In this Talkwalker white paper you will learn how to plan social media monitoring systematically and target-orientated. We will show you how to prepare your social media monitoring tool from search definition, to ongoing monitoring and up to selective qualification of the search results in order to prepare for meaningful analysis in just three steps.

1. #1
How To Plan
Social Media Monitoring
www.talkwalker.com

2. In this Talkwalker white paper you will learn how
to plan social media monitoring systematically
and target-orientated.
We will show you how to prepare your social
media monitoring tool from search definition, to
ongoing monitoring and up to selective
qualification of the search results in order to
prepare for meaningful analysis in just three
steps.
A guide for beginners and those in a rush
From Christophe Folschette with Tapio Liller

3. 4
What is this about?
5
Social media monitoring the need for knowledge,
analysis and proof of success
6
Five key steps to implement a successful
social media monitoring project
7
Steps 1-3
10 Outlook
11 Cheat Sheet #1
how to plan Social Media Monitoring
3

4. What is this about?
You are reading a Talkwalker white paper. This is Part 1
in a series of documents for Social Media Managers and
professionals for digital communications.
It was written by Christophe Folschette from Talkwalker,
a leading provider of social media monitoring and
analysis, together with Tapio Liller, consultant for
communications and co-author of the bestseller “PR on
the social web” (published by O’Reilly).
Regardless of whether you are working in the field of
social media management, campaign management,
online reputation management, PR, corporate
communications, online marketing or have other
functions that involve working online, this white paper
is for you!
You can find more about Talkwalker online at
www.talkwalker.com
You can also contact the Talkwalker team through
Twitter: @Talkwalker
and Facebook: fb.com/Talkwalker
By the way, on the last page of this Talkwalker White
Paper you will find a “Cheat Sheet” optimised for your
desktop. That way, you can have the tips and methods
from this paper always at hand.
We want to help you to improve your social media
initiatives by introducing you to methods and tips,
which will make your (working) life easier. The
productive and efficient use of social media monitoring
and analysis is in the center of it.
We hope that you find this paper interesting and
helpful. If you do, please share your experience on
Twitter using the hashtag #TalkwalkerWP. If you have
comments or questions, please send us your feedback
to whitepapers@talkwalker.com
We will listen to your feedback and take it into account
for future editions.
Thank you very much!
Christophe Folschette & Tapio Liller
WHITE PAPER #1

5. Social media monitoring the need for knowledge,
analysis and proof of success
Anyone who is active on the social web needs - generally
speaking - three things:
Let’s start where every communications project should
start, the systematic planning of your project.
1. Knowledge: about the topics which are relevant to
your target group(s) and where the discussions are
taking place.
2. Analysis: raw data are of little use. You have to ask the
right questions in order to get meaningful answers.
3. Proof of success: social web communications is not
an end in itself. You have to prove the value of your
work and show that you achieved the predefined
goals.
In the following pages we will guide you step-bystep through the design process of a social media
monitoring project. On the last page you will find the
working steps as a clearly displayed Cheat Sheet for
your desktop.
Social media monitoring and analysis tools can help
you with all of the above. But to achieve your goals
there is far greater need than a simple observation of
the online-mentions of a company name or brand. You
need a reliable system for your social media monitoring,
which will use the potential of your tool and display the
gained knowledge, the analysis, the results, and finally
the accurate proof of success in a consistent way.
This Talkwalker white paper moves within that context.
We want to help you to optimize the capabilities of your
social media monitoring and analysis tool and to use all
of its potential.
how to plan Social Media Monitoring
5

6. Five key steps to implement a successful
social media monitoring project
The process of a social media monitoring project can be
divided into five key steps. Great care should be taken in
planning each of these steps.
Analysis
The analysis of the results by previously defined criteria
will provide the above mentioned insight.
Search
At the beginning stands the definition and refinement
of a - at times complex - search. Names, terms, words
and topics have to be listed and - if necessary - be
restricted by search operators after a trial search.
Reporting
The process ends with the editing of all the results,
whether they are about proving the success of a
campaign or about evaluating the development of
corporate reputation on the social web.
Monitoring
The ongoing monitoring can start with the tested
search syntax.
The next pages are dedicated to the above mentioned
pre-planning and data processing in steps 1 to 3. Steps
4 and 5 will be the subject of further Talkwalker white
papers.
Qualification of results
Even the best planned search with a high quality social
media monitoring tool will produce false positive
results. Those will be corrected by the hit qualification
and the remaining relevant results will be prepared for
the upcoming analysis.
WHITE PAPER #1

7. Steps 1-3
Step 1 - What are you searching for on the social web?
Many users of social media monitoring tools start
by typing the name of a company or a product in a
search profile and leave it there. By doing this, they are
essentially wasting almost all of the tool’s potential. For
that kind of simple name search, a search engine would
be sufficient most of the times.
Take the time to write down your search terms and
to fully test the accompanying search input with
your social media monitoring tool. You will get many
irrelevant results in your first run, especially in topic
searches. The search syntax of your monitoring tool
should allow for relevant restrictions based on Boolean
query.
As a first step, the choice of names of companies,
products and also the names of certain important
people, such as company spokesperson or other
stakeholders are the anchor of social media monitoring.
Those search terms are the basis for an ongoing
observation and evaluation.
In parallel it is important to benchmark against the
competition. For example, a share-of-voice analysis is
only possible if you observe and evaluate both your
own and your competitors at the same time in the same
source panel.
EXAMPLE SEARCH SYNTAX
When it finally comes to planning a compatible
communication strategy, you will not be able to avoid
a topic search. That means to define search terms,
which best describe the relevant topics of your target
group and customers. With the help of social media
monitoring you will be able to find the places on the
web where these topics are being discussed and after
more detailed evaluation, also the relevant influencers.
Last but not least, the topic search is suitable for
identifying suggestions in editorially-driven social
media programs. Community Managers, e.g. of
Facebook fan pages, can benefit from references
appearing quickly on widely discussed topics.
how to plan Social Media Monitoring
7

8. Step 2 - Monitoring
Step 3 - Qualification of results
In our five step sequence we understand monitoring
as a search over time. The design and refinement of the
search was part of Step 1, and, after that, the monitoring
displays the search results continuously on a time axis.
Even the most accurate search with tested keywords
and restrictions will generate irrelevant results. Only a
clean, completely relevant to the monitoring purpose,
stock of search results can make the further analysis
useful and successful.
Monitoring exceeds the search for the detection
of a “snapshot” in a specific moment in time. The
most obvious results of all professional social media
monitoring tools are the well-known trend charts of the
frequency of social media mentions. With them, you
can identify and document trends over a long period
of time. Outliers, in an otherwise consistent flow, are
indicators of special events.
In order to ensure a quick and consistent qualification
of results, it is important to determine the evaluation
criteria beforehand.
3.1. LANGUAGE
It is rarely necessary to search the whole social web. You
should therefore only select the language(s) that are
relevant to your project.
3.2. Sources & source panels
Not every website or source will be relevant. It is
therefore advisable to exclude sources that are not
relevant or of poor quality.
TREND CURVE WITH OUTLIER
There can be many reasons to observe an outlier
over a long-term trend. If there was a particular
highlight of a communications campaign that day (e.g.
product introduction, a press conference on financial
statements, a new TV spot, appearance of a corporate
representative at a conference etc.), the social media
monitoring tool could display the response to that
event. On the other hand, a sudden drop in the social
media mentions trend is very rare and could be of
technical nature, for instance if a crawled site with a
high number of mentions is not accessible any more.
BLOCKING SOURCES
However, such an anomaly in the trend could also be
a warning sign, as a result of a developing crisis, which
leads to more social media mentions. In most cases,
it is worth it to have a closer look at individual results
while observing the trend in mentions. With a look at an
automatically generated tag-cloud, one can also identify
terms, which are associated with the search terms.
WHITE PAPER #1

9. Conversely, certain sources will definitely have to be
included. The use of pre-defined source panels can be
very useful in describing and setting goals of certain
communication campaigns.
3.4. detecting false positive results
Before proceeding with your analysis, you should check
for false positive results and exclude them from your
results list.
For example, you are looking for mentions of a
bookstore named „Bookworm“ and this will inevitably
generate results that include this word not as a name,
but also as the description for people who enjoy
reading.
SOURCE PANEL SETUP
3.5. sentiment
For example: “In the time period X the client’s product
shall be discussed by 80% of the blogs that their target
group has defined as the relevant Top 30 blogs”. The Top
30 blogs can be classified in a separate source panel,
thereby filtering the reporting results of this media type
by one click of a button.
3.3. influence & Relevance
Social media communication can’t quite get by without
influence indicators - even if it is optimized to a very
precise target group. In order to calculate the influence
of online media, the number of page views per month is
usually used.
Naturally, not all sources can be evaluated by tracking
the website itself, therefore social media monitoring
tools use the data from external providers such as Alexa,
as is the case for Talkwalker.
Social media monitoring will be clearly more
informative, if it takes into account both quantitative
and qualitative factors for the evaluation. The most
commonly used qualitative factor, which is also
integrated as a feature in most social media monitoring
tools, is the sentiment or “mood” of an article.
The sentiment is derived by analyising the tone and
attitude contained within the text of an article or
mention. A classification of positive/neutral/negative
will usually do the job.
Many social media monitoring tools use use their own
techniques and semantic analysis in order to classify
sentiment results. However, you should not only rely on
this, as no algorithm can ‚read between the lines‘ like
a human being. Irony, sarcasm, ambiguity - often key
ingredients of the social web - should not be excluded.
Together with other factors, such as the frequency of
interaction with the content of a source, a relevancy
scoring can be proposed by the social media monitoring
tool.
For example, Talkwalker does does this by displaying a
score ranging from 0 to 3 stars. This relevancy scoring can
be updated at any time in order to prioritise the sources
according to the goals of the communications campaign.
It also facilitates a consistent ranking which can be
used to analyse targeted results (e.g. „only show 3-star
sources“).
sentiment setting
update relevancy scoring
how to plan Social Media Monitoring
9

10. Therefore, there is no way around a consistent reexamination of the sentiment when qualifying the
results.
Outlook
Do not underestimate the efforts this step can
entail. Possibly hundreds, even thousands of sources
previously classified as relevant, may have to be re-read
and re-classified. A good social media monitoring tool
should offer features that help with this task.
Once you have planned and prepared the various
steps outlined in this white paper and you continue to
follow the process as part of your ongoing social media
monitoring, you will be in a position to tackle the next
steps, analysis and reporting, with good quality data.
3.6. Topics/categories
We will cover analysis and reporting in future White
Papers. There you will learn how to interpret trend
charts, use tag clouds as trend indicators and identify
your influencers.
To further qualify the results and prepare for a deeper
analysis, keyword topics or a categorisation are the next
step.
Topics could be different products of a company, but
also their usage context. For example, a shampoo
manufacturer might want to know which of their
products are mentioned where, and how often. At the
same time it could be useful to know whether shampoo
“A“ is mentioned in context with “hair salon“ or “at
home“.
Until then, we recommend that you visit the Talkwalker
blog: blog.talkwalker.com. The blog features regular
updates, tips and articles on topics related to social
media monitoring.
Also, to keep up to date on the latest developments, just
follow us on Twitter: @Talkwalker
Depending on the company, its products, its marketing/
communications strategy, these types of questions
can be answered with the help of a hierarchical
categorisation system. The detailed methodology for
that is beyond the scope of this first white paper, but
will be addressed in a future publication of this series.
Below are a few suggestions on how to set up a basic
categorisation system.
In the Talkwalker tool, you can use the „tagging“ function
to facilitate this.
• Category “Author”: journalist, blogger, analyst,
Facebook fan, Twitter follower, blog commentator
etc.
• Category “Topic”: product names, usage contexts,
campaign themes, depending on the objectives
• Category “Messages”: here you can describe the core
messages, which are relevant to your communications objectives, with keywords
• Category “Reference”: original article, guest article,
comment, share, tweet / retweet etc.
• Category “Influencer”: fan, advocate, observer,
skeptic, critic, troll etc.
WHITE PAPER #1

11. Cheat Sheet #1
How to plan social media monitoring
This sheet summarises all important aspects of planning a successful social media monitoring project.
SEARCH
What am I looking for on the social web?
Company or brand name
Product name(s)
Certain people
Competitors (company, product)
Topics
QUALIFYING RESULTS
What identifies a relevant search result?
What languages are relevant?
What sources should be scanned? (e.g. blogs, forums, social networks,
benchmark portals, online magazines, news sites etc.)
How should the sources be prioritized with regards to influence, relevance,
engagement?
In what context should the searched topics be related?
PREPARING THE EVALUATION
What are the criteria by which the results should be evaluated?
Trends - Mentions over time (also in comparison with competitors, share of voice)
Issues - Increase in number of keywords related to search terms
Sentiment - Change in mood on the social web
Type of media - Comparison of results after appearance (e.g. on blogs, Twitter,
Facebook, forums etc.)
Relevance/priority - Comparison of results after appearance, based on prioritised
media (tier 1, tier 2, etc.)
Categories - Evaluation according to campaign-specific classification such as
topics, products, messages, article types, countries, etc.
Persons - Identification of influencers, opinion-leaders, critics, fans, etc.
Engagement - Evaluation of results based on number of shares, likes, comments,
retweets, etc.
© 2013 by Talkwalker – Created with Tapio Liller, Oseon.
More about Talkwalker at talkwalker.com, Twitter: @Talkwalker and Facebook: facebook.com/Talkwalker
www.talkwalker.com

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L-1118 Luxembourg
Luxembourg
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contact@talkwalker.com
www.talkwalker.com
© 2013 by Talkwalker – Created with Tapio Liller, Oseon.
More about Talkwalker at talkwalker.com, Twitter: @Talkwalker and Facebook: facebook.com/Talkwalker