Social media measurement or
‘social media monitoring’ is an active monitoring of social media channels for information,
[1] usually tracking of various
social media content such as
blogs,
wikis,
news sites, micro-blogs such as
Twitter,
social networking sites, video/photo sharing websites,
forums, message boards and
user-generated content in general as a way to determine the volume and sentiment of online conversation about a brand or topic.
Social media monitoring for brands
Social media monitoring allows users to find insights into a brand's
overall visibility on social media, measure the impact of campaigns,
identify opportunities for engagement, assess competitor activity and
share of voice, and be alerted to impending crises. It can also provide
valuable information about emerging trends and what consumers and
clients think about specific topics, brands or products. This is the
work of a cross-section of groups that include market researchers,
PR staff,
marketing
teams, social engagement and community staff, agencies and sales teams.
Several different providers have created tools to facilitate the
monitoring of a variety of social media channels from blogging to
internet video to internet forums. This allows companies to track what
consumers are saying about their brands and actions. Companies can then
react to these conversations and interact with consumers through social
media platforms.
[1]
Quantifying social media
Social media management software (SMMS) is an application program or
software that facilitates an organisation’s ability to successfully
engage in social media across different communication channels. SMMS is
used to monitor inbound and outbound conversations, support customer
interaction, audit or document social marketing initiatives and evaluate
the usefulness of a social media presence.
It can be difficult to measure all social media conversation. Due to
privacy settings and other issues, not all social media conversation can
be found and reported by monitoring tools. However, whilst social media
monitoring cannot give absolute figures, it can be extremely useful for
identifying trends and for benchmarking, in addition to the uses
mentioned above. These findings can, in turn, influence and shape future
business decisions.
In order to access social media data (posts, Tweets, and meta-data)
and to analyze and monitor social media, many companies use software
technologies built for business.
Location-based social media monitoring
Most social media networks allow users to add a location to their
posts (reference all of our feeds). The location can be classified as
either ‘at-the-location’ or ‘about-the-location’. “‘At-the-location’
services can be defined as services where location-based content is
created at the geographic location. ‘About-the-location’ services can be
defined as services which are referring to particular location but the
content is not necessarily created in this particular physical place.”.
[2]
The added information available from geotagged (link to Geotagging
article) posts means that they can be displayed on a map. This means
that a location can be used as the start of a social media search rather
than a keyword or hashtag. This has major implications for disaster
relief, event monitoring, safety and security professionals since a
large portion of their job is related to tracking and monitoring
specific locations.
Technologies used
Various monitoring platforms use different technologies for social
media monitoring and measurement. These technology providers may connect
to the API provided by social platforms that
are created for 3rd
party developers to develop their own applications and services that
access data. Facebook's Graph API is one such API that social media
monitoring solution products would connect to pull data from.
[3]
Technology companies may also get social data from a data reseller,
such as DataSift or Gnip, which was acquired by Twitter. Some social
media monitoring and analytics companies use calls to data providers
each time an end-user develops a query. A small number of companies,
including Crimson Hexagon, archive and index social media posts, which
provides end users with on-demand access to historical data and enables
methodologies and technologies leveraging network and relational data.
[4]
Additional monitoring companies use crawlers and spidering technology to find keyword references, See also: *
Semantic analysis,*
Natural Language Processing.
Basic implementation involves curating data from social media on a
large scale and analyzing the results to make sense out of it.
Posted by: Marcy
Original Source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_measurement
