3 Best Practices for Setting Up a Social Media Monitoring Campaign

The following Powered by partner guest blog comes from Chris Marchak, Business Development Manager at Scup, Brazil’s leading social media monitoring and management platform.

3 Best Practices for Setting Up a Social Media Monitoring Campaign

Social media is overflowing with raw data. How do you collect data from divergent platforms, posts, pictures and comments and refine it into something that will help you make decisions?

The process isn’t as daunting as it seems. If you follow the three best practices below, you’ll set the groundwork for a social media monitoring campaign that essentially runs itself:

1. Define your goals

Before you start to organize and monitor your social media data, you need to define your goals. Setting objectives enables you to conduct a more targeted, relevant monitoring campaign. If you want to change your product, the goal could be to understand the impact and acceptance of the change. You would monitor the amount of mentions, how many of them relate to your new product and the ratio of positive versus negative mentions. On the other hand, if your goal is to grow your business into a new market, you’d want to monitor your target market, how they interact with your competitors and which pain points they’re expressing.

2. Identify your target audience

The next step is to immerse yourself in the world of the individuals you want to sell to. Building a profile of your target audience will help you refine your R&D processes, titrate your message and branding to your prospects’ needs and direct your approach to offline product testing.
Which social media hubs do they prefer? How do they express themselves within those hubs? Which trends are they following cloesely? Who are the main influencers in your target market, and how can you best reach out to them? Who are the main detractors to watch?

3. Structure your project

Establishing a project structure simplifies your life after you launch your campaign, making sure all parts are working together smoothly. Regardless of your monitoring focus, three steps can be taken to structure your project:

• List keywords
  Write down as many subject-related keywords and phrases as you can think of. In addition to your own product- and brand name, include your competitors’ names, product nicknames and jargon, including typos; event sponsors and words that are commonly associated with the product name.

• Refine and test keywords
  It’s important to continually refine and test keywords so that you don’t miss any important social media posts—and so you don’t appear in the wrong place. Sometimes undesirable words appear in search results alongside your product name. For example, if the name of your graphic design company is “Apple Pie Designs”, you don’t want to appear in the search results for apple pie recipes. To avoid this, perfect your word combinations with something like “apple pie graphic art.”

• Tagging
  Category tags cluster social media posts with similar characteristics into smaller groups. This lets you compare traffic and mentions between categories, as well as how people are cross-referencing data and which patterns appear in the content. You can use the same structure on your competitors to see where you stand.

Once you have these three steps in place, you’ll have the foundation of your social media monitoring system set up. All that’s left to do is to power through your work from posting to analysis, dramatically increasing your efficiency in the process.

About Chris Marchak
Chris joined the Scup team to kick off its international expansion. He is currently focused on bringing Scup to the U.S. and setting up its New York office. Prior to Scup, Chris acquired his taste for adventure working for a number of high growth start ups, including Groupon.

Learn more about how to monetize social media with GoodData and Scup.

Join our webinar on January 30 to hear Scup share their best practices for setting up social media campaigns.