In today's times, each business is registered digitally hence is also marketed the same way and through the social media. Hence, social media monitoring has become very important in terms of being able to track the sales of any business. Social media monitoring is nothing but listening to what is being communicated across the internet via traditional and social media publishers. There are also many other words which describe this process like social media intelligence, social media measurement, social media marketing, online analytics, social listening etc.

‍Social Media Monitoring Tools

‍Usually the social media is monitored by continuously crawling sites, indexing them and then searching them on the basis of queries, search strings into the interface of the monitoring tool which is later sliced or read. So, social media tools not only search social media but all kinds of sites. But check this before you start using the tool as there could be some tools which do not actually take care of all sites.

‍What does it cover and what can you do with it?

‍A monitoring tool only covers Facebook posts, blogs, tweets, forums, news, articles, YouTube videos, comments, public pins etc.

It can differ for each tool as to what you can do with it. However, the main services they provide are:

• Metadata regarding the sites as well as authors
• Topic analysis
• Charting
• Sentiment analysis
• Categorization
• Comparing queries
• Alerts

You can use this data and analyze it for any kind of research or decision making.

‍What does it not cover?‍

It is important to note here is that these tools only access publicly available data and collates it all together. If there are Facebook pages with privacy settings for protected tweets, Facebook messages or private messages they are not accessed at all.