Monitoring Social Media

It is great having different types of social media platforms but as a business it is important to see what return you are getting investing your time, energy and resources into maintaining social media platforms and using them as a tool to create awareness and sales generation for your business. 

To best understand if the strategy and social media tactics are working you need to have defined measurables in place to understand if your preferred platform has its cheques and balances.  Not only for your own company but to see what your competitors and authoritive industry leaders are experiencing.

Like most things social media has a life cycle and if one understands this it can be easier to evaluate and monitor the process. Firstly a platform is chosen, set objectives and measurable are agreed upon. Once the platform is operational it is analyzed and either it is improved upon or eliminated and so the process starts again.

 What we need to do is establish the best forms of monitoring. There are different monitors for different types of social media, ie wordpress, google analytics, YouTube Yahoo Alerts but which one is best for your social media being used? This is something every company should ask and try and stick to the monitoring tool that suits them specifically.

To add to why we monitor we need to understand why we are using the platform we are using. Ie: is it for branding, SEO, Customer services, lead generation etc. The long and the short, everything is intertwined be sure you can see the outcome before just implementing a social medium because everyone else is doing it!

by Lianne du Toit