Online Monitoring Tools

Imagine that you had finished an important online campaign for your company or brand and now you have to evaluate the communications results. There are several online monitoring tools that will allow you not only to measure the campaign’s results, but also to monitor and manage your online presence.

Online tools for measuring brand activity became very popular because they offer the possibility of creating a complex report with graphics about notoriety, performances and the context in which every brand name is mentioned by each source. You can use online monitoring tools for brands and businesses from every industry. And look out, even if a brand does not have an online presence, this does not mean that people cannot discuss about it on social networking platforms. Therefore, it is highly recommended to use these tools in order to find out who and what is talking about a brand/ product/ business.

Here are some of the features online monitoring tools offer:

• Listen for conversations that are already taking place
• Research and understand how the discussions appeared and who is talking; gain insights from the audience and use this kind of information to improve your products/ service or customer service
• Engage to prospects or customers where they are using the appropriate communication tactics – people don’t discuss on Twitter the same way they do on Facebook
• Share relevant information with your audience

By analyzing several monitoring online tools we came up with some of the advantages of using them either if you have a small business or even if you work for multinational companies.

Brand positioning

Social media tools will help you filter all the data on the Internet and give you an overview of your brand positioning online. You can use Mention.net or Trackur to understand what’s buzzing about.

Influence

How influential are people talking about you? How many tweets or retweets do they get? How many external links point to their blog? Several online tools can provide you with this kind of information. With Trackur’s proprietary InfluenceRank dashboards for example, you can see who’s behind the conversation.

Volume

Many tools offer charts for specific keywords over time. Combined with sentiment, this can offer you a lot of useful information.

Workflow

Especially when working in teams it is essential for more co-workers to use the same dashboard. Premium versions from HootSuite and Sprout Social have this feature. You can easily track if someone replied to a mention or tweet and you can assign a “to do” task for a colleague.

The monitoring instruments are working just like a search engine, based on key words. You can search all over the web trough mass media and social media, having access to both online and offline publications and of course to social media mentions on the key words you’re searching. But using online monitoring tools makes it is easier to decide upon your social media goals and check upon their progress. Even more, they can be extremely helpful in terms of providing with information for future campaigns or for development of your product, service, marketing strategy or customer care service.