Social media management, listening, and monitoring tools

How many of you use the social media? If in a class of 100, I had to take a head count, the whole class would stand up. Social media management may be used for various purposes by different individuals, but one thing that binds them together is the World Wide Web or the internet. Digitalization has united people across borders, cutting across barriers of class, language, race and gender.

Since the late 1990s and beginning of the 2000s, a new concept has been coined by media gurus - Social media management. Prior to the advent of social media, the print media ruled. People’s image once tarnished could not be erased from print media. But, with the advent of social networking sites, many organizations managed to achieve this feat as well. They employed tools to garner positive coverage for themselves. Now, there are organizations that engage exclusively in managing a brand in social media.

Social media management entails the tracking of content through various channels in the virtual world such as YouTube, Facebook, Google, Twitter and other blogging sites. You will be surprised to see statistics of content being generated in seconds after a topic is posted. It shows how people are hooked to the online world. Moments are defined in micro-seconds, seconds, minutes, and hours become stale news. New information gets refreshed in every few nanoseconds. People connect instantly and give feedback at each click. Organizations are using this tool to generate statistics and managing content on social networks.

Listening and monitoring tools

There are many media marketing tools being used by CEOs in various companies to gather information on various media trends through search engines. They use a method that searches content, tracks them and analyzes feedback about a product by a consumer. Some social media managers use tools that may be either free or paid. Either way, keep checking if these tools are indeed managing your brand effectively. If not, change the tact and upgrade yourself. After all, the internet has millions of options for you.

There are various ways to manage social content: listening and monitoring. Both concepts have one thing in common and that is engaging people from all walks of life in brand building. It all depends what kind of content you want to monitor. For example, if you are looking at selling a brand, you might want to watch out for content on your web page that you created on Facebook. Users will definitely post feedback about your brand there and you would want to keep refreshing the page for new content.

This concept of ‘listening’ to feedback helps in cashing in on sentiments of users in terms of their preferences. Though, experts say that a company should not hinge its brand management on sentiment-based feedback since it is vulnerable to a certain amount of bias.

Monitoring helps reduce these very biases created through ‘listening.’ A clinical analysis of statistics through various tools employed by search engines will help give specific information about your target audience, their likes and dislikes. So it is advisable to use both together when conducting brand building exercises.

Last, but not the least, if you are thinking of creating a professional brand, then take the help of a media manager or a professional organization that uses social media management tools. Keep checking for latest hot trends and tools that can be effectively used for brand management. So don’t just sit around, start listening!