Monitoring social media and listening to conversations about your brand, your competitors’ brands and critical issues facing your industry is important if you’re going to stay up to speed on trends. You may also glean information from these discussions that can be applied to your business to make it stronger.

Given the importance of listening, I’ve decided to revisit some best practices for social media monitoring. You can get started in three easy steps:

Identify the terms and accounts you want to monitor

The first step is to determine the conversations you want to track. This means you need to know the key words, phrases, and hashtags you’re most interested in following. For instance, if you’re working for the Mayo Clinic, you’ll want to track any conversations about the Mayo Clinic, its clinical practices, and its research, as well as other companies and people who frequently discuss the Mayo Clinic.

SparkToro is a great way to develop an initial list because you can quickly identify the people and companies who are most frequently discussing a particular topic and see the hashtags and terms they’re using, as well.

For instance, when I search the Mayo Clinic in SparkToro, I find that the 596 people that talk about the clinic on social media engage most with these accounts: the Mayo Clinic, John Noseworthy, M.D., Sharonne Hayes, M.D., NIH, Gianrico Farrugia, M.D., CDC, NYT Health and others.

Given that these individuals speak often about the Mayo Clinic, monitoring their conversations – along with their competitors’ conversations – could provide insight.

For more about SparkToro, please see my colleague’s post, SparkToro – the marketing tool that all strategists need in their toolkit.

Set up Hootsuite or another tool

Next, I suggest using some form of social media dashboard software. This will let you listen to a broad range of conversations on platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram, among others Hootsuite has some excellent capabilities for social listening. For more information, check out this blog which covers ten tools that make listening easier.

Share your findings

A final word about monitoring and listening, it only works if you take the time to review and share the data.

The folks at Hootsuite use the phrase created by America’s Homeland Security, “If you see something, say something.” If you see a spike in traffic or some other key event online, it’s often a good idea to share the information with others on your team. To make this easy, you may want to set up an email alias to loop in key teams such as customer service or content marketing, publish a weekly or monthly report, and arrange a quarterly meeting to discuss findings.

Conversations can move quickly, so if someone needs a response right away, you should know how you’ll handle that. Processes involving customer service teams or content marketing may be especially vital if you’re a consumer-facing company.

By practicing active social listening, you will likely gain important insight into your competitor’s actions. For instance, by monitoring discussions, you may learn that one of your top competitors is missing an opportunity to address customers’ true pain points. Identifying this market gap gives you a chance to address and fill it.

There are myriad benefits to social listening. Not only can you gain insight into what is being said, but by listening you’ll also better understand the attitudes and feelings of your customers, clients, or other stakeholders, and you’ll have a better understanding of how to participate in conversations.