What is social media monitoring
Social media monitoring is an integral part of competitive intelligence (CI). It involves tracking and analysis of competitors' social media activities, customer interactions, and market trends. Social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Glassdoor, and Fishbowl, are frequently used by companies and their customers to interact and express opinions on a product or a service. Professional services (PS) firms explore these sites to gather intelligence on their competitors.
Evalueserve offers social media monitoring through its CI programs. Our monitoring process involves tracking different social media pages of companies to analyze posts, conversations, mentions, and hashtags to gain an insight into industry trends, company activities, customer preferences, and employee well-being programs.
Importance of social media monitoring
- Helps identify emerging trends and adapt to changing market conditions: By analyzing conversations and discussions on social media platforms, companies (including PS firms) can identify new trends, issues, and topics that are relevant to their business. These activities help them to develop new services or products, enter new markets, improve their existing offerings, as well as gain a competitive edge and remain relevant in a rapidly changing business environment.
- Enables monitoring of competitors' activities: Social media monitoring enables companies (including PS firms) to keep an eye on their competitors and track their activities. By monitoring competitors, companies (including PS firms) can identify their strengths and weaknesses, analyze their marketing strategies, and stay up to date with their latest offerings. This information can help PS firms to develop better strategies and gain a competitive edge. For example, the graph below (taken from Evalueserve’s Insightsfirst CI platform) shows prominent sentiment patterns of companies through whitespace analysis. The numerical values indicate the specific sentiment emphasis of each company. These numbers can help determine the growth strategies and market presence of competitors.
- Helps develop an understanding of customer preferences: Social media monitoring provides firms with valuable insights into their customers' needs and preferences. By analyzing customer conversations and feedback, they can understand what their customers are looking for, identify pain points and issues, and develop solutions that meet their needs. This can help them to improve their services and build stronger customer relationships.
Steps involved in social media monitoring
- Setting clear objectives: The first step is to identify the goals and objectives of social media monitoring and determine specific metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), such as mentions, engagement rates, sentiment analysis, or market reach. For its PS clients, Evalueserve examines posts shared on platforms such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Glassdoor, and Fishbowl based on KPIs such as likes, views, comments, and shares.
- Selecting suitable tools and platforms: The next stage involves the selection of appropriate monitoring tools and platforms that align with objectives and budget. Evalueserve's comprehensive CI platform, AI for Research and Analytics (AIRA), employs automated processes to efficiently collect data from diverse sources by generating automated pipelines. The data is subjected to advanced analytics using artificial intelligence and machine learning to extract meaningful insights. From the automated pipelines, the data is segregated into pre-defined themes based on specific defined keywords. Through this approach, AIRA streamlines the data analysis process and enables clients to stay ahead in a data-driven business landscape.
- Monitoring and analyzing: The final step involves setting up different monitoring parameters, such as keywords, hashtags, brand names, competitor names, and relevant topics. These parameters can be used to set up filters within a monitoring tool to capture specific mentions and conversations that are relevant to the set objectives.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring is a vital tool for CI. By identifying trends, understanding sentiments, analyzing posts, and measuring the market reach of posts, companies (including PS firms) can gain valuable insights and data to improve their services and stay ahead of competitors.
Evalueserve’s social media monitoring platforms provide PS firms with real-time actions, forecasts, and insights into market trends, consumer behavior, and competitor strategies, enabling them to identify new opportunities, adapt to market changes, benchmark their performance, improve their customer experience, and predict future trends.
