Social media monitoring is able to advise communicators as to the success of their strategies and inform them of potential reputational crises. Pritcia Wongwaisayawan analyses the capabilities of monitoring techniques.

Social media has developed to become one of the most important and efficient forms of communication in the 21st century. It is undeniably the fastest way of sharing information, and with its widespread reach, it makes for an advantageous option for brands to connect with their audiences.

In the early wave of social media monitoring, “When brands were first taking the plunge into social and wanting to know what people were saying elsewhere about them” as Joel Windels, VP inbound marketing at Brandwatch, a Brighton-based social media monitoring company, says, “The focus was merely on Facebook or Twitter interactions on the brand’s page”. The initial aim was to use social networking services, alongside other technologies, to increase brand awareness and experience. But as it continuously evolves, social media now not only serves its purpose as a way for people to easily connect, and for brands to provide viral marketing to consumers, but also to give way to more perceptive analysis of what happens across platforms.

“For brands, social media has become one of the best ways to engage with consumers. It’s interactive and instantaneous and can be used across the business, from marketing, to sales and customer service. But the real value of social media lies in its treasure trove of real-time intelligence and this is where social media monitoring comes into play”, says Liliana Osorio, EMEA marketing manager at social media analytics company, Crimson Hexagon.

The basis of social media monitoring is simply sending crawlers into the server to detect and collect anything concerning the brand. These crawlers can only access public content and because, “Each social media platform deploys a different privacy policy, it becomes a huge factor in the ability to analyse the data,” says Osorio. Regulations around crawlers on websites with stricter privacy settings, make it harder for brands to do their own social media monitoring as they would have to arrange specific relationships and agreements with each site.

Twitter is known to be the most open source platform, “Allowing developers to access their data via Fabric” says Melanie Dichtl, EMEA marketing manager at Hootsuite, a major social media management firm, and is deemed by many as the most useful to brands considering it is easy to monitor. But depending on the objective of the brand, this may not be the most important platform to monitor; it all depends “To a large degree on the audiences they are targeting and where they spend the most time,” says Ben Mason, head of social at creative agency, Unity. “Kylie Jenner’s latest lip kit may trend well on Twitter, but ultimately it is her Instagram audience that shares and drives her popularity because her posts are visually led”.

Instagram is said to currently be the best place to genuinely engage with consumers, yet it can be tricky for monitoring. “Its easy for brands to monitor the performance of specific hashtags, but similarly to Facebook, it’s not yet possible to access information from private accounts,” Mason says. “Facebook’s personal and closed nature (rightfully so, given the content and conversations often shared on it) makes it terrible for monitoring.” Additionally, if brands are looking to connect with Gen Z, things become even more complicated. “It’s difficult enough to market on Snapchat, the preferred app of 2016 between young adults, and close to impossible to monitor it,” Mason adds.

There is also currently “No way of monitoring private conversations such as on WhatsApp or Facebook messenger,” says Windels. “But there are platforms such as Pylon which takes some private data, anonymises it and puts it in aggregate form to allow a broader analysis.” This is where monitoring companies, such as Crimson Hexagon and Brandwatch, have a slight advantage because they already have arranged relationships with different platforms, and in Crimson Hexagon’s case, developed a large data library that consists of over 800bn social posts from a variety of sources.

Although monitoring a brand’s social media through these supply businesses may make things easier, there are also companies that have taken more organic approaches and set up their own successful social media monitoring programmes. Asda, for example, created and followed a methodical five-year plan that included listening and monitoring, awareness of when to build relationships, content creation and the development of an interactive website to name a few. It created Twitter handles and hashtags that would trend with customers and progressed with an interactive customer service site. It found that it is key for brands to have a clear content strategy, as they have to seriously consider who they are and what they stand for in order to not blindly follow the crowd or daily buzz. Asda’s mantra, when it comes to measuring the success of social media is, ‘Fans are for vanity, engagement is sanity,” because direct relationships and consumer engagement is deemed as increasingly important.

Creative agencies such as Unity, are also using social media monitoring with their clients. “We live in a day and age where reactions to questions and concerns are increasingly expected to be instantaneous, human and productive. Where reputations are made or lost on a brand’s ability to deliver on this. When we combine live monitoring with a campaign providing exclusive and compelling reasons to engage (and rewards for doing so) then you can start to drive real perception change,” says Mason.

Adam Clyne, EMEA head of digital at major international PR firm Weber Shandwick says, “Every social strategy should align to the organisation’s broader marketing and commercial strategy, so it should change for every business, brand or organisation. It should never be generic to a sector. But with that said, the underlining principle for every social campaign must be that it has impact. Every single post, tweet, image or video must deliver something meaningful, or else don’t bother!”

Steven Murgatroyd, engage consultant at business and tech consultancy WM360, says “One person searching Twitter isn’t social media monitoring. if you don’t do it properly, then you can waste a lot of time and effort for not a lot of results. You have to invest properly and take it seriously, then it’ll fundamentally improve your business.”

"Social media helps us reach beyond traditional networks. And thanks to monitoring, we know what our followers online care about, and we know when they engage"

Social media monitoring could also be developed much greater than merely following online conversations surrounding a brand and its competitors, by properly analysing the true interest of its consumers in order to be able to focus content that appeals to them. Osorio also says that monitoring has progressed past simple engagement, “Brands can now source actionable insights that can be used for various business purposes.” This is beneficial because brands can now better “Understand the landscape of conversation, topics, trends, influencers etc., but also find out more about audience and demographics and protect the brand’s reputation,” says Dichtl. Murgatroyd says companies should “Be honest, open and transparent and listen to their audience and react.”

With monitoring focused more on the engagement between the brand and its consumer, Clyne adds, “More and more, B2B communication is mirroring B2C in style and tone. A consumer watching Question Time on the couch is just as likely to tweet an opinion on the content as someone attending a trade conference with a guest speaker.” This emphasises the importance of social listening for brands in both forms engagement and communications.

Brand protection monitoring is also becoming increasingly important. “This side of monitoring is vital for brands as any degrading content online can have a direct impact on reputation and profits,” says Dichtl. Brands could also use it as a tool to prepare for crisis management. Windels gives the example of Target, an American big box retailer, that unthinkingly named its plus-sized dress ‘manatee grey’ while the same dress in regular sizes was called ‘dark heather grey.’ With social media monitoring and real-time analysis, the retailer was able to contact and apologise to the unhappy customer who tweeted about it, fix the name on the website, properly handle the problem and put out a communications plan around it before any journalists got the news out.

Mason says, “Getting real-time feedback on the activity of your brand is something to harness in order to drastically improve service and make genuine and real connections to your customers. Consumer engagement is starting to help shape the way a brand thinks about itself, and this is starting to influence the products and services it offers. This is starting to give social networks genuine influence, rather than just a more guaranteed way to get customer service.” This also adds value to the brand-to-consumer communications and creates more brand-to-brand interaction with social media monitoring suppliers.

But not all businesses benefit entirely from monitoring. The Musician’s Union (MU), for example, gained certain knowledge from monitoring yet often requires more direct engagement with its members. It uses social media to “Reach people in between magazine issues, inform them of new developments, get them campaigning and sharing ideas,” says campaigns and public affairs officer, Maddy Radcliff. “Social media helps [us] reach beyond traditional networks, get the MU out there to potential members and cement our place in the wider music industry and trade union movement. And thanks to monitoring, we know what our followers online care about, and we know when they engage.

Knowing the interests and locations of our followers have also been massively useful. It became clear that certain groups of musicians – by genre and geography – were not as well represented as they should be on social media. That’s really important given that we are a trade union and democracy, equality, fairness are all core values. So we were able to direct efforts to boost that.”

However, its audience is not solely on social media. As a membership organisation and a trade union, it puts its members first and foremost, and checks on how communications works; this may not be immediately evident on social media monitoring tools, and could even become misleading. Radcliff says, “One thing that doesn’t work so well is measuring sentiment with monitoring tools. People often contact us because they have a problem, such as a legal issue or question about their career. Social media monitoring tools register that as negative when, in reality, the act of helping and supporting them is a really positive engagement. The same thing happens with campaigns – as part of our ‘Work Not Play’ campaign, we ask people to share instances of being asked to work for free. It’s negative. But the discussions and increased awareness that comes out of that is actually empowering.”

It is important to keep in mind the audiences relevant to each sector and how brands should best engage with them because a combination of social media monitoring alongside an alternative way of engagement may be the most beneficial. Successful companies focus on only the most useful platforms for their sector.

“As social media use continues to evolve with the Millennial generation preferring to share content more privately, monitoring will continue to change as more platforms take the route of Facebook in ‘selling’ anonymous data,” says Dichtl. Clyne agrees, “The days of simply broadcasting to audiences are now over. This is the era of engagement marketing and this starts by listening.”