I’ve been testing a few social media monitoring software for Chinese market (mainland China) lately and found very few good ones. Let me share some tips on sourcing social media monitoring software or online applications for mainland Chinese market.
Language capabilities. If an application does a good job of monitoring online conversations on English keywords, it’s not hard to add in support of double byte characters like Chinese characters. But, it’s important the tool can tell the difference between traditional Chinese (official language in Taiwan, Hong Kong) and simplified Chinese (used by mainland Chinese).
If your English brand name (or your competitors) is very well known in China such as BMW and LV, you do want to monitor English brand keywords as well while no content from English content are returned at the same time.
BBS online forums. I came across a tool this morning that did a good job of monitoring online content according to the specified keyword; however, no forum results are included at all. Social networking sites and microblogging sites are popular; no doubt. But, online BBS forums are still the place where most online conversations take place.
Do a search in Google and Baidu and identify some popular forums where your brand is mentioned. See whether they are included in the returned results from the social monitoring tool.
Filtering function. Whether you like it or not, people in China copy articles from other sources including the top portal sites. You can expect news content appearing across news sites, blogs, and forums. If the social media monitoring tool can filter out news content from blogs and online forums, it will definitely be very helpful.
Advanced aggregation and summary feature. If a piece of news gets published across different sites, and many people leave comments on these sites, you want to have aggregated comments in one place instead of having to click into each matched item and view the comments separately.
Last tip: ask yourself what actionable results the social media monitoring tool can generate for your China marketing / PR team.
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Rocky,
Not sure if you’ve checked out Sysomos’ social media monitoring services but they offer on-the-fly translation into multiple languages, including Mandarin.
Mark
Mark Evans
Director of Communications
Sysomos Inc.