Monitoring social media for market intelligence: how to get started

With social media marketing not being that new anymore, many companies are starting to appreciate and understand the value of integrating social media into their business. Many of them are reaping the rewards of engaging with customers and prospects in conversation on the social web. But, even though social media has been around for a while, many are yet to make any sense of it because they are overwhelmed and confused with all the available options open to them.

If your company is still a bit scared of using social media with your communication strategy, here is a simple and effective strategy to help you get started. All that the strategy requires is that you monitor what people are saying online, their opinions, their praises, their complaints, their questions, and basically everything else that goes on about your business, your industry, and your competitors.

If you do nothing else on the social web but monitor, then you will have useful market intelligence that you can use to transform into competitive information for your business. Monitoring and listening to the conversations busy happening on the social web is easy. How are you going to get started?

Keyword research

Do some research and list all the keywords that are relevant to your brand and your company. This list can include your product and key employee names that are visible to customers and the public web. You can also include the names of your competitors similar to the names you took from your business such as key employees, brand names, etc. Also add the keywords that are relevant to your industry. This keyword list should be monitored on a regular basis and often updated to make sure that it remains relevant and current.

Select your tools

Carefully select the tools and channels you will be using to monitor the conversions of your target audience. There are hundreds of tools ranging from free ones such as Google Alerts, Social Mention, and Netvibes, to paid ones such as Brandseye that can be used for online reputation management (ORM). Regardless of which monitoring tools you are going to use, it is important that you monitor most of the popular social media channels and other related content sources in your industry such as blogs, bookmarking channels, microblogs, etc.

Setup automated announcements

It is difficult to monitor what is being said 24/7 and to make your life easier, set up automated alerts whenever a keyword you have chosen to monitor gets mentioned in a conversation. The data you will gather will be helpful to the insights about your market and your business. Many of the monitoring tools has their own automated alerts system such as Google Alerts where you can be emailed as soon as Google finds one of your keywords mentioned on the web.

Explained above is a simple strategy you can use to get started with conversation monitoring on the social web. It is not comprehensive, but it will help you to get started with ease. The kind of information you will get from monitoring will consist of focused and broad conversations that will give you a good indication of where you are online, and provide additional information that you can use for social media marketing.