What to monitor in social media?

Engaging in social media and having a standard public presence doesn’t always mean the channel you are engaging with is successful for you and your company. Social media efforts should also analyze, monitor and determine which platforms are beneficial for you and your company. Monitoring your social efforts provides you with an opportunity to keep an eye on trending in your strategy, and allows you to make educated decisions to improve your channels. The social and online landscape is constantly evolving, so being aware of real-time changes allows you to adapt and capitalize on opportunities.

Social monitoring dashboards allow our social media managers and clients to observe trends, sentiment, and ensures that our engagement and content strategies are on target. After looking at the social media space, we tie web analytics into these dashboards to understand how and what the web is doing based on clients’ social efforts.

When analyzing analytics, we first tackle the type of traffic that’s driving to clients’ websites from their social channels. We look to see how much traffic is driving to the sites from these social networks each month. If Facebook is driving the most traffic, maybe that’s where they should spend the majority of their time and energy. Perhaps they’ve put their efforts into a Facebook Ad and that’s where the most traffic is coming from. It’s important to know what your efforts are producing and tying the measurements back to the tactics.

Another important metric in social media monitoring is sentiment. Are the responses to your posts positive, negative or neutral? While everyone loves positive messages, it’s important to drill into the negative messages. By drilling into these messages, you can see why people have a negative tone, choose to engage with them publically or privately and turn antagonists into your company’s positive influencers. 

These are two of the many metrics that you can consider when monitoring social media. When you understand these metrics and how they tie into your social strategy, it can help evolve and move your overall social media and online plan forward. We use the data to drive insights and recommend a more focused strategy for our clients to return a positive ROI.