Social Media Monitoring: choosing the right tools for the job. Part 1 – Research

We get asked about social media monitoring a lot – when should we use it? Why should we use it? Do we really need it? What tools should we use? This blog forms the first part of a series which will explore social media monitoring and hopefully answer some frequently asked questions.

What is Social Media Monitoring?

In a nutshell, for those of you who aren’t familiar with it, social media monitoring is the process of scanning the various online social media channels such as forums, blogs, in the comment sections of articles posted online, on content sharing sites such as Vimeo, YouTube or Flickr, and social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, to find where people are engaging in conversations about a particular subject.

Why use monitoring?

There are 3 different areas where social media monitoring is important, and it is important to split these out because each area may require different tools. The 3 different areas are:

• Research;
• Ongoing usage; and
• Reporting

These apply to ANY social media based project you are involved in, whether it is a content driven project, an online community, or the creation of a social media site.

In this blog I’m going to look at the area of ‘Research’, with the intention of finding out what is going on in the social media space that we are interested in. Research is vital for finding out which subjects we should be creating content about, and where we should be starting / joining conversations in order to engage with our customers or peers.

What information should be gathered during the ‘Research’ phase of Social Media Monitoring?

When researching a subject we need to look for the following information:

• What types of conversations are happening in the social media space about the subjects we are interested in?
• Are there any questions in particular that are being asked by potential customers or peers which aren’t currently being answered either directly or through blog content?
• Who is participating in these conversations?
• What social sites are these conversations happening on?
• Are people already talking about us as a company?
• Are people already talking about our products?

 

How to use social media monitoring for ‘Research’

The process for using social media monitoring for research purposes should follow a method similar to that outlined in the diagram above.

Basically we input keywords into search engines to find places online where conversations are happening that relevant to the subject area we are interested in. We then monitor these conversations and find similarities in topics between them or ‘trends’ in conversation. We create a list of these ‘trends’ which gives us our keywords. We can then use these keywords to find other ‘trending’ topics that are relevant to the people we want to target and engage with.

To put all of the above into context, here is an example. If we are in the business of providing tablet PCs to the market, we might find that there is a lot of discussion on that subject on www.tabletpcs.com – so we then investigate that site to see what kind of questions are being asked, and which keywords are being used. We might find that ‘Tablet Performance’ ‘Laptop Vs Tablet’ and ‘Tablet screensize’ are very common subject areas.

So we note these as subjects we may wish to create some content about, and go back to the start, using these are search strings so we can find out where else they are being discussed, which will lead to other conversational areas.

And so our research continues in this loop, building a wider and more comprehensive set of information which comprises more sites which may be of interest, and more conversational subjects and keywords, and so on. We can then also repeat this process for our own company and its products, and that of each of our competitors if we want to find out customers’ opinions on each and ways to develop, expand or improve on our product, services or other offering.

What types of tools are available for us to use for monitoring?

There are hundreds of different tools out there which we can use for monitoring, so I’m not going to go into each one but it would be useful to explain the 3 main types:

The first is the collection of tools and utilities which everyone is most likely to be familiar with, such as Google, Bing, Google Alerts, the search facility in Twitter, etc. The good news is that they are free, and the bad news is that they can be quite limiting in that they are typically only looking at one particular ‘channel’ of the social media landscape.

The next level is either tools which can combine the results from other sources (dashboarding tools such as www.netvibes.com) or free search engines which will look at multiple channels with one search (such as www.socialmention.com or www.whostalkin.com) – these are also mostly free to use and can be very useful.

Finally, the top level is made up of ‘Enterprise Level’ monitoring tools (market leaders are Radian6, but there are many others). These carry a licensing fee, which may imply they are superior to the previous two groups, but as we’ll see in this series of posts, this is not always the case.

So what should I choose for Research?

The enterprise level of monitoring tools will certainly allow us to undertake social media monitoring for research purposes, but they are certainly not essential for this phase of a social media project. In fact the overhead of getting the search terms right for these tools (which can take some time) in a process where you are frequently changing them, could well take longer.

So our recommendation is always that it is usually best to use whatever you are familiar with, and this will come down to the standard search engines, one of the blog searching tools, and perhaps something like socialmention. This is because most of this research is ‘stop-start’ research – alternating between some quick searches and human analysis of the results, so although either investing in the setup and configuration of the freely available monitoring tools, or the financial investment in Enterprise level monitoring tools may well be important later in the project, at this stage there is no great need to invest in these things.

In part 2 we’ll look at the role of social media monitoring for ongoing usage as part of a social media project, the role of a ‘Corporate DJ’, and the necessary tools that are required for this project phase.