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How to do social media monitoring
A step-by-step social media monitoring setup: pick keywords, wire free alerts, triage by urgency and reply. Time per step and what to skip.
- 3 August 2026
- Free to read
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How do you do social media monitoring?
Pick five to eight keywords, wire them into free alerts, give one named person fifteen minutes a day to triage, and reply to questions and complaints first. Setup takes about 30 minutes and costs nothing. The measure of success is not mentions caught — it is replies sent within your target window and conversations that turn into customers.
Last updated 3 August 2026
| When | Task | Time |
|---|---|---|
| Daily | Triage alerts, reply to questions and complaints | 15 min |
| Daily | Log new phrasing customers use | 2 min |
| Weekly | Scan competitor mentions for switchers | 20 min |
| Weekly | Check nothing was missed on the slowest channel | 10 min |
| Monthly | Prune keywords producing only noise | 15 min |
Do this
The steps, in order.
- Step 1
Choose keywords a buyer would type, not a marketer
Brand name, misspellings, bare domain, two competitors, one category phrase. Add "alternative to [competitor]" if you sell software — it is the highest-intent phrase in monitoring and volume is low enough to read every hit.
- Step 2
Wire the alerts
F5Bot for Reddit and Hacker News, Google Alerts for indexed pages and news, native saved searches for X. Send everything to one inbox folder so triage is a single pass.
- Step 3
Triage on urgency, not order received
Complaints inside two hours. Buying questions the same day. Category questions within 48 hours. Neutral mentions get read and ignored. Without this rule the loudest, least important thread eats the whole session.
- Step 4
Reply as a person, answer before you pitch
Lead with the answer to what they asked. Disclose that you work on the product, in one clause. A reply that solves the problem without a link outperforms a pitch nine times out of ten, and it will not get removed by a moderator.
- Step 5
Review the keyword list monthly
Any term that produced only noise for four weeks gets cut. Any phrase you saw repeatedly in real conversations gets added. The list should shrink and sharpen over time, not grow.
Worth knowing
The bits people get wrong.
The failure mode is volume. Teams start with twenty keywords, drown, and abandon the habit inside a month. Start with five and add one at a time only when you have the attention to read it.
Subreddit and forum rules vary a lot. Some ban self-promotion outright, some allow it with disclosure. Read the sidebar before your first reply — a removed comment and a banned account costs more than the mention was worth.
Keep a shared document of good replies. Most questions repeat, and having a written starting point cuts reply time from ten minutes to two without making the answers generic.
Questions
Follow-up questions.
How often should I check mentions?
Once a day is enough for most businesses, twice a day during a launch or an incident. Real-time push notifications are counterproductive unless someone is on duty for support.
Should I reply to negative mentions?
Yes, if it's a specific, fixable complaint — answer publicly, then move to DM. Vague hostility with no ask is best left alone; replying gives it a bigger audience.
What should I track to know it's working?
Replies sent, median time to reply, and conversations that led to a signup or a saved customer. Mention count is a vanity metric — it goes up when someone criticises you.
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