Week 6- Social Monitoring

With the rise of social media, businesses have never had a more direct access to the views of the people. When making social media posts about businesses or people, there are ways for those companies to be able to see what people are saying about them. This process is called Social Monitoring, which is defined by Brandwatch.com as “the act of using a tool to listen to what is being said across the internet; monitoring media not just from traditional publishers, but on millions of social sites too.”

Social monitoring has helped give businesses an advantage on not only knowing what people are saying about their company, but also how they can use this information to adjust their business to best fit the consumer’s wants or needs.With this, a company can know when it is best for them to do certain ad campaigns, adjust their customer service or what times of year the consumers are talking about their company for advertising.

There are many different Social Monitoring websites that companies can use, but I will only discuss the free sites that I used during class, Google Trends and Social Mention. I will use a company that I previously worked for, The Kane County Cougars baseball team, to give you an example of how these sights work.

With Google Trends, it monitors the amount of Google searches are done about the certain topic or company you want to see and puts the “trending” on a 0-100 point scale with 100 being the most times the term has been searched. Looking at the Kane County Cougars trend over the past year, it becomes clear that in the heart of their season, about mid-July, the term has its highest search total. Its lowest search total comes in the middle of their offseason, about mid-November. These trends make sense as the term follows the team’s season, so it may be good for the company to put their best ad campaigns during the turn from low to high searches (beginning of April).

As for Social Mention, it does not monitor all of the most well known social media sites but it does have Twitter, Reddit and Wordpress among others. For the Kane County Cougars, the posts are not very recent, but that is not surprising with their season ending about a month ago. What the website does help you see is the actual post people are making regarding the company which is a helpful tool for a business. It also allows you to see the reaction that people have toward your business by ranking the posts positively, negatively or neutral which is another helpful way to hear what people are saying.

So if you are working for a company and they would like to know how the company is doing on social media, these websites will help you to find what the customers are saying. Social monitoring is definitely an important skill that you should utilize for the future.