Buzz Monitoring
What is buzz monitoring?
Buzz monitoring, also known as social buzz monitoring, is an important tool for understanding what people are saying about you or your brand online. It involves tracking conversations and mentions on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and more in order to gauge how customers and competitors perceive your product or service.
When buzz monitoring is used to measure customer sentiment towards a particular topic, product, or brand, it helps brands identify areas that need improvement.
Businesses and individuals who integrate buzz monitoring into their social media marketing efforts can better understand the needs of their customers and make informed decisions about how to engage with them.
The history of buzz monitoring
Buzz monitoring has been around since the advent of social media platforms. Initially, buzz monitoring was used by companies to track what people were saying about their brand and identify issues or complaints that needed to be addressed. Today, many brands have social support teams who use buzz monitoring for this purpose.
As social media grew in popularity, buzz monitoring became a more sophisticated part of marketing strategies by including deeper analysis of sentiment and conversation topics. This enables companies to grasp the attitude of their target audience, including what their customers’ preferences are and how they feel about the competition. These insights can guide brands to tailor their marketing strategies and customer service to satisfy consumer needs.
With buzz monitoring, companies can now develop a more comprehensive understanding of how their brand is perceived online, how to tailor their marketing strategies and how to stay ahead of the competition.
The benefits of buzz monitoring
Here are some of the most well-known and impactful pros of using buzz monitoring in your social media marketing strategy:
Being able to understand customer sentiment around your brand and product, so you can address outstanding issues and the perception is more positive.
Staying ahead of the competition by understanding how to make a better product or offering based on sentiment and conversations you see online.
Identifying potential areas for growth and opportunity amongst new audiences.
Having a clearer understanding of customers preferences and behaviors to guide your marketing, advertising and product development efforts more efficiently.
The future of buzz monitoring
As social media continues to evolve and grow, so will buzz monitoring develop to improve the trust between brands and customers. With more tools and human intelligence, buzz monitoring will become an increasingly sophisticated practice, capable of providing more detailed insights into customer sentiment and engagement online.
There is a big chance the future of buzz monitoring will develop hand-in-hand with the development of AI marketing, machine learning and natural language technologies. With these advancements, buzz monitoring may become more affordable, allowing companies of all sizes to take advantage of its impact. Automation will also make data more accessible in real-time, which can improve our understanding of customer sentiment, along with how it’s tracked and used for insights.
How to track buzz monitoring
The following steps show how companies can think about starting their buzz monitoring efforts:
Identify the channels you want to monitor: Where are your customers or intended audience most likely to be active? Start by identifying the right social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or YouTube, as well as blogs and online forums you’d like to keep track of.
Know what data you want to collect: What data are you trying to collect? If it's an understanding of online sentiment or discussions, you’ll need to identify keywords or phrases that are worth noting, and a way to track mentions of your brand’s name. Google Alerts can help with this, for example.
Analyze your data: There are a number of machine learning and natural language processing tools that can do this for you. Examples include IBM Watson or Google Cloud NLP, which can help identify patterns in conversations and how they relate to your brand.
Track long term: Opinions aren’t formed overnight—and they’re not static. Long term tracking is the best way to stay on top of changes in perception, and will help you improve how customer’s experience your product or services on a consistent basis.
You may also be interested in:
5 types of buzz monitoring
There are several types of buzz monitoring brands that can choose to deploy. Some of the most popular include:
Social media listening: Tools such as Hootsuite, Brand24, Mention or Google Alerts track mentions of your brand, products and competitors on social media platforms. These can be used across a variety of social media platforms, so make sure to hone in on those where your audience spends the most time.
Web monitoring: Search engine optimization (SEO) tools such as Google Analytics or SEMrush can track your website's visibility, traffic and search engine rankings. These give you an understanding of how visible you are on search engines and for what keywords or queries.
Sentiment analysis: This is a practice that uses natural language processing (NLP) tools such as IBM Watson, Google Cloud NLP or Microsoft Azure to analyze the sentiment of social media posts, comments and reviews related to your brand or products.
Surveys and polls: Conducting regular surveys or polls is a great way to gauge public opinion and/or measure customer satisfaction with your brand. You can run these through your social media accounts, via newsletters or with user focus groups.
Press monitoring: Tools such as Meltwater, Cision or Muck Rack can be used to track mentions of your brand beyond social media, in both traditional and online media outlets.