Social Media Monitoring: More than just the Software.

Using Social media effectively and creatively to promote your business is more than just understanding the mechanics of the retweet, how to upload a photo to facebook, or post a video to posterous.  All of these, once you get the hang of them, are relatively simple things to do, but knowing how to do them will not make you a social media expert.

To be able to promote your business, you need to understand not just the mechanics of the system, but the way it is used, the things it is used for, and the types of behaviour that are accepted – the etiquette and social norms of the system.  Well – we all know how to speak, but just being able to speak doesn’t make us the most popular guy at the party.  This is why, in my Understanding Social Media course, there are two sections on twitter and two sections on facebook: the first covers the mechanics of the system, and the second covers the social aspects of it.

I think of a lot of software in this way – you can know the code, the functions and how to access them, but that doesn’t automatically mean that you can use the software effectively – having a saw and a hammer doesn’t make me a carpenter, and having Photoshop does not make me a graphic designer.

The same goes for social media monitoring.  With the proliferation of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces, which allow third party developers to access the functions and data held in a software system) there has been a corresponding proliferation of social media monitoring tools – from the free and basic Google Alerts, through Trackur, MediaGenius, Synthesio, and TechrigySM2, to the real heavyweight, Radian6.  Most of these systems have a free (or at least cheap) starter option, which means companies can start to track what is happening for themselves.

And the same goes for social media monitoring systems.  You can set up your searches, or take out a license for a system, but if you don’t know what the results mean or how the system uses the data, it can be very misleading.

For this reason, I recommend that, at least when you are getting started with social media, you get some training and you find a consultant who understands the data produced from social media monitoring, and can make actionable recommendations on the basis of it. I provide monitoring clients with a weekly report outlining the trends and themes from the posts, across all types of social media that they are tracking, for the keywords they are searching for.  In addition, my reports, where necessary, make recommendations as to actions the client can take as a result of these trends.

If this sounds useful to you, please get in touch, and I hope we can help you.

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