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Twitter, Facebok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr, delicious, digg, myspace, google+… the list could go on and on and on. Social media has transformed our culture and is growing at a rapid pace. But what is all this talk about social media monitoring? Many believe that social media monitoring is necessary to be aware of certain things that are going on world-wide. Social media monitoring is beneficial to organizations as it helps them to regulate and monitor what conversations are taking place. This helps organizations to have the ability to know specific interests of those that are in the organizations immediate conversations. Social media monitoring can also help search references to specific brands, campaigns, or actions.
There are some tools that can help your organization, but they do have limitations. It is important to remember that not all aspects of social media and the web are accessible, especially a lot of portions of Facebook.
Some forms of social media monitoring are simply recognizing certain key words that are used often. For instance, google uses this approach. This is the most simple form of monitoring and is referred to as counts.
Another form of social media monitoring is referred to as trends. This is something that has been very effective within Twitter with the hashtag feature. This helps brands to recognize and identify trends that could potentially help them with their marketing and campaign launches.
Though social media monitoring is a good idea, it is much more expensive than they initially thought it would be. I think that social media monitoring can be beneficial to organizations, but I believe that you must be very careful in your monitoring in order to ensure that your results are accurate. Most brands have felt the need to monitor what is being said about them, and I believe that it is important to listen to your clientele and make the necessary changes to please them. Your customers are your business, and they need to be a first priority.
Really well written post, Mikelle! With the magnitude of all the different social media, it is definitely helpful to businesses and brands for it to be organized in SOME capacity. Especially for them to filter what is being said directly about them. This helps them help US by delivering to the customers what we want.