The Social Media Monitoring Funnel

In my opinion, social media monitoring is one of the most important aspects to any Internet marketing initiative today. Tight integration with offline and online campaigns is a necessity and organizations need to have the right procedures in place to fully take advantage of conversation about themselves and their competitors online.

The following is a guide to social media monitoring. Before I get into the nuts and bolts of the article, I want to emphasize that each company needs its own strategic thought and implementation – and that no two companies should have identical forms of monitoring. Each brand is different, each website is different, and where people talk about your company and what is being said is going to vary. With that in mind, I present to you the Social Media Monitoring Funnel.

The Social Media Monitoring Funnel offers you a pragmatic approach to understanding the complex world of monitoring.

Social Media Monitoring Funnel

Social Monitoring Tools

Establish which tools you want to use to capture the conversation, whether they are paid or free custom solutions. The tools you decide to use will impact the rest of the social media monitoring funnel, so choose carefully.

Keyword Targeting

Implement specific keywords that allow you to monitor your brand, target significant players in your organization, and keep tabs on your competition. This is also a point of entry in the funnel where you should be doing ongoing optimizations to refine your keyword data set.

Noise Elimination

Eliminate spam sites that litter your feed and remove off topic mentions by building out negative key phrase lists. Blacklist specific sites that you do not want appearing in your feed.

Refined Mentions

Utilize your refined mention feed – watch the conversation. This is also an entry point of the funnel where most of the day-to-day monitoring takes place. Read, analyze and act.

Analysis

Apply sentiment analysis manually if your system is not doing it automatically – you need to measure the overall health of your brand if there is enough conversation going on. Group your mentions together in a holistic manner, facilitating portable data transfer within your organization.

Take Action

Take action when needed – make sure the proper people inside your organization are acting and engaging the social web where your conversation is happening. If you are not applying manual analysis, then this part will be difficult. If you feel like your stream of mentions is not optimal enough, then go back through and tweak your keyword targeting at this point. Once you have constructed your plan, you will want to rinse and repeat. Read the refined mentions, analyze them and act accordingly.

Download the PDF Here
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Keep an eye out for more in depth social media monitoring analysis in the coming weeks.



Ignite Social Media