Social media monitoring tools have become widespread among many sorts of businesses. For example, even offline businesses like clubs and restaurants have started using social media monitoring tools. But why? Well, social media monitoring allows businesses to do many things, such as:

1. See what competitors are doing
2. Target competitors’ customers
3. See how effective your branding campaign is

and more! As a result, the benefits of using a good social media monitoring tool far outweighs the drawbacks. Some businesses simply utilize “drive by” social media, but this does not work. They are too results-oriented with their initial efforts and see it as a broadcast medium instead of an interactive medium, so they quit posting to their Facebook wall or quit making tweets when they don’t “see sales” coming from their content. Frequently, they simply aren’t grabbing customers’ attention. SMM tools can be used to find out what to write so that you can grab the customer’s attention effectively. In this Future of Engagement episode, host Murray Newlands looks at how to use social media monitoring tools well:

Social media monitoring tool: How can they change social media?

Social media monitoring tool use among tools like Alerti has skyrocketed at a faster rate than the growth of social media itself, and they are showing that they can have a direct effect on how businesses use social media. For example, when businesses realize that their marketing campaign does not work, they can shift gears and become more interactive or produce different content. Also, the act of monitoring itself lets them directly engage with users who like their product so that they can target them more effectively. They can then use these people’s profiles as high quality leads at which to aim well-targeted marketing campaigns.

Jason Falls has some great tips on social media monitoring & measurement (and the difference between them) in this presentation. Very similar to my own thinking on the subject.

Just like social media, itself, measuring social media is a relatively new discipline. While everything needs (and should) track back to business objectives and metrics, there are some interesting social media metrics which can give you leading indicators about what’s happening (or going to happen).