Social Media Monitoring Step by Step: Setting Up a Project

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool that allows monitoring and analyzing all publically available conversations about predefined keywords. They can be connected to anything: your company name, product name, competitor name, industry, trends, cat videos, research, job offers, +XXX other ideas. Brand24 looks for these conversations on websites, blogs, forums, social media and other public sources.

Social media monitoring improves businesses in a number of ways. Some of the most important include:

• Brand image – you get to know who your customers are, where they hang out, what they think about your product or service, how they use it, what their expectations are, some improvement suggestions, factors influencing purchasing decisions and more. All in all, it’s a sure way to understand your customers.
• Engagement – using Brand24, you can identify and approach people talking about things relevant to your business. It’s the best way to interact with your audience and build relations with customers.
• Social selling – as consumers become more and more tired of the traditional advertising, social selling is on the rise. It’s a sales technique that involves identifying and reaching out to people directly interested in your product or service.

Setting Up a Project

Depending on a subscription plan, you can monitor either 5, 10 or 25 keywords. For more info on this one, please visit our pricing page.

Once you sign up, the first screen you see asks you to create your first project.

If you want to monitor your company, some keywords we would advise you to enter include:

• Company name.
• Product name.
• Hashtags your company uses.
• Website address.

It happens that customers fail to create an effective project which results in valueless results. There are numerous mistakes that are made during the initial project configuration. Some of them include:

• Typos
• Too long and specific sentences.
• Too many / too little keywords in one project.
• Wrong language filter.

If uncertain about your project configuration, feel free to ask us and we’ll be more than happy to help you out. You can easily reach out to us by and on-site chat you can find on the bottom right of our website.

It’s a lot more easier if your company name is a proper name, like Oreo.

Fortunately to the guys at Oreo, the word works exclusively as the company’s name. It’s unique. It means that the results from social media monitoring will be connected strictly to the company and not, for example, to a person’s name.

If, on the other hand, your company name is any other common word that also works in different contexts, you need to go to More settings and use the Required keywords option. The reason is that, since the company name you provide works also in other contexts, the results you get will include these unrelated mentions.

Here’s what you see after going to More settings.

So, to show an example, let’s take Specialized as a brand name. The word works also as a common word. The company is a bike manufacturer. To specify the results and emphasize the fact that we want to get results connected to the bike manufacturer, we go to Required keywords and add, for example, “bike”, “bicycles” and so on. It helps you narrow down your project and make it collect only mentions that are relevant to the business.

We can add a couple of words to make it even more specific. It’s important not to make it too specific, or too unspecific.

Whether we like it or not, each and every social media monitoring tool out there works like this. Creating a well-optimized project is essential and requires some effort, accuracy and context.

Trust me, there are a lot of accounts that improperly set up their projects, feel they get insufficient results and quit Brand24. Remember, you can always ask us to help you with it so that you get what you need.

Language

Don’t forget to choose the language you what to collect mentions in.

Other Options

Sources

If you want to get mentions from a specific source, go to the Sources tab and pick the one / ones you’re interested in.

Notifications

Here you get the chance to adjust your email notifications. You provide addressees and their email addresses.

If your company is often discussed online there’s no point in choosing real-time notifications because getting them every, let’s say, half an hour may become a pain in the neck.

But it all depends

If you have a customer service department that’s constantly on watch, it can be the option you can consider. For example, Mike, the CEO of Brand24 gets notifications immediately the moment someone mentions online Brand24. It’s fair to say that we’re recognized for lightning-fast customer service.

Other options allow receiving the most important mentions periodically.

When if doubt, I would highly advise that you let us know about it and we can configure your project for you.

Reports

Brand24 can send you daily and / or weekly reports with the most important and influential mentions. Here you can also turn on Storm Alerts which is a special kind of a notification that let’s you know about sudden changes in mentions volume.

That’s it! Stay tuned for the next part about results!