Social media monitoring is vital for understanding our target audiences and knowing what sort of content we need to create to be helpful.
Monitoring conversations also helps us avoid being tone deaf when sharing out social media posts. It’s important to be sensitive to the issues happening around us, which gets more complicated for global social management.
The trouble with analyzing social data is that it is time consuming work. The social tools can help us identify influential and important conversations around specific topics, but that’s the easy part.
Most of the time is spent reading through the conversations to understand the who/what/where/why on each channel — and also acknowledging sarcasm and meme humor that social tools have trouble analyzing. This is crucial work during times when specific trending issues need to be analyzed.
I’m thankful for tools like Brandwatch, BuzzSumo, Spredfast, Hootsuite, Keyhole.co, Radian6, Pulsar Platform, and others that I’ve used to help me with this process.
The next evolution of social listening will require more insights around predictions of how topics and issues may trend up or down over time and where. We also need better insights into social video stories (e.g. Twitter Fleets, TikTok), audio data (e.g. podcasts, SoundCloud) and live streams (e.g. Twitch, YouTube Live, IGTV).
