative. Click Save.
    Setting up email notifications about negative mentions
    From now on, all negative mentions will arrive to your inbox in real time.

  • Massive increases in the number of mentions or social media reach

    One of best practices for social media monitoring is to get notified about sudden spikes in mentions volume and social media reach.

    This feature is called Storm Alerts. In short, you provide a percentage of change in the number of mentions and social media reach Brand24 will email you about.

    Storm Alerts are one of best practices in social media monitoring
    Learn more about Storm Alerts and set them up for your project.

Slack integration

If you and your team communicate on Slack, you can receive new mentions in one of your Slack’s channels. It’s the most convenient way to stay up to speed with new mentions.

Slack integration

Mobile app

Brand24 is one of few social media monitoring tools with a mobile app. The app has push notifications that you can set to inform you about each new mention.

Learn more about the app here.

4. Create groups.

Grouping your mentions will help you separate them into different categories, for example:

  • Mentions from customers seeking assistance
  • Mentions containing customer feedback
  • Mentions about your competitors
  • Mentions from influencers
  • Negative / positive mentions
  • Months

Necessity is the mother of invention here – categories are completely up to you.

5. Respond.

Collecting mentions is one thing.

Another important part of social media monitoring is responding to your mentions.

Some mentions may contain comments from disappointed customers, customers seeking, assistance, influencers talking about your business, media talking about your business or happy customers praising your product – make sure you respond to them.

Customer engagement one o

Reaching out to audience talking about your company is extremely important. This is how you build customer relationships and improve their experience.

Remember that a happy customer is the best advertisement.

Conclusion

These are just some best practices you should have in mind as a user of a social media monitoring tool.

Log into your dashboard or create a free account to test them out. It’s absolutely free. No credit card required!

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