What are the benefits and risks of using social media listening tools for media monitoring?

Social media listening tools are software applications that allow you to monitor, analyze, and respond to online conversations about your brand, industry, competitors, or topics of interest. They can help you gain insights, identify trends, manage reputation, and engage with your audience. But they also come with some challenges and risks that you need to be aware of and address. In this article, we will explore some of the benefits and risks of using social media listening tools for media monitoring.

Find expert answers in this collaborative article

Selected by the community from 2 contributions. Learn more

1 Benefits of social media listening tools

Social media listening tools can be invaluable in helping you improve your media monitoring. These tools can assist in tracking the reach, sentiment, and impact of your media coverage across different platforms and channels. Additionally, they can help you identify influencers, journalists, and potential partners who are talking about your brand or industry, as well as discover new opportunities, gaps, or issues that you can address with your content or products. Furthermore, these tools can monitor the feedback, opinions, and preferences of your customers and prospects that you can use to improve customer service, marketing, or product development. Finally, they can help you respond to questions, complaints, or praises from your audience to build trust and loyalty.

Add your perspective

Fabian Carrillo, PhD

Disney | Coast Guard | PhD Psychology
Report contribution
Understanding audience sentiment is crucial to a brand, arguably more than volume of posts or understanding what key topics audiences are discussing. That type data is of course beneficial, but you need to understand how audiences are discussing your brand, what feeling is driving one's emotional reaction to the spikes in posts and emergence of key trends.

Like

Unhelpful

2 Risks of social media listening tools

Social media listening tools come with certain risks that need to be taken into account. These include data privacy and security, which requires compliance with relevant laws and regulations, as well as data quality and accuracy, which must be verified to avoid bias or fake accounts. Furthermore, it is important to filter and prioritize the data collected from social media sources, as well as set clear goals and metrics that align with the media monitoring objectives. Lastly, data ethics and responsibility should be respected by using the data in a fair, transparent, and respectful way.

Add your perspective

Fabian Carrillo, PhD

Disney | Coast Guard | PhD Psychology
Report contribution
Any metric that is preface with "potential" should be taken with a grain of salt. Social listening tools track public-facing data and not private data. That said, potential impressions is just that, a potential estimate. Same can be said with the tracking of engagement data. Certain engagement metrics, such as clicks and shares, are private and available through platform access (i.e.,. regarding log-in credentials). While one may rely on these metrics using social listening tools to measure awareness, one should also report on these findings with an asterisk to explain that these potential metrics are not necessarily completely accurate.

Like

Unhelpful

3 How to use social media listening tools effectively

To use social media listening tools effectively for media monitoring, you should choose the right tool for your needs and budget, define relevant keywords and queries, segment and categorize your data, analyze and visualize your data, and act on your data. Comparing the features, functions, and prices of the many tools available in the market is important to ensure that you can meet your media monitoring goals. You should also refine and update your keywords regularly to capture current trends and topics. Additionally, organizing and classifying your data into meaningful segments and categories based on criteria such as platform, channel, source, topic, sentiment, or audience is essential. Utilizing the analytical and reporting features of the tool to extract insights and patterns from your data as well as using charts, graphs, or dashboards to visualize your data can help communicate your findings. Finally, using the insights to inform decisions and actions as well as engaging with your audience using the outreach features of the tool are key steps in effectively using social media listening tools for media monitoring.

Add your perspective

4 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?

Add your perspective

What are the benefits and risks of using social media listening tools for media monitoring?

1

2

3

4

1 Benefits of social media listening tools

2 Risks of social media listening tools

3 How to use social media listening tools effectively

4 Here’s what else to consider

Media Monitoring

Rate this article

Thanks for your feedback

More articles on Media Monitoring

More relevant reading