As marketing and sales professionals, we’re always looking for new tactics to grow our businesses. This means turning to social media for success. We want to see what the competition is up to, see what our customers are saying, and make sure we’re in line with the latest trends. This can get a bit tricky, as social media gets millions of new posts every day — how are we supposed to analyze it all? Luckily for you (and me), there are some amazing free social media monitoring tools available.
In a digital world with more than 2 billion Facebook users alone, managing online reputation has become an even trickier affair for businesses. Social media can thank its meteoric rise to global popularity as the top selling point for brands and bsinesses. But if harnessed carelessly, social media could also have the power to cause extensive damage to one’s business. Therefore, it is imperative for every business to set up proper social media management and track its performance via some dependable Free Media Monitoring Tools.
Discover the best free social media monitoring tools to help your team save precious time and money. From planning to publishing content, these tools will help you keep track of your brand image across social media channels.
When we are considering social media marketing strategies, you should be aware that the tools used to monitor your channel or content can improve or create a better way of interacting with people. If you take a look at the monitoring tools currently available, you’ll find a variety of different applications that can help you get the most out of social media and that guarantee constant attention to your presence.
What should you look for when monitoring brand mentions?
You can use one of these social media monitoring tools (e.g. Brand24 or Awario) to keep track of individual comments or conversations that are happening online, as well as for monitoring overall brand sentiment. On a daily basis, you should check whether or not your brand sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.
If you notice that your sentiment is overwhelmingly negative or positive, you can then take a closer look and evaluate what is causing the change.
This can help you to identify customer issues and complaints, as well as give you an idea of how your customers are responding to new products, marketing efforts, and more.
SumAll
SumAll connects to a variety of different social accounts — including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn — to provide you with insights about your followers, interactions, and engagements. The paid version provides content recommendations and automatic post scheduling.
Mentionmapp
Mentionmapp connects to your Twitter API and see what’s going on in your Twitter network. You can see who mentions you the most, as well as who retweets you the most (using Retweetmapp). It’s interactive, too. That way, you can click through and see how your interactions are connected — if you want to keep an eye on the impact or reach a positive (or negative) tweet about your brand can have.
Lithium (formerly Klout)
Lithium — which recently acquired the social media monitoring tool, Klout — offers a “social response” tool that allows you to manage, understand, and respond to the direct outreach you get from other users on social media. The tool integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more to help you visualize where people are talking to (and about) you the most, so you can focus your customer engagement in all the right places.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite works like TweetDeck — but for all of your social networks. From your Dashboard, you can carry out social monitoring, scheduling, campaigns, and analytics — all in one place. Hootsuite integrates with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+, and although it’s free for individuals’ accounts, businesses and enterprises have to purchase paid versions.
Boardreader
Boardreader does what its name suggests — it crawls message boards and discussion panels to see what people are saying about you and your brand in the dreaded comments sections, which otherwise seem impossible to parse through. Commenters often have stronger words than social media posters, so make sure you have a thick skin before diving in.
Mentionlytics
What does it monitor?: all social platforms + broader web
Mentionlytics is a professional-grade social media monitoring app that tracks mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages.
Reputology
What does it monitor?: Yelp, Google, Facebook reviews + other review sites
For customer-facing businesses, a bad review can be a real blow if it isn’t dealt with correctly and quickly. Reputology lets you monitor major review sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook reviews from one dashboard.
You can track activity across multiple storefronts and locations, and respond using quick links.
Tweepsmap
What does it monitor?: Twitter
This combination analytics/social monitoring tool is built to show Twitter power-users how hashtags and topics travel, so you can tune into what your audience is talking about.
Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
What does it monitor?: Reddit
With 430 million average monthly active users, Reddit is an often-overlooked social platform where conversation is often in-depth and honest. This tool allows you to monitor the site’s 138,000 active communities for the conversations you care about.
Buzzsumo
Analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor. Find the key influencers to promote your content:
- Discover the most shared content across all social networks and run detailed analysis reports.
- Find influencers in any topic area, review the content they share and amplify.
- Be the first to see content mentioning your keyword; or when an author or competitor publishes new content.
- Track your competitor’s content performance and do detailed comparisons.
All paid plans come with a 14 day free trial $79/ month
Crowdfire
A tool that I’ve been using for quite sometime now is Crowdfire. It’s a Twitter growth tool which lets you get relevant followers with features like Copy followers and Keyword follow. Schedule your tweets to get maximum reach with Publish, manage non-followers and inactive followers and engage with new users using Auto direct message.
Cyfe
Cyfe is an all-in-one dashboard software that helps you monitor and analyze data scattered across all your online services like Google Analytics, Salesforce, AdSense, MailChimp, Facebook, WordPress and more from one single location in real-time.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a cool social media analytics tool thet lets you explore and grow your social graph. Dig deeper into Twitter analytics: followers, their locations, when do they tweet. Find and connect with influencers in your niche. Use visualizations to compare your social graph to competitors.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (blogs, news, etc.) based on your searches. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you’ll receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include: monitoring a developing news story and keeping current on a competitor or industry.
Google Trends
This is one of the best free social media monitoring tools out there. Trends allows you to compare search terms and websites. With Google Trends you can get insights into the traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites or keywords. You can compare data for up to five websites and view related sites and top searches for each one.
HowSociable
Free monitoring tool for measuring your brands or keywords using 32 social networking sites. HowSociable provides a simple way for you to begin measuring your brand’s visibility on the social web. Compare brands with those of competitors and similar sized businesses.
Icerocket
Blog Tools, create your own Trend Graphs with the IceRocket Trend Tool. Enter keywords to see mentions trended over time. Trend Tool, enter items to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to five queries under Trend Terms. Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Labels. Search tool for blogs, web, Twitter, Facebook, news, and images.
Iconosquare
Key metrics about your Instagram account. Number of likes received, your most liked photos ever, your average number of likes and comments per photo, your follower growth charts and more advanced analytics. Track lead conversations, send private message as on Twitter, and improve communication with your followers.
Kred
Kred is a social-media scoring system that seeks to measure a person’s online influence.Kred, which was created by the San Francisco-based social analytics firm PeopleBrowsr, attempts to also measure a person or company’s engagement, or as they call it, outreach. PeopleBrowsr hopes that that combination can offer a more informed metric for non-celebrities like entrepreneurs and those whom they follow and look to for advice.
Mention
Mention allows you to create alerts for your brand, your industry, your company, your name or your competitors and be informed in real-time about any mentions on the web and social web. And there is a great limited free option.
Mentionmap
Explore your Twitter network. Discover which people interact the most and what they’re talking about. It’s also a great way to find relevant people to follow. The visualization runs right in your browser and displays data from Twitter. Mentionmap loads user’s tweets and finds the people and hashtags they talked about the most. In this data visualization, mentions become connections and discussions between multiple users emerge as clusters.
Omgili
Omgili helps you find interesting and current discussions, news stories and blog posts. Direct access to live data from hundreds of thousands of forums, news and blogs. Very easy to use, no signup for web interface. API available.
Pinterest Analytics
Find out how many people are pinning from your website, seeing your pins, and clicking your content. Pick a time-frame to see how your numbers trend over time. Get better at creating Pins and boards with metrics from your Pinterest profile. Learn how people use the Pin It button on your site to add Pins. See how people interact with your Pins from whatever device they use. Get a glance at your all-time highest-performing Pins.
Pluggio
Pluggio is a web-based social media tool to help marketers easily grow and manage their social media profiles (Facebook and Twitter). It includes a suite of tools to organize and keep track of multiple accounts, get more followers, and automate the finding and publishing of excellent targeted content.
Postific
The full set of social media tools. Post content to over 10 social networks with one single click of a button. Get real time click-through statistics with your domain name. Measure and analyze the best results from your social posts. Monitor the social media conversations that are important for your business.
Quintly
Quintly is the professional social media monitoring and analytics solution to track and compare the performance of your social media marketing activities. Whether you are using Facebook, Twitter or both, Quintly monitors and visualizes your social media marketing success. Benchmark your numbers against your competitors or best practice examples.
Choosing the right brand monitoring tool for your businesses
For many consumers, social media is the first place they will go to share their opinions about a business, so it’s really good practice to monitor your social mentions of your brand regularly.
But, how do you choose from all of these social media monitoring tools?
The tool you choose will depend on the size of your business, your budget, and what other social media features your business needs. You will also need to consider the social media channels your business is focused on most.
Conclusion
Social Media monitoring tools are extremely important for any brand that is looking to perform a deep dive into their online presence. By using these online monitoring tools, you can gain invaluable insights and discover useful data to enhance your social media strategy. These also help you in building an effective competitor analysis strategy and improve your visibility on the internet.
Monitoring is critical when you’re running a business. You need to know what people are saying about your brand, products, and even your competition. But it’s not always easy to find the perfect social media monitoring tool for your business. There are thousands out there — some are great and some are …not so great.