What do you mean by social media monitoring?

[Loreen France]

[slexy]

illuninminta

[Scott]

Social media monitoring (SMM) is the process of finding the posts, tweets and status updates that matter to your brand among the millions that are created every hour.

[Arjun]

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 on the social media web space including platforms like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc..

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.