How To: Monitor Your Sports Brands

So you finally convinced management to allow you to get into social media, you’ve set up your Facebook and your Twitter account (hopefully a few others too) and the people are flocking to your accounts. Now what? How do you find out what people are saying about you and then get into the conversation yourself?

Social Media Monitoring

The conversation is happening out there on the internet, with or without you, so it only makes sense for you to get involved. There are plenty of places that your sports brand gets talked about not just on Facebook or Twitter, there are blogs, podcasts, message boards etc. It’s up to you and go and find them. Not only is it up to you to find them, but you must decide if it is worth intersecting in the conversation.

Eliminate the noise 

There are two types of tracking going online right now. Generic brand monitoring, where the brand mention is found and catalogued in a database, but the latest trend is now in sentiment tracking. They track the brand mention but then analyse whether they are being talked about in a positive or negative light.

What are some useful tools to get you started in monitoring your brand?

Brand Monitoring

Twitter Search

Yep, simple right? Twitter Search is the easiest and most effective way to start out when monitoring your brand on Twitter only. You can type in usernames to catch all the @ mentions, specific words or phrases or #hashtags to monitor as well. They used to index up to seven days worth of tweets but with Twitter now hitting up to 3000 tweets per second there just became too many tweets, and now they only index around four days worth of tweets. Why is it extra awesome? You can save your searches on to your twitter.com homepage and never have to come back to the search site.

SocialMention

Probably the best way to start. SocialMention is a great way for you to punch in your brand and see how its being talked about on social media platforms, blogs, videos, audio, events, comments you name it you can track it. Not only does it list all your brand mentions but it does also give a little taste of sentiment tracking, but we’ll touch on that later.

TweetReach

TweetReach allows you to track anything; phrases, websites addresses, usernames, whatever you want. It’s a great service to track the status of a campaign you’ve recently launched or an event you’ve just had. Say you’re a local cycling federation and you want to track the conversation around the Tour De France hashtag #tdf simply type in #tdf and voila. You can track the total amount of impressions the hashtag had, who has the most followers that are engaging in the conversation and from there you can use a service like Klout to follow up the influential ones (we’ll touch on that later as well). But remember, just because they have the most followers on Twitter doesn’t mean they are the most influential.

We love infographs 

TweetReach will give you an example size of 50 impressions, and from there you can purchase the full report for $20. For example, the screenshot above only showed 50 tweets out of a total of 1500.

Sentiment Tracking

Yep, they can now track how you feel. No longer is just capturing the tweet good enough, there are now automated systems to track the sentiment of your tweet, is your brand being talked about in a positive or negative light? Here are some of the best free sites to use for sentiment tracking.

Twitter Sentiment

It says exactly what it is, it shows the positive or negative sentiment of tweets about your brand. While still in beta testing, Twitter Sentiment allows you to save your searches, shows you a pie chart and also bar chart graph in % and total tweets and allows you to register for an account.

Twitrratr

This is easily the most visually appealing of the bunch that I could find. Twitrratr allows you to ‘view’ each individual tweet and then follow up and identify the influence of that person. It also highlights the words that they feel are key to identifying them as positive, neutral or negative tweets.

Tweetfeel

Tweetfeel is a really simple service. You type in your key word and then it comes up with a green smiley face or a red sad face, pretty simple really. Apart from that there’s not much to say, it’s very easy on the eyes and lets you follow the individual tweets.

Monitor their influence

Social media influence is becoming a real barometer of the importance of the online persona of individuals. Let’s say you had ten people commenting negatively about your brand, is it realistic that you would reply to all ten? Probably not. But what you can do is do some quick research on all ten and find out who has the most influence online (a great way to do this is via a Twitter influence tracking site Klout -want to find out your influence? Simply go to www.klout.com/yourusername).

We can’t spend our day online from 9-5 on social media, so staff can reduce their time spent on social media platforms by highlighting the influential people and respond to them, as their voice and opinion counts for more in the online space than the others.

You’ve contacted them, but you still can’t convince them? Offer them something that others cant. If you’re a team, offer them a VIP experience or the chance to meet their favourite player, if you’re a sports apparel brand, give them a discount at your store or a behind the scenes tour of your factory. Win them over, and your brand will reap the benefit online. Sports is a unique entity compared to regular businesses, so leverage that when you’re trying to influence the influencers.

Conclusion

Being a part of the conversation where all social media is trending, no longer can brands get away with having their head in the sand while the conversation goes on around them, and without them. These simple tools in brand monitoring will allow you to at least monitor the conversation, even if you don’t want to get involved. Now, with  these new services like sentiment tracking still being new, they won’t deliver perfect results everytime, but it does allow you to get a general overview of how your brand is being talked about.

About author

Anthony Alsop
Anthony Alsop 9 posts

Anthony Alsop is a blogger and consultant at sportspiel.com.au. He has worked previously in both the IT and Sport sectors, so working in the niche of social media and sport was a natural fit. Anthony is from Melbourne, Australia was was recently named the sporting capital of the world and has consulted with sporting organisations both in Australia and in the United States. You can find him on Twitter @anthonyalsop or via email anthony@sportspiel.com.au

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