What is social media monitoring ? - Definition from WhatIs.com

Definition

social media monitoring

Social media monitoring, also known as social listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand.

Social media monitoring involves text mining specific keywords on social networking websites, blogs, discussion forums and other social media. Essentially, monitoring software transposes specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values. The numerical values are linked to structured data in a database, allowing the data to be analyzed with traditional data mining techniques.

Conversations on the Internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data. It's important, therefore, to define what the goals are for a social media monitoring initiative. Depending on the goal, the right tool might be a series of free Google Alerts or an expensive software suite that includes ad hoc analysis and full integration with legacy customer relationship management (CRM) applications.

 

Related glossary terms: social CRM
Contributor(s): Rosemary Cafasso
This was last updated in October 2011
Editorial Director: Margaret Rouse

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