Social media monitoring is great, but how do I deal with it? All I get each month is a long list of things people have said. What do I do with that?

This surprised me. Social media monitoring is about much more than just gathering the data. It’s what you do with this data once it’s gathered that makes the real difference.

 Any good social media monitoring campaign should have three core elements:

1. Gathering information

This isn’t just as simple as using Google alerts, a back-links search tool, or even an enterprise-level sentiment analysis package. There are many places online that these tools just won’t reach, namely anywhere behind a log-in and password. That rules out Facebook, most forums and many online communities. These are often the most interesting places to find mentions of your brand, product or other terms you’re interested in.

If you want to get a full and complete picture you need to combine some of these excellent tools with analyst time. Find out and then track where people hang out talking about your brand and make sure you have a presence there. This is an ideal role for your community manager to play as part of a hub-and-spoke model of social media engagement. The human element to gathering information means that you start to really understand not just where people are saying things, but in what context.

2. Understanding what is being said

As the lady who spoke up in the conference last week showed, it is all very well having great social media monitoring in place, but if all you end up with is a long list of mentions then this may never end up being useful to you. You need to analyse the mentions, conversations and discussions that are taking place online to make sure that your business is really getting benefit. This may be something that you do manually, or it may be something that you do using text analysis tools. But you need to analyse what is said to understand:

• the themes and topics that people are discussing online, how these change and how they interact
• the people who are talking about you and how they can be segmented
• who is talking about you positively and who is talking about you negatively

3. Knowing when to respond and who to monitor

One of the real benefits of social media monitoring is when you then use the information you have to monitor people and join or respond to conversations where relevant. We’ve written about this before. Knowing when and how to react if somebody writes about your brand online is important for anybody embarking on a process of social media monitoring. If you find a post that needs responding to, you should have a policy in place to know how you should respond. Further when you find people talking either extremely positively, or extremely negatively, about your brand online it is important to have mechanisms in place to monitor and track them. You want to know who likes your brand and who dislikes it so you are ready to respond to them when relevant. This is even more important if these people are influential. Our recent post looked at how to use Twitter Lists as a free social media monitoring tool to do just this.

So social media monitoring is much more than just the tools you might use or the list of mentions, discussions and conversations you might get from them. That’s just the starting point. More important is how you analyse them and what you do with what you find. This is the bit that is less easy, but reaps greater reward for your brand.