5 Steps to Choose the Right Social Media Monitoring Tool

Social Media has evolved immensely over the past few years, with hundreds and thousands of people signing up on a daily basis. The space in fact is constantly growing and the scope for companies to extract valuable customer insights is also increasing accordingly. So, how do the companies access this valuable information? Does human monitoring work perfectly to extract all the information that a strategically designed monitoring tool can?

Whether one likes it or not, the answer is actually NO! Our human eye misses out on a lot of information, which is important to make sure your social media strategy is on the right track. It also helps in targeting your customers better and at the right time. So, what exactly do companies look for, while choosing the best social media monitoring tools?

Here’s a brief about what is required:

1. Listening
The basic step to Social Media Monitoring is listening, i.e. keeping an eye on who is talking about your brand, where and when. This helps in making sure that you do not miss out on any information that is being disseminated about your brand, whether good or bad. In fact, this also helps the customer service desk to serve better, considering the consistency and well structured display of content, that they are supposed to respond to.
However, every monitoring tool might not be able to provide this. Therefore, it is necessary that one looks for specific features, such as the number of social media platforms that the tool supports a subscription with, the kind of keywords that the tool supports, the ease of removing spam messages and content. More the number of facilities the tool provides better are the results.
2. Integration
Another important aspect is the ability of the tool to integrate with other software, for better access to contacts and information. Especially if the company is also looking at providing support through the same tool, there needs to be a proper mechanism in place, which allows integrating customer lists, contacts and profiles for reference and also easy access to answers for frequently asked questions.

3. Features and Analysis
Every tool has a pre decided set of features, which helps customizing data visualisation according to the needs of the company. This includes viewing your data according to the choice of language you prefer, region you wish to focus on, demographics you need to look at or even the sentiment around the topic of search.
This helps in reaching perfect values for analysis of big data and deriving conclusions about trending topics, industry specific researches and more.
4. Spam Filtration
One of the most important aspects of Social Media Monitoring is being able to differentiate between real and valuable content versus spam content. If this process needs to be done manually, it might take the longest time. Therefore, it is necessary to use a tool which does the same for you by removing content which does not add value to your research, which is repetitive or which might be posted by unidentified people.
5. Budget
Another important aspect which needs to be considered while hiring/buying a monitoring tool is how much does the tool cost. If, the service the tool provides is not in line with the amount you pay to use it, it might turn out to be a complete waste. Considering it is a data extraction tool, specified volumes of data is offered at a particular pre decided rate. Making sure that you are receiving the right amount of data, at the right rate is something that companies should focus on while buying a monitoring tool.