Monitoring and Listening on your Social Media

The most recent chapter of our book "Social Media for Strategic Communication" was Chapter 5, and this chapter was all about researching in social media. In this chapter I learned how important it is in social media that researching actually is, as well as strategic communication. Two of the biggest tools to do research in social media is monitoring and listening.

Karen Fregerg, author of the book, describes monitoring as a systematic process of better understanding different social media sources. She then defines listening as a way to explore different aspects that could impact a company negatively or positively. These together give research a way to provide us with evidence in which influences a specific part of our communication and dialogue.

There are many ways that we can use monitoring and listening to preform research. A good thing to start with is looking for key words which usually comes in hashtags or phrases. These can be used to narrow down what type of data you are looking for and make your research easier on yourself. Another great way is to follow popular accounts or trends. Following these will keep your feed up-to-date and never let you fall behind.

These are not the only uses of monitoring and listening that you can use on social media, but they are some basic ways to get you moving. Social media is slowly taking over how our world functions so it is important that we learn ways to stay on top of it to ensure our success.