Here’s the challenge with social brand monitoring. Most marketers don’t do it and losing brand relevance as a result. I don’t think that many brands think strategically enough about it. They view social brand monitoring as just check mark of tasks that need to be done or a bullet point on a PowerPoint presentation.

What is social brand monitoring?

Social brand monitoring is the act of listening to brand mentions on social media for the purposes of creating online brand engagement. Some marketers are using it to measure share of voice or basic brand health monitoring.

The truth is this: If done right, investing in online brand monitoring tools can provide insights that will make a brand more relevant to its audience. When brands can understand the topics and trends that are demanding the attention of an audience, and then create content based on those insights, they have the ability to become that much more relevant. This is especially true when analyzing micro communities on social media.

The model is simple. The demand side of the model represents an audience. It could be traditional media publications, a group of the top business media publications, a group of influencers, or a target audience.

With data insights, we can find the topics, trends, stories, articles, Reddit forum posts that are demanding the attention of your audience. These are the topics that are highly relevant to the audiences that you are trying to understand. If traditional media is the audience, there are several media monitoring software tools in the market that can provide similar insights.

Social brand monitoring plays a key role in delivering a social analysis that would provide actionable insights into those topics that are top of mind.

The left side of the model represents supply. And the question that you have to ask yourself is this: are you meeting the demand of the audience with your supply of short form content and storytelling?

Also using brand monitoring analytics, we can start to understand the topics, trends, and stories that a brand is publishing through the channels of owned media, earned media measurement and social media content.

In my experience, when analyzing branded content, most of the time it is self-serving filled with product specs, company news and other irrelevant information.

The white space can be identified by looking at the demand of the audience in the supply of content. When there is no overlap, that simply means there is white space for brand to start creating data-driven content that is relevant to the content that is trending among the audience. This is how to get the audience attention your brand deserves in the market place. This is the bedrock of brand advocacy and it works.

In this example, we are not looking at social media monitoring to calculate social brand mentions. I am not saying that it’s not important to do that, just that it’s kind of table stakes at this point and yes, it’s a check mark on a slide somewhere. Sadly, some brands even struggle with the bare minimum of investing in the right social analytics and software and set up a proper social brand monitoring program.

The true value of social brand monitoring is looking at specific data sources like specific subreddits or an audience or a set of media publications; and figuring out what is keeping them up at night. This is one of many strategic decisions for investing in a social brand monitoring tool.

Not only is this approach good for PR measurement, but it also will help inform a data driven B2B content strategy, which has been critical during the pandemic.

I really hope you enjoyed this video. I do my best to create content that’s actionable and provides value to the work you do.

Please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel; and be sure to hit the notification button so you can be notified when new videos are uploaded. You can also connect on Michael Brito’s social channels if you like.