Everybody has seen the fallout from the airport incident between Mon Tulfo and the Santiagos, and how Cebu Pacific ended up being caught in the middle. A salient point that appears to have been highlighted by the situation is the importance of social media monitoring in maintaining your brand’s reputation.

Introduction

Regardless of what reaction you think may have been appropriate, Cebu Pacific would have been better off if they had anticipated their name entering the conversation early on. For any brand, this can be better accomplished when you use  social media monitoring tools, not just to look at immediate reactions, but to understand and analyze prevailing opinions about your brand and how quickly they can change.

There are several free tools that can help jumpstart your social media monitoring. As you get deeper into it, tools can become more complicated and demand more, but yield more useful data. Ideally, the best tools will aggregate the information you need to make it easier to understand and analyze immediately. If you have a small business, or just starting out in social media, it’s best to start with free social media monitoring tools.

Before we get to these tools, however, we need to think about what exactly to monitor. It’s one thing to constantly be online and keep tabs on everything, but on a higher level, what should we be looking for? What guidelines should we use in our use of these tools?

The Social Media Measurement Compass

Susan Etlinger at Altimeter Group made some preliminary research on how to measure the ROI on social media, and came up with the Social Media Measurement Compass. More than a set of guidelines, the different points of the compass represents six identified use cases brands can focus on to align their social media goals more closely with their business goals. These points/use cases are innovation, brand health, marketing optimization, revenue generation, operational efficiency, and customer experience.

We’d like to put the focus on brand health. To quote Etlinger, this is a measure of how people feel about, talk about, and act toward your brand.

Measuring brand health can direct social media marketing efforts. It can also anticipate potential crises and opportunities so that brands can be better prepared for them. The following is a table indicating the different elements of the brand health use list.

More information on the Social Media Measuring Compass and the other specific user lists can be found in the Altimeter report here. With these in mind, let’s look at the different tools available and what information they provide.

Built in SMM Tools

First off, many social networks come with their own built in tools, and it’s a good place to start.  Facebook Page managers have their own analytics, called Insights, and Facebook has integrated Insights such that you get a small preview window at the top of the page when you open it.  (more on Facebook Page Insights here). Twitter Search and Google Alerts both function to let you know when a certain keyword appears on the web, and you can use these to track your brand’s names and trademarks. URL shorteners, like bit.ly, goo.gl, etc, also have their own analytics, but to leverage these, you have to go out of your way to use these shorteners in all the places you share your links.

Spotlight on: Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of Google’s simplest and earliest services, and remains one of the most relevant. You enter a search query (say, your brand name or a keyword) and Google will periodically email you when new search results come up. Google Alerts can be fine tuned to send results based on how often you receive them, the volume of updates you get per email, even send them via RSS or export to a CSV file. You can also focus on new search results from blogs, web pages, videos, news or Google Groups.

With Google Alerts, you can track down who are the new entities talking about your brand. With the increasing demands of social media monitoring, however, you will need to use this to complement other free tools.

Social Media Dashboards

Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck all started as social media dashboards that allowed you to manage Twitter and Facebook accounts. As the years passed, features were added and eliminated to all three services, but even now all three offer all the basics required for good social media monitoring of Twitter and Facebook. In a single page, they will allow you to monitor your Facebook feeds, Twitter feeds, mentions, and keyword use.

Spotlight on: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the most powered up among the three services, offering integrated analytics for its own ow.ly URL shortener. Even more services are available for pay (discussed below). Irregardless of which package you use, Hootsuite is best used by people who need easy access to analytics but pay more attention to engagement across multiple channels.

Spotlight on: SocialMention

SocialMention is an amazing tool offering a service that is usually paid for for free. In its own words, it aggregates user generated content from ‘across the universe’, and organizes it in real time. Not only do you get your mentions collated, it will also make calculations on ratios to help you assess things like your influence, the reach of your network, etc. Social Mention’s reach across the web is astounding, including over 1000 services including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, Digg, Google, etc.

Spotlight on: Klout

Klout is the innovator when it comes to measuring social media engagement and influence. It’s also streamlined its system so that Klout scores would not be as easy to game as it used to, although gamification features remain on the surface. In general, using algorithms to measure influence and engagement have their limits, and scores have to be taken with a grain of salt. It’s not practical to compare one’s Klout scores with others; however, it makes a good measure of how much engagement and influence one has developed over time. Klout is more geared towards personal than corporate brands, but will be useful for companies with brand ambassadors and employees in the public eye.

Paid vs Free Tools

Depending on the size of your business and its dependence on social, however, you may ultimately have to go beyond these apps and use paid solutions. Paid social media monitoring tools are light years away from free tools. However, using these tools are an investment of time, money and energy. For most businesses, free tools should provide all the information you need. If you are curious enough to give paid tools a try, these are our top recommendations.

Hootsuite paid services

If you are already using Hootsuite, the transition to using their paid services should be easy, if expensive. They offer Pro solutions, with further payments for several features, and Enterprise, which is everything they have at a hefty $ 1499 a month. Pro and Enterprise solutions are geared towards entire teams using Hootsuite in sync. Pro Services include enhanced analytics reports for ow.ly, Google Analytics and Facebook insights. Enterprise Services layer on top of that prioritized customer support and custom branded use of ow.ly. Hootsuite is also periodically involved in the social media events circuit, organizing its own seminars as well as participating in others. If you ever decide to make the jump from free to paid tools, Hootsuite is a good choice if you can afford it.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social emerged as a prime product for its easy to use and understand user interface. Sprout Social uses an integrated social media inbox to track incoming and outgoing messages. It also has its own Klout like influence and engagement system, with should be used with the same caveats. Other features are constantly being added, but Sprout Social’s greatest benefit is that it cuts down the time needed in social media monitoring overall. Fortunately, Sprout Social also comes with a 30 day free trial so you can try it out for yourself.

Conclusion

Social Media Monitoring is an unavoidable necessity. The good thing is, some of you may already be doing this on instinct. However, to be most efficient, it’s necessary to know what metrics are most relevant in providing ROI, as well as what tools are most useful. There is a wealth of free tools that can provide basic and some advanced uses, but fully featured paid tools are available for those who need it.