Social media monitoring involves understanding, analyzing, and reporting on the audiences, reactions, interactions and attitudes related to a brand or campaign on social media. The purpose of social media monitoring is to explore and make sense of data that can provide crucial insights for strategic social media marketing decisions for a brand or campaign. However, it may be difficult to convince other professionals of its necessity in strategic marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Let\u2019s say, for example, before entering a client meeting about social media strategy and monitoring, your boss pulls you aside and says, \u201cMonitoring is too expensive, we need to get rid of this.\u201d What would you say?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u200bMy proposed reply is based on a simple principle from chapter 6 of Freberg (2025), Social Media for Strategic Communication<\/em>: \u201cdata equal money\u201d (Benefits of Monitoring and Listening section, last para.). At its core, social media data is knowledge and information about audiences, platforms, accounts, actions and more. Without monitoring this data, we, as strategic communications professionals, can\u2019t provide any justification or strategy for how to spend the client\u2019s money to (hopefully) generate sales, sponsorships, awareness, etc. As a result, we put the client at risk of losing money, and our company risks losing clients (and money). Alternatively, monitoring efforts yield data that can be used to strategically inform campaign efforts, ensuring funds are spent responsibly, clients are getting the most value for their spend and increasing the likelihood that they will see a return. Additionally, \u201cdata equals money\u201d is true in that most data costs money to obtain, like that from third-party social media tools. This is similar to the common business phrase, \u201cyou have to spend money to make money,\u201d in that to make money, or help clients make money or see ROI from data-informed social media strategies and tactics, privileged data needs to be purchased. Monitoring is an essential aspect of strategic social media communications, where data and money go hand in hand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Assuming lowering costs is the goal, the next step I would take is to work with my boss and client(s) to find one tool, or likely multiple tools, that provide the necessary insights to make informed decisions about clients\u2019 brand\/campaigns on social media, but are also more cost-conscious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u200bHow would you<\/em> respond to your boss in this scenario? Leave a comment and let\u2019s discuss!<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Reference <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Social media pros know social monitoring is essential, but can we convince our colleagues to feel the same way? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18021,"featured_media":58,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18021"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10\/revisions\/11"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uww.edu\/meredithsmessages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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<\/strong>Freberg, K. (2025). Social media for strategic communication: Creative strategies and research-based applications (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications<\/p>\n\n\n\n