IMarks Blog 10 Unique Insights to Look For in Your Social Media Monitoring

One of the most fascinating things about social media is its ability to clue you in to things that you might otherwise have had no idea even existed-there are tons of conversations, communities, articles and so much more just waiting to be discovered online.The trick is: How do you find all of the information online that's relevant to you and your interests and bring it back in such a way that you can make use of it all?The answer, for many brands and individuals, is social media monitoring. With the tools and strategies of basic social media monitoring, you can always keep an eye on whatever's important to you, wherever it is on the web.Social media monitoring-sometimes also referred to as social media listening-is more than simply responding when you're mentioned online. The best social media monitoring strategies not only help surface conversations but also help you understand them more deeply so you know how best to use the knowledge you gain.You might use social media monitoring for many different reasons-to find great content to curate for your audience, to keep an eye on your competitors or other folks in your space, to provide amazing customer service, to look for opportunities to grow and improve your products or service, or maybe all of these!For all the benefits and opportunities social media monitoring provides, it's a surprisingly small investment of time and energy. You don't have to spend hours a day to get all the benefits. All you need is the right plan in place - and a few tools to make sure everything you want to see is coming in, with all the noise filtered out. Here's a quick guide to help you get started reaping all the benefits of social media monitoring.Step 1: What to monitor?The first step is to know what's worthwhile to monitor and what types of searches will net you the best results. It might take a bit of trial and error, but here are some ideas of where you might want to begin.Brand or company monitoring Your name or your brand's name Any variations of your brand's name (For example, I would want to monitor both "Buffer" and "Bufferapp" for my brand) Potential misspellings of your brand's name Names of the most active/visible members of your company Mentions of specific campaigns you're running Your catchphrase, slogan or tagline Industry or topic monitoring Key words or phrases that describe your industry or interest (For example, at Buffer I might want to monitor for key phrases like "social media sharing," "social media posting" and "social media automation" to start out) Key words or phrases related to or complementary to your industry or interest Frequently used industry hashtags Step 2: How to monitor? Choose your toolsOnce you've got an idea of why you're entering social media monitoring and what you want to monitor, you'll want to enter your searches into a tool that can keep an eye on your queries for you and serve up the results. There are tons of social media monitoring tools out there - here's a giant wiki of lots of them. For our purposes today, [...]