Can you imagine a day without social networks? It’s hard to even imagine such a world. When we come to think of it, social media is so big and so popular that people often neglect its importance in marketing and advertising. There’s a reason for this: more than half of the American adult population uses social media, and if you want to get your message across successfully, then more than likely you want to find out more about best social media research tools.
Are you looking for best social media research tools? Do you need the best social media for researchers for your academic paper? Let’s talk about free social media research tools that allow to understand better how people interact with social networks.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best free social media listening tools available and covers multiple social networks, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Foursquare and Google+. It is well known for its social media management functions.
The weekly reports and the excellent team management facility (delegating tasks, sending private messages) can be very useful when there’s more than one person handling the social media accounts.
You can also monitor specific search terms in real time. This can be really handy for tracking mentions of our brand, products, or relevant keywords you’re interested in.
Hootsuite also lets you use RSS feeds to post to your personal or organization’s social networks.
TweetReach
TweetReach is a great monitoring tool for your business if you’re interested in checking how far your Tweets travel. TweetReach measures the actual impact and implications of social media discussions.
It is a good way of finding out who are your most influential followers, implicitly guiding you towards the right people you should be targeting when aiming to share and promote online content.
Brandwatch Consumer Research
Our social media monitoring tool, Brandwatch Consumer Research, has a huge range of features and applications. It can track everything from your own channels to hashtags to specific phrases and keywords you want to look at.
With a customisable query builder, you can set it to track very specific topics or every broad ones. Then you can get data from Twitter, Reddit, forums, blogs, and various other sources.
There’s then the ability to build custom dashboards and views, plus analytical components, such as looking at sentiment, emotions, and demographics. It’s one of the most powerful tools in the industry.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
There’s a lot on offer here, including a look at organic versus paid reach and engagement, which helps you decide whether spending on ads is worthwhile. Look back as far as 28 days, and export data to compare over time. Review page views, previews, and actions taken, and see age, gender, and geographic demographics of your audience. You can even do some competitive intelligence using Pages to Watch, which lets you see which posts are succeeding for your competitors. After all, if it’s working for them… The biggest downside is the lack of sentiment analysis – which is what tells you why your audience is invested in your brand and content. But if you’re just looking for a social media and analytics comparison tool, that tells you when this specific audience is most active and engaged with your data.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter’s built-in analytics tell you a lot about which tweets are succeeding and to what degree – even if they don’t tell you why. An audience tab displays a breakdown by gender, and also by interests. It also lets you compare against a comparison audience – like “all of Twitter.” The events tab clues you into which current events – like Valentine’s Day, Coachella, and the Met Gala – have everyone abuzz. Video view insights and conversion tracking are great analytic additions to this social media channel. Missing is the ability to target individual audience segments with messaging just for them. But you at least have an idea of where to aim to please the majority of your audience.
If This Then That (IFTTT)
IFTTT isn’t specifically made for social media monitoring, but it can be easily turned towards it. IFTTT essentially lets you connect up different services so that when something happens on one, it triggers an action in another (or the same if you like).
For example, you could have IFTTT send you an email every time your brand is mentioned. Or you can get an SMS whenever a term specified by a Twitter search query gets posted.
In other words, thanks its customisability and range of integrated apps, it can be a nifty way to keep an eye on social media activity.
There’s whole range of other great social media and marketing uses so be sure to have a dig around. You can use pre-existing ‘applets’ or create your own entirely. Get creative!
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a great tool for content research, but it also has an excellent way to analyze and monitor your Facebook pages. Along with metrics around each individual post, more interestingly is the ability to see what content performs best.
Buzzsumo will tell you what day is the best to post, how long your posts should be, what types of content works best, and monthly stats over time.
INSTAGRAM INSIGHTS
As with Pinterest, you need to convert your profile to a free business or creator profile before you can use Instagram Insights. Once you do, you have access to a host of social analytics data that is ever evolving, including: Activity, Content and Audience insights – like interactions (profile visits and website clicks), discovery (reach and impressions), post, Story, and promotion analytics, and location, age, and gender info for your followers. And you can also see which days and times they are most active on Instagram. Missing is the key social marketing analytics capability to analyze images for sentiment, logos, location, etc.
Falcon
Before we dive into the 14 other (almost) equally great monitoring tools out there, allow us to introduce ourselves…
Falcon’s social media monitoring tool is just what you need to track trends and brand perception. Our tool draws insights from millions of online sources to keep you up-to-date and ready to act when opportunities or potential crises arise. You can track keywords, hashtags, and names—then see the results broken down by demographics and sentiment. Our advanced parameters allow you to narrow the search down with variables such as word combinations and exclusions.
Features
- Discover a goldmine of information: from trending topics and hashtags to how your campaigns are doing.
- See the results broken down by demographics, sentiment and influencers.
- Set email notifications for unusual activity alerts and daily updates of selected mentions.
- Discover which social media influencers are interacting with your topics of interest.
- Receive automated reports of trending topics and mentions directly in your inbox.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social offers some great monitoring capabilities to integrate your social media monitoring efforts. You get a real-time stream of updates from your audience across all the social media channels that you can manage via Zoho Social. As a bonus, the monitoring tool also comes with a listening dashboard to help you listen to all posts relevant to your brand.
Features
- Monitor core keywords, brand hashtags, product, and reviews.
- Discover new leads and listen to what people are saying about the brands you manage across your social channels.
- Track social engagement and notifications.
Conclusion:
It is impossible to keep up with all the social media platforms out there, but it’s not necessary to do so. Who has time to track five hundred different social media platforms? Even if you could manage this, would you even want to? I like to think of social media platforms like trees. There are too many trees in the forest, but you only need the ones that are useful for your work. So, save yourself some time and energy by finding out what social media platforms are really useful for research purposes.