"Social Media for Strategic Communication" Ch. 5

In Chapter 5 we learned about the differences between listening and monitoring in social media. Listening is about learning, exploring and uncovering emerging trends, opportunities, activities and issues that could impact the company either positively or negatively. Monitoring is the systematic process of understanding, analyzing and reporting insights and conversations on reputation, brand position, community health and opinion of key audience members virtually. Social media monitoring also means tuning in every day and carefully listening to what people say anywhere online, about a person, brand and products. Media monitoring provides you with a powerful market insight by allowing you to see who's doing the talking, what they're saying and where they are saying it. It's important to let your community know you care.

When you have proper data in front of you, you can analyze the information to make informed decisions about how you promote on social media in order to achieve maximum engagement. All of this contributes to increasing sales. There are helpful tools you can use to easily monitor your social media accounts. Keyhole helps you monitor your Twitter and Instagram accounts by looking at keywords, hashtags, URLs and usernames. There are even heat maps that show you activity levels in certain parts of the world. A few of the more popular programs I've been told about are Hootsuite, Sprout Social and Buffer. Hootsuite and Buffer allow you to schedule content which comes in handy if you have a lot of content to post throughout the day with little time to do it. Sprout Social allows you to publish posts to a dashboard so you can collaborate with your team better.

Social media is impossible to monitor and listen to all on your own. You need to have tools that can help you feed the content monster and form the data for you. Both monitoring and listening are necessary for a social media campaign or initiative. You cannot not do one and ignore the other.