Google Analytics and Facebook Insights are the go-to monitoring tools that I have been using to follow both my current job social media platforms and the personal sites that I have a hand in promoting. These two tools give me the most information at a glance – sometimes it’s enough to know what is happening and other times we would need to dig deeper into the stats. We also use Facebook Insights and Social Mention for up to the minute information about who’s talking about us.
The more that I get into these courses the more information there is to absorb and reflect upon – I’m looking forward to learning more about how we can utilize these tools in our everyday monitoring of our website and social media platforms. To be able to know your audience inside out and to be able to write content towards their thoughts, concerns and interests become the ultimate challenge and these tools should make that process just a little bit easier.
Implementing a social media listening strategy will allow you to track, analyze and respond to anyone who has mentioned your brand or industry. The actionable part of social media listening is what actually differentiates it from just monitoring. Analyzing these mentions will allow you to identify the actionable items that could be anything from talking to a customer or maybe even changing your whole brand positioning strategy.
All businesses who engage in social media should be doing some social media listening; if you’re not then your strategy is being developed with blindfolds on. If you don’t monitor your social media then you’re not taking advantage of all the insights you get from real people talking about your company. If you don’t care about social listening, you don’t really care about your customer, and that’s just bad business.1
These monitoring apps are easy to use and are very insightful. They allow you to drill down on the statistics in Google Analytics and Facebook Insights. For now, these will work to enlighten us as to what is being read, seen and commented on but as the program progresses I hope to revisit this blog and make sure that I have learned more and implemented different strategies to monitor our social media platforms.
1 NEWBERRY, Christina. June-13-2017 “Social Listening: What it is, Why You Should Care, and
How to Do It Well.”
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-listening-business/
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 