Companies constantly wonder about the effectiveness of Twitter, YouTube and blogging.  The potential to reach vast numbrs of people at relatively low cost is hard to ignore.  Many companies jump in and simply start experimenting with a Twitter feed or with videos.  This can be effective in the early stages, but too often, the lack of focused resources leads to social media programs that don’t deliver results.

Page One PR has worked on hundreds of social media campaigns in the past couple of years and we always start with these three basic types of monitoring-and-analysis:

1. Competitive landscape – Find out what your competition is doing online and evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns.  If you discover there is a problem, quantify the scope and provide examples of the problem, then assess whether to ignore or address the program.  If you address the problem, figure out the resources, costs and timeline of activities.
2. Internal social media assessment – Most companies have employees who tweet, blog or are active on LinkedIn.  The effectiveness of the marketing messages that these employees are communicating and the viral distribution of the messages are usually not tracked.  If employees or partners are representing your company and products, their activities need to be monitored and even organized via suggested guidelines and message frameworks.  Lack of management, which begins with monitoring, can also lead to negative discussions getting out of control.  The internal assessment creates a snapshot of where the conversations are taking place, categorizes the conversations into marketing message buckets, and compares them to the overall marketing message goals.
3. Market analysis – Review ongoing discussions of a specific market category and catch the conversations that the company needs to join.  This is an opportunity to figure out which channels and information are most relevant to your target audience and to increase your marketing reach with social media programs.

Be aware that various issues can make the monitoring-and-analysis process time-consuming and complicated.  For example, the techniques that we use rely on keywords to identify groups of conversations regarding different trends and markets.  These keywords can take a long time to define – our process involves daily monitoring and regular meetings with the relevant stakeholders – and can even be skewed in the short-term due to company announcements or other media events.  Instead of developing keywords in an hour, it is better to spend a week on a first pass and continue to adjust them over the course of a month or longer.

Also, trends in social media discussions vary over time.  If the level of conversation happens to be unusally high during the monitoring phase and then dies off at the start of a campaign, the number of clicks on links published on social media channels will be lower than expected.  In addition, media events will affect conversation trends and a product announcement can skew the results of a campaign both positively and negatively.

At this stage, monitoring for strategy purposes remains a manual process.  It cannot be automated with social media monitoring tools because these tools are unable to summarize what is being said and to decipher the tone and content of conversations.

Despite these difficulties, starting with monitoring-and-analysis before building a social media plan pays off in the long run as it leads to better results.  Monitor and analyze first, then build the buzz.

If you would like to read a 3-step beginner’s guide to the monitoring-and-analysis process Page One PR has developed, click here.