How to Create an Industry Monitor

Watch a tutorial video here.

When approaching this monitor, first think about which industry you are in. What are people saying in it? Who are the leaders? What are the trends? What direction is it going? Think of generic keywords to help you are you create this monitor to understand these key metrics.

For this example, we’re going to be creating a ski & snowboard industry monitor.

To be generic, we want to capture mentions that contain ski, skiing, snowboard, snowboarding. This way we can capture as much data as possible.

By running a quick monitor preview, you get sample mentions of what people are posting. This enables you to begin your exclusion rules.

For example, we only want mentions of downhill skiing or snowboarding. Not jet skiing, cross-country skiing or a musical artist called Ski Mask.

Once you think you’ve got your monitor all set up, go ahead and save it.

Big Picture Data

Industry monitors give you a good pulse on what trends are appearing, where the social conversation is leading it, who may be influential in the industry, etc.

Let’s take a dive into some of these metrics.

Influencers

We can look at who are the most influential in the industry and what they are talking about. For example, in the influencers panel, we can see the top 10 profiles with the highest influencer score. One of them being Lindsey Vonn--an Olympic skier.

By clicking on her profile, we can see the types of mentions she has published that contain our keywords.

Next, we can see trends in the social conversation in the Trends Panel.

Trends

Here we can see how many times people have posted using one of the keywords. Based on the mentions & date range, it looks like ski/skiing greatly out mentions snowboard/snowboarding.

Lastly, we can look at demographics; Who, where, and what language. 

Demographics

This will give us a good perspective of the industry in general. Which gender is talking about it, where they are located in the world, and which language they're using.

Okay, so what?

All of this information now enables you to better focus your efforts. Industry monitors are vital in crafting a strategic social marketing plan. It will give you top influencers to partner with, trending hashtags/keywords to include in your content, and demographics values to target.