Think Before You Engage: 100 Questions to Ask Before Starting a Social Media Marketing Campaign

73. How Do I Track What Is Said About My Brand?

A common argument in favor of social media for brands is that conversations happen about your brand, or your industry, whether or not you take part in it. Through the proper use of social media, those conversations can be guided and controlled to deliver your message rather than have to react to feedback in an attempt to regain control of the message.

As social media blends more into interactive public relations, brands can find themselves using more online methods to interact, converse, and communicate with their consumers to maintain a proactive position rather than reactive.

Monitoring a brand online is more than just seeing how many times and in what context your brand name is mentioned. Checking how often a brand is mentioned in blogs and Twitter isn't enough anymore. Although brand monitoring can be highly statistical, it's not just about quantity—it's about quality.

The details behind the brand mentions are just as important as the number. One hundred separate people can mention a brand in a day, but if the majority of those mentions are negative in nature, those mentions can have an overall negative effect on your influence.

The use of tools to monitor brand presence online can move past the mere counting of how often a brand is mentioned and move more into the context and sentiment of the brand through its overall presence. ...