What Functions are Must for a Successful Media Monitoring System?

• Gives insights about the market and competitors.

Find out about the latest developments, events, and trends, and benchmark your company’s performance against your competition. Media monitoring can reveal what’s on-demand and which topics within the industry are hot right now, but also helps you keep track of your competitors’ coverage.

• Prevents crisis and lowers response time.

Media monitoring is good for preventing and responding to crisis situations. At the same time, it significantly reduces response time, which is a great benefit all on its own.

• Attributes value by better mapping your campaigns.

Media monitoring helps you to build a strong brand by noticing the pitfalls in your communication strategy and overcoming them. It lets you narrow down the customers using specific criteria, find out what their first choice are, and build up successful campaigns that work best for your business needs.

• Helps you identify the top influencers for your brand.

Media monitoring helps evaluate which influencers have the most impact on your brand. Whether you decide to approach them for cooperation, or simply monitor what they say about your brand, you need data to pinpoint these influencers.

In perspective, it’s fantastic what media monitoring can give to your brand and you don’t have to do it manually. Media monitoring software automates huge chunks of this process so you can get factual data and improve the efficiency of your campaigns. There are a lot of ready solutions on the market, but there’s always the option to develop your own software tailored to the needs of your company.

Before You Choose a Media Monitoring Service

Selecting a media monitoring service is all about choosing what’s right for your specific business objectives, such as increasing mentions or collecting data about competitors. For example, when LookSMI hired us to develop a media monitoring system for them, their objective was to automate the process of collecting information from diverse media types and unifying it a single database to analyze it.

But how would you know what kind of a system would fit your needs and if such an app exists, for that matter? Monitoring the media without such software is a good place to start. This way, you’ll get the hang of what kind of information you can get from different social platforms (e.g., what people say about your brand) and how you search for it — define what kind of features you need.

Then, you’ll need to determine which department or a specific person will coordinate social media monitoring, and how the other departments will be involved. Although the software automates some of the processes, you still need someone to make use of the data or reports it provides.

Now you can start using monitoring software. And if you decide to develop a media tracking software platform for your company’s use or for distribution, we’d still advise you to try out an existing solution to get a feel of how they work or, even more importantly, if they work at all. Here are a few examples of such services.

Top Free and Paid Online Monitoring Software Suites

Mention

Mention is a free software suite aimed at bringing brand awareness, engaging new customers, and improving a company’s reputation online.

Benefits:

Can monitor 1 mill sources in 42 languages;

Generates brand mention reports;

Stores yours and competitors’ mentions in one place;

Helps discover influencers.

Price: Starter plan for $89 per month for up to 3 users, Enterprise — $600+/month.

Talkwalker Alerts

Talkwalker Alerts is a powerful tool for monitoring the web for certain key phrases and getting email alerts when there’s a new result.

Benefits:

Filters information to find the most important conversations;

Has dashboards and reports for sharing data with team members;

Covers blogs, forums, websites, and social media platforms.

Price: free.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo lets you find out what content is popular on your competitors’ platforms, and what doesn’t get that much attention. It’s also a great service to analyze your own Facebook pages and see how your audience reacts to what you post.

Benefits:

Identifies the best posting time;

Identifies the best length of posts;

Gives monthly statistics.

Price: starting at $79 per month for up to 5 projects monitored for 1 year and up to $499+ for big enterprise projects for 5 years of monitoring.

Determ

Basically, Determ is an enterprise-level tool that helps you track who exactly mentions your brand online.

Benefits:

Monitors websites, social media platforms, blogs, and forums;

Tracks any country or language;

Provides brand reports of post engagements, brand sentiments, viral content;

All data is stored in the cloud.

Price: 7-day free trial; "Solo" package  — 49€, "Lite" package - 99€, "Plus" package - 399€ per month and "Premium" package is an individual price. 

Some marketing tools include features for social listening as part of their suite, including Agile CRM and Socialbakers Suite

Key Functionality of Media Monitoring Software

It might be hard to distinguish what features media monitoring software should have just from looking or using the existing software. So if you plan to create a media monitoring software system for your company, here’s a list of key functions to keep in mind.

1. Deep Insights
   Make sure the software gives you truly valuable insights about your company’s media presence, as well as visualize them in them in the form of reports. The best media monitoring software presents you with a breakdown of the main topics your customers are talking about online, as well as their interests and preferences. Eventually, you can use this information to build your future marketing campaigns more effectively.
2. Target Audience Identification
   Media monitoring software developers are responsible for creating software that helps you understand more about who the people interested in your product are, and how to categorize them according to different criteria. The software used for analysis collects mentions of your brand, targets people for future sales, and builds more specific marketing campaigns than your current ones.
3. Use of Relevant Platforms
   Media tracking software development presupposes a versatile solution that can be used for monitoring any type of platform (social media, online publications, websites, etc.). So, make sure your software has broad access to content hubs around the world and can monitor them simultaneously. And if you purposely focus on a single platform, it should still be capable of analyzing tons of information in real-time.
4. Research of Ways to Mitigate Risk
   When poorly handled, brand mentions can damage your company’s reputation. Therefore, media monitoring comes as a great solution to prevent risks and manage crisis situations, as they happen. The data you collect helps you respond effectively, take action to shape the public’s opinion, and make sure that unsatisfied clients feel heard and taken care of.
5. Effort Evaluation
   Evaluating your company’s performance online can be done in different ways. In this case, media monitoring provides you with concrete results, numbers and statistical information about your brand’s marketing strategy online. Are you getting the reaction you intended? Are you reaching your business goals? With this data, you get full media coverage of your brand over time.
6. Identification of Journalists and Influencers
   By locating the most influential people in your field, you can track what they say about your brand, and if there is something they’re not satisfied with. So, if you want to promote your products or services with the help of influencers, you need to build a media monitoring tool that allows you to track them. On top of that, media monitoring gives you a comprehensive review of the journalists who can advocate for your brand in printed or online media.

Wrap Up

Social media monitoring is a great tool for businesses of all sizes. It lets business owners get a clear overview of what people say about their brand online, which platforms are the most popular for their target audience, and who are the influencers that can possibly spread a good word about their company. And it can be packaged into a software system to automate the routine part of the process, like gathering data.

You can choose from the many existing monitoring platforms, both free and paid ones, or you can make a media monitoring platform that will be tailored to your needs. If you go the second route, hiring an agency is a great way to get fully-customized software that corresponds to your business objectives. The cost of software for monitoring social media may vary across the market, but as a rule, the services from a reliable company with a comprehensive portfolio are totally worth paying for.