5 signs it's time to upgrade from free to paid media monitoring

There are signs that it's time you upgrade to paid media monitoring..

Scrolling becomes a challenge

Ever tried watching a trending hashtag? Ok, maybe that's extreme.. but as with anything that has any general interest, there will be a lot of it. The speed at which the Tweets fly by is mind-boggling, so trying to engage with a trending hashtag can be next to impossible—especially if you're trying to be part of a conversation. If you're on Twitter, Tweetdeck is impractical and you will have to look for other paid social media management solutions.

This is the beginning. If you're looking at something to manage your social media accounts, there's a good chance you should be or will be shortly, looking for paid media monitoring and social listening software too.

The noise is getting annoying

Remember the old days of social media, when it was just one or two posts that were irrelevant? You could just ignore it or easily remove it from any spreadsheet with which you use to track things with. But the noise has slowly increased and without realizing it, you're spending all of your time cleaning up and none of your time doing what you're supposed to be doing: monitoring content.

We are an adaptable species, so it's easy to get sucked into doing work that you shouldn't be doing without realizing it. Are you spending more than 5 minutes a day on this? Then that's too long. The answer? Paid media monitoring.

Need help replying to messages?

Are you starting to feel like there are more and more messages to reply to? Are you starting to wish you had more time to do other things? You know that it's time to hire someone to help.

The moment you feel that you need a new hire, consider that they should come equipped with all the tools they need to help you succeed—and that means media monitoring solutions. They may have their own preferred set of tools they use for this. That's an excellent question to begin an interview with. You'll find that the tools a social media manager uses tells you a lot about their ability to get the job done. Too many tools means they're probably a little wasteful, but too few means they're letting things fall through the cracks. Just the right amount? Now we're talking paid media monitoring.

Your OCD is kicking in, you need folders

Picture this: things are getting messy and your OCD is starting to take over.

You need organization and those social media feeds need to be organized. You have 4 products and a main brand. So many things to keep track of, not to mention the content strategy your competitor has. You can't be mixing Instagram and Twitter posts in the same feed. There's just too many and besides, they represent an entirely different consumer segment. Have you considered paid media monitoring?

You can afford it

You can go online and price some of the big players like TalkWalker and you're starting at $800/mo. But, once you realize that you're paying for an AI that figures out which apple is a fruit and which is the brand, you can rest assured that you certainly don't need that in your life. Honestly, you can achieve the same thing by learning how to build a boolean search string.

Also, you're not Apple and you don't need to pay Apple prices. You can get started with paid media monitoring for as little as $29/mo and grow as your business and needs do. What's it worth to be able to learn your customers' thoughts and sentiments about your category and brand?

Can you afford not to?