Understanding What to Do with Media Monitoring Data
If you’ve implemented systems to monitor social media, fantastic! You’re likely steps ahead of your competition and have tremendously valuable information at your fingertips. You can track brand mentions, industry influencers, keywords, engagement, trends, and much more. But what do you do with the information? That’s the next step and that’s what we aim to clear up in this article.
Mentions
By starting with mentions we begin with perhaps one of the most common metrics – and one of the most complicated.”Mentions” are not just mentions on social media, but include print and other online mentions. Comments are often dismissed in mentions. Seeing everything people say about the alert you set is important to better understand what is being talked about. From news to comments, all the information online should be taken with a grain of salt.
If people are talking about your company, you should immediately act on it. For example: An influencer asks about a product or service suggestion and his/her followers suggest your brand, that is a key mention to act on. Anytime your products, services, or company name comes up, that is a data point.
Okay, so if you’re tracking mentions, what do you do with the information?
Positive vs Negative Mentions
One key element of media monitoring can be your brand perception. How do people feel about your company? You can track, over time, the number of positive and negative mentions. Positive mentions go up, awesome! Your efforts are working. Negative mentions go up, it’s time to get serious about problem solving.
Number of Mentions
You’ll also likely be tracking the quantity of mentions, not just the quality. So as a whole, when your mentions go up, it means that more people are aware of your company and they’re engaging with you. They’re talking about you online. Assuming they’re mostly positive mentions, this is a huge indicator of PR success. AND these mentions can be leveraged into more press coverage.
Campaign Tracking
Speaking of press and PR, media monitoring is a fantastic tool to measure the success of your PR campaigns. After you publish a story or obtain media coverage, you can and should track mentions of your brand. Collecting data is good, but acting on the information makes you smarter. The information gathered through a media monitoring service, gives you the chance to make better business decisions. Make sure the data you are collecting can be leveraged to take actionable steps to advance your business.
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