Whether its because you’ve seen a demonstration of FPinfomart Heartbeat, or it’s an idea that has been percolating in your office (or your head!) for awhile now, you’ve decided it’s time to jump on the social media monitoring bandwagon.

Great – but where do you start?  Let’s assume you’ve selected a tracking tool.  But what is is that you want to monitor?

Before you can begin, it’s time to brainstorm.  There are two major aspects to consider:  input, and output.  On the input side, what is it, exactly, that you’re tracking?  What keywords or concepts make a social media conversation relevant?  On the output side, what will you do with the information when you’ve found it?

Input

Yourself

This is the first place to start.  What does a conversation about “you” look like?  It might include mentions of:

• Your company/organization name
• Your executives
• Your spokespeople
• Your products & services

Competitors

You can usually take the same list you used to define yourself, (as above) and apply it to your competitors.

Issues

There may be relevant conversations out there that don’t mention your organization or your competitors by name.  What do these conversations look like?  Are there industry associations involved?  Do you track mentions of customer service?  What are some of the issues that are unique to your industry?  On what topics do your customers’ (or your potential customers!) opinions matter most?  Try to group these into  “themes” that belong together.

Once you’ve named these conversations, start thinking about what words or phrases would be used in blog posts, tweets, forum posts, and other social content about these topics.

For example, an Oil & Gas company might track the following conversations:

• drilling & production
• environment
• exploration & development
• innovation
• transportation

A Pharmaceutical company tracking their over-the-counter pain relief product may be segmenting conversations along lines such as:

• headache
• muscle pain
• fever
• recalls
• children
• side effects
• generic brands

Output

Setting up social media monitoring can be a bit of a “chicken and egg” situation – at times, your desired output may inform how you structure your monitoring activities (i.e. the input).  In fact, there are many situations where it can be wise to think about the output stage BEFORE the input stage.  If you know what your reports need to look like, you can set up your issues to dovetail neatly into this desired report.  With that in mind, here are some things to think about when envisioning your ideal social media monitoring output.

Reports

Who is your audience? Do they prefer textual descriptions of results, charts & graphs, or spreadsheets?

What is the most important piece of information you want to get from this exercise?  Some possibilities might include:

• Share of voice vs. competitors
• % of time a certain message is repeated/picked up
• Sentiment associated with content mentioning your company, product or customer service
• The most prevalent issue seen in conversations where your products (or competitors’ products) are mentioned

Demographics

If your message targets a specific segment of the population (age range, gender, geography), is it your targeted demographic that is discussing your issues most frequently?  Or is the conversation happening outside this targeted demographic?  Do you need to re-tool your message to reach your desired customer base?  Or perhaps is it time to re-tool your products to reach the demographic discussing relevant issues more frequently?

Sentiment

Are you interested in not only locating the conversations defined in the input stage, but also measuring whether these conversations are, on average, positive, neutral, or negative?  Does sentiment matter to you?  If so, how will you measure sentiment?

• Overall sentiment for YOU vs. your competitors
• Sentiment for each of the issues you’re tracking, when your company or your competitors are mentioned
• Sentiment for each geodemographic segment
• Overall sentiment for each of the issues you’re tracking

Engagement

Measurement is important, but it may not be the end-point in your social media monitoring strategy.  Perhaps your goal is to locate conversations in which you need to become involved.  How will you find these conversations?

• Requests for product recommendations
• Customer service complaints/compliments
• Questions about your products/services
• Misinformation about your organization, or other conversations, which you wish to correct
• Conversations in your industry, in which participation might raise your organization’s profile
• Opinions expressed which you’d like to follow up on
• Product/service ideas and suggestions for which you’d like to express thanks

Where will YOU start?

These lists are not intended to be exhaustive but can certainly be used to jump-start your own conversations about how to monitor social media.  Setting up an effective strategy is the key to long-term, successful social media monitoring and engagement.  You’ll need a map to get to your destination, and creating an outline like the one we’ve described here can be a great first step!