Infographic: 8 tips for the best media monitoring results

Media monitoring helps you gain a deeper understanding of your organisation within the market. To make sure you collect the right data and information, it’s important to define clear objectives before you start.

For example, do you want to know how well a certain campaign is performing? Then measure the effect of that campaign by looking at the volume and sentiment of the messages that are posted around your brand in combination with that campaign. People like to give their opinion online on social networks, in forums and blogs. A media monitoring tool gives you insight into all relevant messages. For example, if the sentiments surrounding your campaign are negative, you can still make adjustments in time.

Other objectives for media monitoring can be: mapping out your online reputation or a crisis situation, an analysis of your online customer service, or a benchmark study in which you compare your products, services or brand with competitors.

Only when you have a clear overview of all messages and mentions surrounding your organisation can you make the right decisions about your communication strategy. Within most organisations, however, it’s impossible to manually monitor all relevant posts on social media channels, blogs, forums and offline media. If you still want to keep a tight and efficient overview, choose a media monitoring tool. Go for media monitoring software that meets your needs and requirements. Consider in advance whether you want to be able to monitor offline media in addition to the online channels. Newspapers, magazines, or radio programs, of course, can also contain relevant content for your organisation.

In addition, be critical about the possibility of creating reports. If you do this manually each time, it does take up a lot of time. It’s (often) possible to create automatic reports that are easy to share within your organisation. Alerts can also be a nice addition. These ensure that you’re quickly informed about any reporting on important topics or stakeholders.

Many organisations are cautious when it comes to social media, because things can quickly get out of hand and before you know it, a “social s*** storm” is coming your way. Know that media monitoring not only contributes to good crisis management within your organisation, but it also gives you the opportunity to collect feedback, monitor campaigns, and analyse customer service. Share the most important insights you gain from media monitoring with management and the relevant teams, and show how valuable the collected data is. With easy-to-understand report

Media monitoring tools, such as the Media Monitor, offer the possibility to generate graphs of volumes and reach of the reporting, but also enable sentiment analysis, stakeholder monitoring, extensive reporting, and narrowcasting. In this way you’re always aware of what’s going on online around your organisation. These insights form the basis of strategies for marketing, sales, product development and service, among other things.

In a world where situations can get out of hand in no time, it’s good to always stay informed about what’s going on. During a crisis, social media are important places where people share information and opinions with each other. Your own social media accounts, as well as other accounts, forums, and news sites provide insight into the development of the crisis.

It’s very helpful when you set up your monitoring software in a way that ensures that you’re immediately notified of sudden increases in volume. This way, you can quickly anticipate situations that might get out of hand (online). With the insights obtained, you can address the spokesperson. You can map out which journalists have an influence on the crisis by approaching them proactively when making an organisational statement.

Social media is no longer just for branding and engagement. The internet is also full of potential customers looking for the right solution for their needs. Use the social media signals for sales, marketing, and service. By adding the right search queries to your media monitoring tool, you can identify potential customers’ buying intentions. For example, if someone posts a tweet about his intention to buy a new car.

Media monitoring also offers you insight into how you can adapt your marketing message to current demands and popular topics. And, it offers the opportunity to identify questions and complaints that aren’t posted directly on your own social accounts, but are shared online. This enables you to proactively provide service, redirect negative sentiments, and increase customer satisfaction.

The media is always “on”. This means that media monitoring is more than an occasional task. Therefore, it’s a great idea to make someone responsible for this within the marketing and communication team, as with the Medical Centre in Leeuwarden, for example. This employee must, of course, have the right skills and knowledge. But you can also have the more complex analyses carried out by a specialised team. Link the objectives of social media monitoring to the company objectives and ensure that the employee and the team are flexible enough to respond to unexpected developments such as a crisis.

When monitoring media, you shouldn’t limit yourself to analysing online messages, such as social media messages or messages on websites, blogs and forums. Also make sure that you supplement your reports with radio, TV, and print media so that you get a 360-degree view of your organisation in the media. This gives you extra insight into PR and gives direction to your communication strategies.

Media monitoring goes beyond just numbers and graphs. The purpose of monitoring should be to determine the ‘so what’ behind the numbers. So don’t stop at printing graphs and figures, but make sure that, possibly with the help of a data analyst, you’re also aware of the correct interpretation, and of the actions to be taken in response to these insights.

By looking at historical data around your organisation, you can map out trends and developments. For example: how has your brand reputation changed online after a crisis, or what are the main messages and themes that influence this reputation? Compare the insights per year, quarter or month and adjust as necessary, for example by focusing your own communication on important themes.