Social Media Monitoring Guide: Strategy, Key Components, Metrics, & More

Every minute, there are millions of conversations, posts, and reviews on social media. Social monitoring helps you uncover helpful information to shape your business decisions. But without the right monitoring strategy, you’ll miss out on actionable insights and opportunities.

To create a successful social monitoring strategy, have clear goals and KPIs. Next, choose the right monitoring tools, platforms, and keywords to track. After that, analyze key metrics and take action. Finally, adjust your strategy based on the results.

This guide covers the step-by-step process of creating an effective social media monitoring strategy. Read on to learn what goals to set, what metrics to monitor, and how social monitoring drives your overall business growth.

Understanding social media monitoring

Social media monitoring refers to tracking mentions relevant to your business on social media. It is a tactic-based and reactive process because you monitor conversations to respond to them. 

Here’s an example:

The Good Food Institute (GFI) monitored social media to identify customers’ perceptions and unmet needs. They tracked and analyzed people’s conversations around plant-based meat alternatives. They used keywords like vegan meat and meat alternatives to analyze consumers’ sentiments. 

From the data gathered, GIF discovered that some keywords like ‘fake meat’ had negative sentiments. But keywords like ‘meat alternatives’ and ‘plant-based meat’ attracted positive sentiments. Plus, most consumers care about the taste, texture, and smell of meat alternatives. 

Check out more social monitoring examples on Quorage.com.

Key components of social monitoring 

The key components of data collection and analysis, real-time alerts, and response strategies.

As a newbie social media manager, I thought social monitoring was only about tracking mentions. But it involves more than that.

Let’s dig deeper into these social monitoring components and how this process works:

• Data collection involves tracking specific keywords, topics, hashtags, or URLs to gather information. It should also align with your key goals, like measuring brand awareness or competitive analysis.
• Platform coverage is the scope of sources from which you collect data. Track conversations on different social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But you can extend monitoring to online forums (like Reddit and Quora) and websites.
• Real-time alerts or notifications update you on mentions that matter to your brand. These alerts can be in the form of emails or notifications on a social monitoring tool’s account.
• Sentiment analysis helps you understand what people feel about your brand or competitors. And sentiment can either be positive, negative, or neutral. For instance, “I love Starbucks’ new coffee flavor” is an example of a positive sentiment.
• Competitor analysis lets you keep tabs on your competitors. You can track their names or products to understand consumers’ sentiments or perceptions towards them. For example, you might spot a spike in negative comments about a competitor’s products. Your first response would be to understand the reason why customers are complaining. And if you’re selling a similar product, this information can help you improve it to beat your competition.
• Content analysis shows how your audience interacts with your content. Here, you analyze engagement metrics such as likes, comments, and shares.  
• Trend analysis lets you spot market and industry patterns that affect your brand. Studying these trends helps you understand shifts in consumers’ preferences and interests.
• Influencer tracking is when you monitor potential influencers and gauge if they’re fit for your brand. What’s more, you can track what brands an influencer has worked with and the impact of their marketing campaigns.
• Reporting and analytics help you make sense of the data you’ve collected and analyzed. Most social monitoring tools offer reporting features like graphs and charts that you can export, read, and share with others. Plus, they give actionable insights to improve your social media strategy.
• Response strategy is the move you make from the insights you’ve gathered from social monitoring. For instance, you can respond to a negative comment on your social inbox to protect your brand’s reputation. Or you could reach out to a viable influencer and strike a partnership deal. 

The goals of social media monitoring

• To measure brand awareness or visibility. Track brand mentions across online platforms to know who mentions your brand. That’s how you measure your share of voice in your niche (or industry). 
• To manage crises and brand reputation. Track relevant terms to understand what people feel about your brand. So, you’ll receive regular alerts whenever there’s an unusual increase in mentions. That way, you’ll quickly respond to it to prevent or manage crises that could ruin your brand’s reputation.
• To conduct market research. Track industry terms to understand your ideal customers. For instance, you’ll know their demographics, interests, and unmet needs. Plus, you’ll discover market trends that affect consumers’ shopping habits.
• To track customer feedback for product development. Monitor online conversations to understand what customers feel about your products (or services). For instance, tracking a term like sanitary pads can reveal negative customer experiences like irritations and discomfort. So, as a manufacturer, you’ll adjust the sanitary towels to improve customer experience.
• To improve content strategies. Track the performance of your social media posts to know the content types that resonate with your audience. That way, you’ll adjust your content strategy to get more engagement and conversions from your posts.
• To measure the performance of social media campaigns. Track specific hashtags, URLs, and keywords to know the impact of your campaigns. For instance, you can measure the traffic your social media posts drive to your website. That’s not all! You can also track the ROI you generate from your campaigns.
• To keep tabs on competitors. Track your competitors to know what’s working for them on social media. For instance, you can study their social media platforms to measure engagement rates on their posts. If their audience is interacting with their posts, that could tell you what content forms perform well in your niche.
• To monitor influencers: You can track influencers and analyze their profiles to see if they’re real or fake. Plus, their content types and the marketing campaigns on their profiles can tell you if they’re the perfect fit for your brand.

Who should monitor social media?

Social monitoring isn’t reserved for social media managers and marketers. Data analysts, communication, PR, and customer service teams also benefit from social monitoring insights. Product development, compliance, and cybersecurity teams should also monitor social media.

Marketing teams for campaign success

If you’re part of a marketing team, social media monitoring is a great tool to measure your campaign performance. You’ll track specific keywords, hashtags, or URs across different platforms to:

• Identify content types that drive leads, conversions, and sales
• Measure the impact of your social media marketing campaigns
• Spot market trends to understand how consumer behavior changes with time
• Get actionable insights to improve your marketing strategy

Data analysts and market researchers to gather insights for strategic decision-making

As a data analyst or market researcher, social media platforms are treasure troves of consumer information. From conversations to posts, all these offer data-driven insights for decision-making.

For instance, you can understand customers’ perceptions toward a brand or its products by studying the sentiment in social media discussions.

And that’s not all!

Studying market trends and patterns provides actionable insights to improve your social media or marketing strategies. For example, a spike in conversations about the TikTok shop shows that TikTok is a viable marketing platform.

Communication and PR teams for brand reputation management

Social media conversations can make or ruin your brand’s reputation. So, if you’re in the PR or communications team, actively monitoring online conversations keeps you on top of any discussions that affect your brand. And by responding to them, you’ll manage any issues that could tarnish your brand’s reputation. 

Additionally, real-time alerts update you on negative news or conversations mentioning your brand before they go viral. Plus, you’ll spot (and reach out to) journalists, influencers, or bloggers discussing your brand.

For instance, if a celebrity tweets negatively about your brand, you can quickly craft a response or issue a media statement to manage the situation.

Risk management and compliance teams for crisis management

Social monitoring helps you identify risks early and ensure that your organization complies with regulations and policies. For example, you could track misinformation or defamation in social media conversations mentioning your brand. Or, you could monitor fake accounts impersonating your brand to protect your customers from potential scams.

Raising the alarm and addressing these issues helps your brand manage crises and build customers’ trust.

Customer service teams to improve response and customer support

Since most customers raise their concerns on social media, monitoring these conversations helps you stay on top of things. You’ll identify customer feedback and queries requiring urgent responses.

For example, if you’re a telecommunication company, you could monitor your social channels for customer complaints on network hitches. Spotting these issues and responding to them improves customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty. 

Product development teams for product development and innovation

Customers share their unfiltered product reviews online. If you’re in the product development team, social monitoring helps you identify customers’ complaints against your products. You can also track competitors’ products to know what customers feel about them.

With these insights:

• Identify and address customers’ pain points.
• Respond to their product requests.
• Spot customers willing to try out your new products (and become brand advocates).
• Identify market gaps or patterns that inspire new product ideas.

IT and cybersecurity teams to detect and manage threats

With the increased cybersecurity attacks, monitoring online conversations helps you identify data leaks and security threats. It also helps you spot and manage phishing attempts, potential frauds, or scams affecting your brand.

For instance, you could monitor your brand name and keywords like “hack” or “data breaches” to identify any cybersecurity threats targeting your company.

Social monitoring vs social listening

Social monitoring is a tactic-based process that tells you “what” people say about your brand, competitor, or industry online. In contrast, social listening is the strategy-based process that helps you understand the “why” behind these conversations. Social monitoring is more reactive, while social listening is proactive.

Both are marketing strategies that involve tracking specific terms. But social listening goes a bit deeper than social monitoring.

The table below shows the difference between social listening and social monitoring:

Read our social listening vs. social monitoring guide for more information.

What to monitor

In social media monitoring, you track different aspects of your business, competitors, or industry. For instance, you can analyze your social media performance by tracking engagement rates on your posts.

Here’s what else to monitor on social media platforms:

• Brand mentions to understand your audience’s perception. Tracking these mentions will help you spot and manage issues that could tarnish your brand’s name.
• Hashtags, keywords, and URLs to measure campaign performance. The insights gathered will let you prove your marketing efforts. 
• Competitors’ mentions to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You might discover gaps in your competitors’ strategies that you could fill to remain competitive.
• Industry-specific terms to spot patterns and trends. By doing so, you’ll understand shifts in consumers’ interests, preferences, and behaviors. 
• Customer feedback and sentiments to understand their perceptions toward your brand, products, or services. A quick response to these issues improves your customer service.
• Influencers and brand advocates. You could find viable influencers to advocate for your brand’s products or services. You can also track and analyze the influencers’ social impact by studying their past brand partnerships.
• Engagement metrics to measure content performance.  The engagement rates on your posts will tell you if your audience resonates with your content. Plus, comparing different content formats on various platforms helps you understand what works (and what doesn’t). That way, you’ll adjust your content strategy to get higher audience engagement.

Social media monitoring metrics

Social monitoring metrics help you quantify your brand’s online presence, audience, and campaign efforts. They also measure engagement, sentiments, and customer service on social media. Some social media metrics include mention volume, reach, share of voice, impressions, comments, shares, likes, click-through rates, conversion rates, and more.

Let’s get into the details:

Brand awareness and visibility metrics

Brand awareness and visibility metrics help you understand how your brand’s online presence has grown over time.

Brand awareness and visibility metrics include:

• Mentions volume shows how often people have mentioned your brand’s name online. For example, if you use your brand’s name as the keyword to track, a social media monitoring tool will track online conversations to generate the mention volume over a specific period. 
• Reach tells you the number of people who’ve seen your content online. For instance, if you post on all your social media platforms, your reach would be the unique views on each post.
• Share of voice (SOV) is the percentage of conversations where your brand’s name is mentioned compared to your competitors. SOV helps you compare your social media performance against your competitors.
• Impressions are the number of times your content is displayed on social media platforms. This number doesn’t depend on how many times people view your content

Engagement metrics

Engagement metrics help you understand how people interact with your audience. Analyzing these parameters helps determine if your content resonates with your audience. And this informs your content strategy decisions.

Here are some examples of engagement metrics:

• Reactions show the number of people who’ve reacted to your posts. They could’ve liked, loved, or supported your post. Others may find it funny, sad, or surprising.
• Comments tell you how many people have commented on your posts. They are a great way to gauge your audience’s opinions, sentiments, or perceptions.
• Shares (retweets) are the number of times people share your posts either on the same platform or on other channels. A high sharing volume shows that your audience found value in your content.
• Engagement rates (ER) show how many people interact with your content compared to your total number of followers. You can calculate the ER by dividing the number of active followers by the total number of followers and then multiplying by 100.
• Click-through rates give you the percentage of people who’ve clicked on links in your posts. This metric is helpful when you want to calculate your web traffic, downloads, or subscriptions.

Sentiment analysis metrics

Sentiment analysis metrics let you analyze the tone of voice or emotions in people’s posts, conversations, or reviews. They help you understand what your audience feels about your brand, products, or services. 

Sentiment analysis can also help you rate people’s perceptions of your competitors or some happenings in your industry.

Most social monitoring tools categorize people’s sentiments into 3:

• Positive, e.g., Starbucks coffee is my go-to hangover antidote!
• Negative, e.g., I’m not staying at that hotel again. That was an awful experience!
• Neutral, e.g., I don’t know what to think of this new tax policy. Let’s wait and see.

Audience metrics

Audience metrics help you understand your social media audience better. They tell you who they are, how they interact with your content, and how this affects your business.

Audience metrics include the following:

• Audience demographics (age, gender, language, location, and social status)
• Audience behavior (e.g., most active time and top content formats)
• Follower count (total number of followers or subscribers)
• Follower growth rate (the rate at which you’re getting new followers)
• Churn rate (percentage of followers lost)

Conversion metrics

Conversion metrics let you know if your social media efforts have met the desired goals.

Examples of conversion metrics include:

• Click-through rate (CTR) is the percentage of clicks divided by impressions (clicks ÷ impressions x 100). For instance, CTR can help you understand how many people clicked on a “Buy Now” link on your social media post.
• Conversion rate is the percentage of social media interactions that lead to a desired action. Examples include newsletter subscriptions, downloads, or purchases.
• Cost per conversion (CPC) is how much it costs you to get a conversion. For instance, how much do you pay when someone clicks on your Facebook ad?
• Return on Ads Spend (ROAS) is the revenue you get from every dollar you spend on ads. It helps you measure the success of your campaigns.
• Cost per lead (CPL) is the amount of money you spend to get leads through your campaigns.

Customer response and service metrics

These metrics analyze how you respond to or resolve customer feedback and queries. So they help you measure the quality of your customer service.

They may include:

• Response time is how quickly you reply to customers’ queries.
• Resolution rate is the percentage of resolved customer issues.
• Customer satisfaction score shows how satisfied customers feel after you’ve addressed their concerns.

How to develop your social media monitoring strategy (best practices) 

Step 1: Set clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs)

Before diving into social monitoring, determine what you want to achieve. Your goals should align with your business objectives because they’ll shape your entire strategy.

The best practice is to set SMART goals, such as:

• Specific – e.g., improve customer service by 10% by the end of the first quarter
• Measurable – e.g., get 1000 followers on Facebook in 6 months
• Achievable – e.g., track social media campaign using Agorapulse (a social monitoring tool)
• Realistic – e.g., reduce customer response time to under 1 hour
• Time-bound – e.g., track competitor activity for the next 3 months

Once you’ve defined your goals, set measurable KPIs to track your progress. Your KPIs could include the following:

• Increased follower growth
• Conversions (sales, newsletter subscriptions)
• Engagement rates
• Mentions volume

Step 2: Choose the right keywords or topics to track

Your keywords are the foundation of social media monitoring. They help you capture relevant conversations about your brand, industry, or competitors. 

Consider tracking:

• Brand names, product names, and slogans
• Industry-specific terms (e.g., “plant-based meat” for a food brand)
• Competitor names and products
• Campaign-specific hashtags or URLs
• Common misspellings of your brand name

Note: You can use keyword research tools (like Google Keyword Planner) to search for relevant keywords.

Step 3:  Pick the right social media monitoring tool(s)

Choose a social media monitoring tool that aligns with your business goals and budget. You could consider software with key features like:

• Real-time keyword and hashtag tracking
• Real-time alerts and notifications
• Sentiment analysis
• Competitive analysis
• Reporting and analytics
• Customizable dashboards
• Monitors the platforms you want to track

Step 4: Monitor your keywords across various channels

Don’t limit yourself to just one platform. 

Track keywords and conversations across various channels, including:

• Social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok)
• Online forums (Reddit, Quora)
• Review sites (Yelp, Trustpilot)
• News outlets and blogs

Multi-platform coverage gives you a comprehensive view of what’s being said about your brand.

Step 5: Analyze and measure performance

The data collected only matters if you can interpret it and apply the insights. So, use your monitoring tool with analytics and reporting features. That way, you’ll analyze various metrics, including:

• Sentiment: Are mentions positive, negative, or neutral?
• Engagement: Which posts or campaigns are resonating with your audience?
• Trends: Are there emerging topics or patterns in your industry?
• Competitor performance: How do you stack up against competitors?

Also, review these insights regularly to identify opportunities and areas for improvement.

Step 6: Respond or take action

Your social media monitoring efforts will only drive business change if you take action. 

Use the generated insights to:

• Respond to customer feedback 
• Address potential PR crises before they escalate
• Engage with influencers or brand advocates
• Adjust your content strategy based on what’s working
• Capitalize on gaps in your competitors’ strategies

Note: You can create a response protocol (guidelines) for your team to ensure timely and consistent replies.

Step 7: Adjust your strategy accordingly

Social media is constantly evolving, and so should your strategy. Regularly review your goals, KPIs, and performance metrics to see what’s working and what’s not. 

So:

• Update your keyword list as trends change
• Experiment with new platforms or content formats
• Refine your response strategies based on customer feedback

The best social media monitoring tools

• Brandwatch is the best social monitoring tool for consumer intelligence. It collects and analyzes consumer data. Brandwatch also offers helpful insights into your target audience, competitors, and market trends. Plus, it generates live, custom reports that you can share with your team and decision-makers.
• Agorapulse is your go-to software for monitoring and measuring your social media campaigns. It lets you know what content types or social media channels drive sales for your business. And that’s not all! You can integrate Agorapulse with Google Analytics to track leads, conversions, and sales from all your business efforts.
• Storyclash is the perfect tool for monitoring influencer marketing campaigns on social media. It helps you find brand-fit partners and manage your marketing campaigns. Besides that, Storyclash helps you measure the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns. Plus, you can integrate Storyclash with Spotify to track your campaign revenue and ROAS (return on ad spend). 

Check out more tools in my detailed review here: social media monitoring software.

FAQs

What are the three stages of social media monitoring?

The three stages of social media monitoring are awareness, understanding, and engagement.

Let’s get into more details:

• Awareness: In this stage, you gather data from online conversations. Data, in this case, could mean brand mentions or other metrics (like engagement or sentiments). A social media monitoring tool helps you collect relevant data from various sources. It also updates you via real-time alerts or notifications.
• Understanding: In this stage, you can use a social media monitoring tool to analyze the collected data. Alternatively, a data analyst could help you make sense of what you’ve gathered from social media conversations.
• Engagement (Response): Here, you take action depending on the insights gathered in stage 2. For instance, you may respond to customer queries or add new features to your product.

What is the strategic implication of social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring affects your business’s overall strategy. It offers helpful information to inform your business decisions, like product development. Ultimately, the actions you take affect your brand’s reputation, growth, and customer retention.

Here’s an example:

If you own a food delivery business, you could monitor your social media platforms to know what people say about it. You might notice that your customers love the food but complain that the delivery takes too long. 

The strategic implication of monitoring your socials is:

• Respond to customer’s complaints by assuring them of timely delivery.
• Ensure to take the shortest time to deliver customer orders (for example, by buying electric bikes).
• Promote customers’ favorite menus on your social media platforms.
• Create new menu items based on customers’ requests.

What is the use of a monitoring strategy?

A monitoring strategy guides you on how to run the monitoring process. It ensures that your social monitoring process is effective and aligned to your business goals.

Ultimately, you’ll reap the following benefits from a well-structured monitoring process:

• Understanding your audience better
• Protecting your brand’s reputation
• Improving customer service and experience
• Managing crises and mitigating risks
• Improving brand and influencer partnerships
• Gaining a competitive advantage against competitors
• Improving content and marketing strategies
• Strengthening your decision-making process and driving business growth