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Media Monitoring: All You Need to Know
You’re launching a new product line for your retail brand. Your media monitoring team is on its toes to handle queries. However, within a day of the launch, negative reviews and tough questions start popping up across channels. This is a challenging scenario for any brand on social media.
Why? Because 91% of consumers between 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
The old approach to resolving social media flareups involved identifying negative posts, crafting reactive strategies and issuing press releases. Today, media monitoring tools allow brands to catch negative mentions early, preventing full-blown crises.
This blog will explore media monitoring essentials, including how to apply it across channels, the benefits for industries and key metrics to measure the effectiveness of your strategy. Read on.
What is media monitoring?
Media monitoring is the process of systematically observing, analyzing and interpreting content across media channels. It can be applied to a topic, trend, individual or business. Media monitoring is usually done on a combination of these channels:
- Social media monitoring: This involves tracking conversations, mentions and engagement on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn
- Broadcast media monitoring: This approach analyzes content from television and radio broadcasts
- Print media monitoring: This includes observing mentions in newspapers, magazines and other printed publications
- Online media monitoring: Tracking content on news websites, blogs, forums and other online platforms constitutes online media monitoring
- Review monitoring: Keeping tabs on customer reviews across various sites and e-commerce platforms relates to review monitoring
Difference between media monitoring and social listening
While the terms are often used interchangeably, media monitoring and social listening have quite a few key differences:
Aspect | Media monitoring | Social listening |
Scope | Covers all media types (social, print, broadcast, online, etc.) | Primarily focuses on social media platforms |
Purpose | Track mentions and coverage across various channels | Analyzes social conversations to understand audience sentiment and trends |
Time frame | Covers both real-time and historical data | Typically focuses on real-time and recent data |
Depth of analysis | Includes a mix of qualitative and quantitative metrics about brand perception | Emphasizes sentiment analysis and audience insights |
Primary users | PR professionals, marketing teams, brand managers and customer service teams | Social media managers, community managers and customer service teams |
Media monitoring provides a wider view of brand perception across all media types, while social listening offers deeper insights into audience sentiment and engagement on social platforms.
Why does media monitoring matter?
Media monitoring keeps you tuned to the latest conversations about your brand or industry. To understand the importance of media monitoring, let’s examine the ways it benefits businesses:
1. Improves brand reputation
Brand reputation management is important for every business. Big brands often align themselves with social causes and values that resonate with their core audience. However, one lousy PR incident can undo a positive perception.
When Apple launched Apple Music in 2015, Taylor Swift's Tumblr post criticizing its free streaming policy sparked a storm on X (formerly Twitter). Within 24 hours, Apple responded and resolved the issue amicably. So, brands need a social media reputation management plan during crises.
Interesting Watch: 3 effective tips for brand crisis management
2. Helps conduct market research
Media monitoring allows you to monitor their competitors' activities, marketing strategies and public perception. These insights can help inform your strategic decisions and identify opportunities for differentiation.
By analyzing media trends and consumer conversations, you can gain valuable insights into market demands, emerging trends and customer preferences. This information can drive product development and marketing strategies.
For instance, a gaming company could monitor media to identify trending technologies, such as virtual reality, used by its competitors. The company could leverage this insight to accelerate the development of its own offerings with VR features.
3. Identifies potential influencers
Through media monitoring, you can identify key opinion makers and industry influencers. Once you decide on the type of content you need to monitor to onboard influencers, you can monitor their reach and engagement.
It’s a great way for brands to build strategic partnerships and amplify their message through trusted voices and influencer marketing strategies.
4. Interprets unstructured media data
While comparing your performance to competitors is valuable, tracking your brand's evolution over time is equally important. Looking at your media presence across months or years can reveal long-term trends and the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Advanced tools and dashboards can automatically categorize brand mentions as positive, neutral or negative, offering a nuanced understanding of public perception of your brand.
5. Offers a better understanding of your target audience
Media monitoring extends far beyond tracking your brand mentions or that of your competition. It casts a wider net to understand your target audience’s preferences, behaviors and buying patterns. It also provides insights into what resonates with your existing customers and potential buyers.
By diving deep into audience analysis through media monitoring, you're not just collecting data but building a foundation for more authentic and impactful communication strategies.
6. Enables proactive customer service and engagement
Media monitoring is a powerful way to enhance customer service and foster deeper engagement with your audience. By keeping a close eye on various media channels, businesses can:
- Identify and address customer issues quickly: Proactive media monitoring allows you to catch and resolve customer issues swiftly, potentially turning a negative experience into a positive one
- Personalize customer interactions: By understanding the context and history of a customer's interactions with your brand across different platforms, you can provide more personalized and effective support
- Build a brand community: Identifying positive mentions and brand advocates allows you to foster a sense of community and loyalty among your customer base
Top industries that benefit from media monitoring
Media monitoring is necessary across sectors where brand perception plays a major role. But some industries may find it particularly useful.
- Technology and software: Media monitoring helps track evolving technological trends, such as breakthroughs in AI and machine learning, emerging innovations in augmented and virtual reality, product developments and user feedback.
- Retail and e-commerce: By using media monitoring, retail and e-commerce businesses can understand shifting consumer preferences, such as demand for sustainable products and growing interest in omnichannel shopping experiences.
- Healthcare and pharma: Monitoring allows companies to gauge consumer perceptions of health issues and treatments. Think of the public response to COVID-19 vaccines and emerging health trends like mental wellness and telehealth services.
- Finance and banking: Media monitoring acts as an early warning system for potential issues, such as market fluctuations linked to currency exchange rates. Plus, it helps track the overall market sentiment. ️
- Hospitality and tourism: Hotels and other similar establishments can gain valuable insights into traveler preferences and experiences. For instance, monitoring can help identify popular destinations or preferred holiday activities, such as the rise of eco-friendly accommodations or the demand for remote work retreats.
- Automotive: Media monitoring helps automotive companies track public reaction to new vehicle models, safety concerns and industry innovations such as electric vehicles and automated driving technology.
- Entertainment and media: Entertainment and media brands can track audience reactions to programming in real time to identify the latest trends, such as the rising popularity of streaming platforms or shifting content preferences.
- Food and beverage: Food and beverage brands can track product reception and quickly address safety or quality concerns such as ingredient recalls, contamination issues and customer complaints about taste or packaging.
Key metrics to track for media monitoring
To effectively manage media monitoring and surface real-time insights, businesses should track these key metrics:
1. Brand mentions: They refer to the frequency and context of brand name appearances across various media channels
2. Reach: It refers to the potential audience size exposed to the mentions of your brand or relevant topics
3. Engagement: This metric indicates the level of interaction (likes, shares, comments) with your content
4. Sentiment: It captures the overall tone (positive, negative or neutral) of mentions and conversations about your brand
5. Share of voice: This marketing metric assesses your brand's media presence against competitors
7. Influencer impact: This refers to the reach and engagement generated by influencers mentioning your brand
Media monitoring best practices
These best practices can serve as a strong foundation for your media monitoring strategy:
1. Define clear objectives
Establish specific goals for your media monitoring efforts. For instance, your goals could be:
➤ Measure the percentage rise in product inquiries or direct conversions from a collaboration post
➤ Improve customer sentiment by 20% over the next quarter
➤ Identify and engage with 50 new industry influencers in six months
➤ Reduce first response time to customer complaints on social media to under one hour
➤ Increase share of voice in the industry by 15% compared to top competitors
Align your media monitoring objectives with overall business goals for maximum impact. And ensure that all the stakeholders are on the same page about the desired outcome.
2. Choose the right keywords to monitor
Your keyword list should be comprehensive yet focused, allowing you to filter out noise and zero in on valuable insights. Start with a broad list of potential keywords and refine them later. Here’s a list of keyword types you can consider:
✓ Brand names (including common misspellings)
✓ Product names and key features
✓ Industry-specific terms and jargon
✓ Competitor names and products
✓ Key brand executives and PR experts
✓ Campaign hashtags and slogans
💡Pro Tip: To increase the effectiveness of your media monitoring strategy, you would need to use different sets of keywords to monitor multiple scenarios. However, pulling these data manually and bucketing them for different cases can be a trek. But with Sprinklr Insights’ keyword lists feature, you can apply filters based on client, owner and tags. Plus, create keyword clusters for different scenarios — like a brand crisis, feedback and appreciation.
3. Monitor competitors’ performance
Keep tabs on your competitors to understand industry trends, potential threats and opportunities for better brand and product differentiation. Here are a few aspects of media monitoring you can consider for tracking competitors:
- Product launches and updates: Monitor how they’re being received and take cues for internal learnings to improve launch events
- Marketing campaigns and messaging: Understand what strikes a chord with the ideal customer profile
- Customer feedback and sentiment: Manage customer feedback and sentiment to offer tailored solutions
💡 Pro Tip: Create a competitive benchmarking scorecard that tracks key metrics like share of voice, sentiment and engagement rates. This will allow easy comparisons and trend identification over time. Building one in-house might be a tedious task but with Sprinklr’s Competitive Insights And Benchmarking Tool, you can perform performance benchmarks of competitors across media channels, and dive deep into ratings and reviews for competing products.
4. Utilize comprehensive monitoring tools
Investing in robust media monitoring tools is essential for capturing the complete picture of your brand's media presence across channels. Look for the following functionalities when selecting your toolkit:
- Multi-channel coverage: Your monitoring tool should cover social media, news sites, blogs, forums, etc.
- Real-time AI monitoring and alerts: It should generate timely notifications, allowing you to respond quickly to emerging issues or opportunities
- Sentiment analysis capabilities: Understanding the tone of conversations helps you gauge public opinion and adjust your strategies through sentiment analysis
- Customizable dashboards and reporting: The framework should offer tailored reports to help you focus on the metrics that matter most to your business
- Integration with other marketing tools and CRM systems: The tool stack should streamline your workflows, allowing you to act more efficiently on insights
Assess your needs and budget before deciding on a media monitoring tool. Test its functionalities with a demo or free trial for internal buy-in from stakeholders.
5. Analyze data and act on it consistently
Monitoring data from all your brand channels daily is not enough. Here are the key data elements to analyze through media monitoring:
- Trend identification: Anticipate public opinion shifts and proactively tweak and fine-tune your strategies
- Anomaly detection: Detect and respond quickly to potential crises or capitalize on unexpected opportunities
- Content performance evaluation: Analyze content that resonates most with your audience
- Audience segmentation and behavior analysis: Create targeted and effective communication strategies based on audience behavior
6. Respond to mentions promptly
Timely responses to media mentions on social platforms can significantly impact your brand perception and customer relationships. Here are some types of mentions that you should prioritize:
✓ Customer complaints or negative feedback
✓ Positive reviews or testimonials
✓ Queries about products or services
✓ Mentions by influencers or key industry figures
Develop response templates for common scenarios. Use AI-powered tools to optimize speed, agent productivity and accuracy without sacrificing personalization.
7. Integrate learnings across internal business functions
For media monitoring to be truly effective, it shouldn't be siloed within a single team or department. Instead, integrate insights from media monitoring across various functions of your organization:
- Marketing: Create campaign strategies, measure campaign performance and identify new marketing opportunities
- Product development: Leverage customer feedback and industry trends to guide product improvements and innovations
- Customer service: Use real-time insights to address customer issues proactively through omnichannel communications
- Sales: Help sales teams enhance their pitches more effectively based on market insights
- Executive leadership: Gain high-level insights for strategic decision-making and long-term planning
- Human resources: Monitor employer branding to improve recruitment strategies and employee engagement
- Legal and compliance: Stay ahead of potential legal issues by monitoring regulatory and compliance issues
The role of AI in media monitoring
Thanks to AI, media monitoring no longer has to be a labor-intensive process. Here’s how AI-powered tools enhance specific aspects of media monitoring:
1. Generates business analytics
AI-driven social media analytics platforms go beyond basic metrics, offering deep insights into media trends and content performance. Through media monitoring, they provide detailed reports with insights on campaign performance, competitor benchmarking, and more. The outcome? Improved ROI and brand visibility.
2. Streamlines social media monitoring
Understanding your audience from a vast amount of data can be tedious. With AI-driven audience insights, you can segment audiences based on behavior, preferences and engagement patterns. These tool stacks monitor online conversations to predict audience reactions to content formats and campaigns.
AI-based social media monitoring platforms help marketers navigate the vast, fast-paced world of social media by tracking trends and brand mentions across multiple platforms. They enable brands to analyze sentiment in posts, comments and reactions while ensuring brand compliance.
Deep Dive: Social Media Monitoring: The Ultimate Guide to Get Started
3. Automates content categorization
AI tools monitor content related to your industry and automatically categorize them. They help efficiently organize vast amounts of media content gathered from across digital channels. How? By tagging and classifying articles, posts and mentions. This helps you identify themes and topics within large datasets and makes analysis and reporting easier.
4. Analyzes post-sale sentiment
AI-powered social media sentiment analysis tools offer a nuanced understanding of audience sentiment by continuously monitoring publicly available posts and data. They detect emotions in the text beyond simple positive and negative classifications.
AI-driven solution kits can also understand context and identify sarcasm or irony, such as passive-aggressive feedback from disgruntled customers. In addition, these tools use image and video analytics to detect logos, support transcriptions and analyze expressions, giving brands a broad understanding of post-sale consumer sentiment.
Leverage 360-degree media monitoring with Sprinklr
Media monitoring should be integrated with your overall social media management strategy to avoid redundant work, disconnected collaboration and poor transparency.
Sprinklr Social addresses this by combining media monitoring and social listening with content planning and publishing. The platform offers real-time insights across 30+ digital channels, predictive trend analysis and automated performance reports with actionable recommendations. Not surprisingly, the world's leading enterprises, such as Honda, Prada and boAt, have leveraged the platform for social media management for over a decade.
Discover how Sprinklr Social can empower your brand with AI-driven insights and comprehensive monitoring capabilities.
Frequently Asked Questions
Media monitoring lets you detect potential issues early by tracking mentions and sentiment across various channels. Brands can address concerns proactively and mitigate potential damage before an issue escalates.
A daily review of key metrics, detailed weekly reports of emerging trends and comprehensive monthly analyses of brand performance can provide a good balance of timely insights and strategic overview.
Media monitoring can provide valuable insights into customer needs, preferences and pain points. You can identify areas for improvement, spot emerging trends and even discover new product ideas.
Media monitoring plays a crucial role in influencer marketing. It helps you identify relevant influencers, track the performance of collaborations and measure the overall impact on brand perception.
Media monitoring data can inform various aspects of business strategy. Some specific areas include marketing, product development, customer service, sales and corporate strategy.
