What is social monitoring?

At a high level, social media monitoring is used to assess and quantify the popularity of a brand or company. It's crucial to have an understanding of how your company, brand, product, or campaign is being received, and social monitoring gives you a unique "fly on the wall" perspective from which to base that understanding. 

The basics of social monitoring

At Bellomy, when we talk about social monitoring, we see it as fairly narrow in scope — focused on a company, brand, product, or campaign. It's often reactive and quite frankly table stakes. We don't mean to belittle social monitoring because it's an incredibly crucial first step into the world of social research, but from our point-of-view social can do so much more than monitoring online conversations.

Measuring social activity

Metrics are at the heart of monitoring as they easily allow for an at-a-glance understanding of vast amounts of unstructured data and major changes in conversation. The most common metrics are:

• Net sentiment: a score that expresses the ratio of positive to negative attitude about a topic, on a scale of -100 (all opinions are negative) to +100 (all opinions are positive)
• Volume of conversation: how many total mentions there are around your brand or topic online with filtering for comments, retweets, and potential views or "impressions"

Depending on your specific use case, it could be important to keep tabs on:

• Conversation intensity: a score that expresses the relative strength of emotions (such as "love" or "hate") on a scale
• Impressions: the number of views

Going beyond social monitoring

As we mentioned, social monitoring is just the tip of the social insights iceberg. In a competitive brand vs. brand landscape, your marketing team needs to be aware of how and how often people are talking about you and your offerings. But what if your brand wants to broaden the scope and depth of learning about the consumers they serve? That is when you enter the realm of social listening.

Our social listening team works with brands and companies that are interested in creatively imagining their future state and competitive set. Throughout our years of social analytics experience, we have seen the power behind organic, unfiltered consumer chatter to drive consumer insight and innovation. Our social analytics experts can harness the power of social listening to allow your company (be that B2B or B2C) to spot budding trends, reveal unmet needs, discover pain points, and much more.