Social Media Monitoring is colorful, diverse and a little scary

A seminar on social media monitoring sounds dry at first and - let's admit it - not really exciting. But after intensive training at the Akademie der Bayerischen Presse, I can say: Social Media Monitoring can be colorful, diverse and also a bit scary.

Social media monitoring is the finding, tracking and evaluation of tweets, posts, articles or online discussions. It analyzes conversations and detects crises at an early stage. The term Social Media Listening is also widely used. Lecturer Daniel Köthe, Marketing Manager at Talkwalker DACH since 2017, differentiates between the two terms: monitoring sees the trees, listening sees the whole forest.

There is the right monitoring tool for everyone

Numerous tools help journalists, PR staff and communicators to find the most important results. In the course of the training, together with our lecturer, who has also worked in marketing at Gruner + Jahr and Amazon, we gained an insight into the various tools and tried many of them out for ourselves. Elaborate tools such as Talkwalker create detailed analyses of the developments of a topic. Once a search query has been made using Boolean operators, the searcher can not only view the reports or mentions on various social media platforms. It is also possible to filter by country, sentiment or gender. Word clouds also show which terms are mentioned particularly frequently in connection with my topic. Simpler monitoring tools like CrowdTangle allow you to create and track dashboards and lists of important (competitor) sites.

The right goal is important

After two days of seminar, it must now be decided which tool is the right one for you. For this, seminar leader Christoph Seidl emphasizes that it must be clear what we want to achieve. Only when the goals have been defined can we decide on the right tool. Besides fascination, there is also a queasy feeling about the amount of information available on the Internet.