What is media monitoring?

Media monitoring is the activity of monitoring online performance through media - and listening in to discussions surrounding your brand, your industry, your competitors as well as any other subject that’s relevant to your business.

Previously - media monitoring was as archaic as cutting-and-pasting bits of newspaper that mentioned a brand into a clip book. Nowadays, the media landscape is trawled using the very latest sophisticated algorithms as well as machine learning to track, obtain and organise mentions. This now thoroughly refined process offers essential insights into the success and failure of a brand.

Depending on the organisation - media monitoring can be used in a variety of ways for many different reasons. For instance, media takes many forms - such as online, print, broadcast and social media monitoring. Whatever form of media is most important to you - conversations relevant to your brand, your competitors and your industry are happening all the time, wherever you look.

What media should you be monitoring?

There’s no doubt that the world lives in the online space these days, while you can also gauge coverage of your brand from print and broadcasts. However, the world of social media is growing at an extremely fast rate - and with so many opinions shared online from major celebrity influencers to the average social user, it’s a media monitoring goldmine.

With social media monitoring you can listen to and engage with the conversations that focus on your brand, or any topics that are relevant to that cause. You can divulge the conversations to better understand how your content is performing, as well as engage with social influencers.

Why do people use media monitoring tools?

Fundamentally - media monitoring is used to measure the performance of your brand, better understand what your competition is doing and discover where your industry is heading. Here are five other reasons media monitoring tools are used:

• Brand monitoring - gauging the overall response to a brand across all media channels - helping to manage reputation
• Evaluation - monitoring brand awareness and engagement efforts to ensure these are turning into results
• Target audience - understand the audience relative to a brand so that communication and relations through media can be improved upon
• Influencers - identify major influencers through social media monitoring and build a positive relationship with them