Everyday millions of blog posts, Youtube videos and micro blogs are generated. Out of all these updates and contents, may be less than 1% could be relevant to your brand. Tracking these conversations around the internet is not possible through manual curation method. The method is bound to miss important messages and relevant mentions of your brands.
The only solution is to use automated tools to crawl the social web and monitor only contents relevant to your brand. Relevance can be achieved by monitoring specific keywords related to your business and brand names. In most cases, the keywords will be your brand name. For example: “apple”, “At&T” etc.
There are many free tools that can be used to track your brands over the internet. One of the most popular is Google Alerts. Google Alerts is a free service where you can set-up an alert system to get daily or weekly consolidated notification on the search results for your relevant keywords.
Google Alert is a good tool to get started for your brand monitoring activities, because it will set up a right expectation for your social media strategy. But on the long run, a proper system with the facility to dig into more insights from the tracked results is necessary. Google Alerts only mails the list of blog posts where the keywords were mentioned. But in case of proper brand monitoring, useful insights like sentiment, location and demographics, number of influencers and trends in the mentions is crucial.
Important Parameters to look for while monitoring your brands.
Volume of Mentions and its Trends: Just like daily traffic visits to your website, volume of daily mentions of your brand is a good measure to see how much buzz is being created about your brand. In addition to daily volume, the trend in the volume can be insightful to understand what kind of associated news with your brand can create more buzz in the online media.
Number of Influencers or brand mentioners: In addition to the volume of mentions, actual number of people talking about your brand is also important. Increase in the number of people mentioning your brand can be related to the virality of any campaign that is being carried out by the brand. For example the increase in number of people taking about “COKE” could be due to their new viral ad campaign initiated in youtube or TV channels.
Sentiment of the Mentions: Sentiment is the key insight which can be digged out of volume of mentions of your brands. Sentiment is very important to understand the nature of the buzz. For example, if you receive 100 mentions every day about your service and 90% of them are negative complaints, then some urgent measures are required to be initiated by the brand to pacify the upset crowd.
Demographics of people: Demographics are a second level of analysis that can be carried out on the volume of mentions and people. This result will show the effectiveness of your campaign and understand your response group, to see if your brand is reaching the target audience in the market or not.
Beside the actual mentions, the above metrics are some of the essential aspect of brand monitoring which can help your brand find out the key influencers of your brand, key upsetting point about your brand and effectiveness of your marketing campaign.