A strong social media marketing strategy is a non-negotiable for ecommerce businesses. Today’s customers use social media networks for entertainment, research, social interaction, and shopping—and successful companies meet them where they are with content and services that anticipate their needs.
As with any marketing strategy, effective social marketing requires performance monitoring and analysis. Social networks present a unique challenge, however, in that they invite public discussion of your brand—a factor you can’t control. This requires you to have a constant pulse on what others are posting about your company. Businesses use a process known as social media monitoring to navigate this unique marketing environment.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process of tracking social media conversations relevant to your company to gain insights into your target audience and improve public perception of your brand. It’s typically part of a business’s social media management strategy, and it involves monitoring conversations about your industry, tracking mentions of your brand and products, reviewing customer comments on your posts, and engaging with customers on social platforms.
Key social media monitoring activities include:
-
Performance monitoring. Use social media monitoring to help you measure the results of your social media marketing efforts, such as engagement rates, click-through rates, share rates, and other key engagement metrics.
-
Community management. Practice actively engaging with your audience by answering customer service requests, responding to questions or comments, and participating in industry conversations.
-
Sentiment analysis. Use sentiment analysis to gauge how consumers feel about your brand, tracking changes over time.
-
Brand reputation management. Track direct mentions of your brand to help you evaluate customer satisfaction, respond to customer service complaints, and protect your brand image.
-
Competitor analysis. Tracking your competitors’ actions and mentions on social media can keep you up to date on what they’re doing well and where they fall short, helping you identify opportunities to fill market gaps and make your own improvements.
Social media monitoring vs. social listening
Social media monitoring and social listening complement each other but require different strategies. While the goal of social media monitoring is to present businesses with information they can take immediate action on, social listening focuses on big-picture, strategic thinking and long-term brand health.
Consider an ecommerce business that sells custom crochet patterns, for example. Using social media monitoring to track brand mentions, it notices an uptick in posts requesting patterns for crochet capelets and dusters. It thanks those customers for the feedback, provides a link to its openwork lace robe pattern, and plans an upcoming social media marketing campaign focused on cape and cape-adjacent products.
The same company then uses social media listening to go deeper, analyzing conversations and audiences that mention capes or dusters, reviewing the collected data in context, and identifying trends. It identifies a broader interest in witch-core and ’90s fashion, theorizes that its audiences are feeling simultaneously pulled toward rebellion and nostalgia, and plans a fall campaign celebrating the fashion of the ’90s, referencing hits like the films Practical Magic and The Craft, and the TV show Daria.
How to get started with social media monitoring
Social media monitoring helps businesses identify, evaluate, and respond to social media mentions. Here are four best practices to help you build your social monitoring strategy:
Set goals
Use social media monitoring to support multiple types of goals. Consider the following categories:
-
Social media performance goals. Social media monitoring can help you identify which content subjects, post types, and channels are most successful at driving the results you want, allowing you to optimize your social media strategy and improve performance metrics.
-
Customer relationship goals. Let consumer sentiment inform your future interactions to help boost engagement, strengthen the community around your brand, build emotional connections, and potentially even increase brand loyalty.
-
Brand-related goals. Evaluate your brand image, boost brand awareness, and improve your brand reputation by analyzing what you learn from social media monitoring and leveraging those findings to design future branded social media content.
-
Market research goals. Create up-to-date buyer personas by gathering data about your audiences and competitors, including details about customer behavior, interests, and demographics, along with insights into competitor marketing strategies and business activities.
Once you’ve chosen a goal, identify key performance indicators (KPIs), or the metrics you’ll use to track results. Monitoring these KPIs will help you determine how close or far you are from achieving your goal.
Note that social media monitoring can help you pursue sequential goals. For example, an ecommerce company might aim to collect brand mentions across different social media platforms, use automated trend analysis tools to extract themes from those mentions, optimize upcoming campaigns based on its findings, and ultimately boost social media engagement.
Choose the right tools
Social media monitoring tools are critical to executing an effective strategy. Many are also social media management tools, which are platforms that allow businesses to create and publish social content across multiple major social networks from one centralized application.
Check to see if your social media management tools can also support your social monitoring efforts—if so, you may be able to start monitoring your social media presence without adding to your tech stack. If not, consider switching to a social media management platform that meets your social media monitoring needs so you can execute marketing campaigns and gather insights using one system.
Check for these key features:
-
Consolidated dashboards. Look for a tool that integrates with your chosen social platforms, can display feeds from multiple social channels in a single view, and lets you receive and respond to direct messages from a unified inbox.
-
Keyword tracking. This feature lets you track direct and indirect mentions of your brand, competitor mentions, and industry conversations, and displays relevant posts in your dashboard feeds.
-
Sentiment analysis. Built-in sentiment analysis tools let you quickly extract qualitative information from a large volume of text, and many facilitate proactive crisis management by flagging high-priority comments (such as questions or negative comments) for review.
-
Automated analytics and reporting. Look for an analytics dashboard and built-in reporting functions that consolidate data from multiple platforms to report on marketing campaign performance and community management activities.
Top social media monitoring tools that include the key features above include Agorapulse, Sprout Social, Sprinklr, and Brandwatch.
Involve your customers
If you want to prove to someone that they matter, give them a job to do. In the social media monitoring world, this means asking for customer feedback, engaging in authentic conversations with audiences, and soliciting user-generated content. This demonstrates your commitment to your customers, surfaces valuable insights into their needs and preferences, and may even help you acquire new marketing materials.
Erika Geraerts, founder of ecommerce makeup retailer Fluff, uses this strategy of involving her customers. Her company operates on a limited-release model with only four drops per year, which Erika says frees up time for authentic engagement on social platforms.
“It really allows us to focus on messaging that we really care about that isn’t product-related, that helps build our brand and helps build our community,” she says on an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast. "We’re very much prepared to welcome constructive criticism or conversation or debate because we think a lot of brands still close their doors to conversations with their customers. Making sure it’s a dialogue is a big thing for us.”
Analyze the competition
Although you could ask your social media manager to make daily Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, and YouTube visits to check out your five top competitors in your ecommerce category or subject area, the task would likely eat up their entire day. A good social media monitoring tool makes this kind of oversight run smoothly behind the scenes. You can use your tool to set up a competitor feed and review the top-performing content from multiple brands each day or week, gaining insight into the social strategies that work with your customer base and staying on top of competitor activities and campaigns.
Social media monitoring FAQ
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the process of monitoring social media conversations and joining them from your brand’s social media accounts. Social monitoring improves your understanding of your target audience, builds customer relationships, and helps you protect your brand reputation.
What is the best social media monitoring tool?
The right social media monitoring tool for your business depends on your specific budget, social media platforms, and business needs, but Agorapulse, Sprout Social, and Brandwatch are all popular options.
What is the primary goal of social media monitoring?
The primary goal of social media monitoring is to give your brand a voice in relevant conversations. It can help you identify noteworthy praise, trending discussions, and unhappy customers, allowing you to actively promote positive brand mentions and defuse potential social media crises before any damage is done to your brand.
