Social media has become the key to success for many companies and businesses. It has given institutions a chance to interact with the people and influence them. It has become a communication channel that gives companies instant feedback on any new venture they launch. In such a scenario, where social media plays a pivotal role, it is necessary for the companies to keep track of their social media presence. It is imperative for the companies to learn and understand the new language of hashtags and mentions. Social media monitoring is a business tool that helps in measuring the extent of a company’s presence across social media platforms.
Need of Social Media Monitoring
In today’s world of cut throat competition, it is not affordable for companies to just rely on conventional media to reach their customers. To create their brand awareness they have to access the potentials of social media. Companies seek brand mentions, relevant hashtags, trends related to the market you work in, etc to estimate their standing viz-a-viz their competitors and plan their course of action. Social media monitoring gives an insight to the company about the expectations of their public. It promotes quick action on both the consumers’ and producers’ end. The awareness that social media monitoring creates in extremely important for the producers to know if they are going in the right direction.
Social Media Monitoring Tools
The fundamental of Social media monitoring is gathering information. There are many tools and techniques to do this. Many companies allot and in house department specifically for media tracking or they can even hire agencies that provide these services. There are many websites that use analytics to provide information related to your business acquired from various social mediums.
One of the newer ways to monitor social media is scraping. Scraping data from all sorts of social media sites is a completely novel concept that helps every company attain access to user generated content for their brand. Web scraping helps mining data in a convenient way which is very necessary for an internet dependent world. It has become a significant operation for any company to keep a tab on all their social media interactions.
How is scraping social media beneficial?
In today’s world data is power. Companies need to be well versed with information pertaining to the views of their customers in order to succeed. Online scraping does exactly that for the companies. It provides the companies with information relating their product’s reviews and ratings on e-commerce sites and also from other social media sites. It also helps in calculating activity happening on the company’s posts. Specific keywords or categories can be used to access the data. Many popular sites like pinterest, twitter, Instagram have enabled scraping and allow sites to rake data off of them. Having all this information makes an organisation aware enough to make sound decisions.
Social media monitoring has become increasingly important in today’s information and technological age. Though it helps many companies, it should not be ignored that malpractice of such techniques can lead to gross violation of people’s privacy and can invite a lot of trouble. Online media tracking should be done diligently and responsibly to utilise the opportunities it presents.