Social media has been a big part of the web for over a decade now, and it’s constantly changing. This can make it hard for marketers to stay on the cutting edge. There are also a lot of social media monitoring tools you might not be aware of.
Monitoring your brand’s social media accounts is important. Doing so can help you learn more about how users are responding to your company and the messages you’re putting out there. There are tons of different social media monitoring tools that can help you with this task. Here, I’ll give you a few suggestions to help get you started.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another tool that has been around a long time. It enables you to monitor the real-time engagement metrics of your social media profiles. It can also help you track conversations and posts related to your brand.
You can access engagement metrics for a hashtag and identify trending and popular hashtags. You also can track conversations or social media posts related to any keyword, mention, username, location, etc.
Price: $49/month
Pros:
- Monitors multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, YouTube)
- Schedules posts for all platforms in the same dashboard
- Makes sharing metrics with your social media marketing teams easy
Cons
- Price for premium plans might not fit in budgets of small businesses and newcomers in the social media marketing landscape
Talkwalker
Talkwalker can help you track, monitor, and analyze social media conversations related to your brand or industry in real-time. It also can monitor TV, radio, and print broadcasts. Its image recognition feature lets you see posts of your products or services even when the brand isn’t mentioned.
Price: $9,000/year
Pros:
- Gives comprehensive analytics for multiple social media platforms
- Tracks non-social media, including TV, radio, and print
- Identifies brand images in social posts even when the brand isn’t tagged or mentioned
Cons:
- Presents difficulties in monitoring print media in multiple languages
- Limits historic data and analytics to 13 months
TrackMyHashtag
TrackMyHashtag, which is my company’s tool, is an AI-enabled tool that lets you track any event, hashtag, tagged handle, or keyword on Twitter. You can monitor the performance indicators of your hashtag campaigns in real-time and all conversations related to your brand, competitors, or industry.
TrackMyHashtag’s customer support mechanism can track all consumer conversations related to your brand. It can help you decrease your response time, which can make all the difference.
Price: $49/month; historical Twitter data priced on the volume of required data
Pros:
- Identifies real-time hashtag trends on Twitter so your brand can jump on them
- Hosts intuitive analytical dashboard with insights into followers’ interests and preferences
- Provides historical Twitter data related to any hashtag, keyword, or @mention in Excel file
Cons:
- Focuses only on Twitter
Brand24
Brand24 was founded in Poland in 2011, quickly building a name for themselves. Within two years their software was being used by big-name companies, such as Intel, Panasonic, and AirFrance. They have continued to attract well-known cusoterms, including Uber, H&M, and IKEA.
They offer three plans, ranging from Plus (at $49/month) to Max (at $199/month). Each plan adds additional users, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of mentions per month. The speed of tracking also improves with each plan.
When you set up your Brand24 account, you create a Project. This is the social identity for whom you intend to monitor mentions and social activity. On higher plans, you can follow more than one Project.
Brans24 is more than just a mere social media listening tool, however. It provides you with comprehensive data and analysis. It helps paint a thorough picture of how the world perceives your brand.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a widely known tool dedicated to making social media management easy. It mainly provides solutions for social media analytics and employee advocacy. It is one of the most effective customer support and relationship management tools out there.
The smart inbox feature enables you to track, monitor, and analyze multiple social media profiles across platforms. It can also help you uncover trends and plan an effective content strategy to keep your users engaged.
Price: $99/month
Pros:
- Tracks multiple social media profiles across multiple platforms
- Provides comprehensive audience insights including demographics, interests, and preferences.
- Acts as a scheduling tool for social posts
Cons
- No premium plan to manage a single platform, leaving users to pay for features they won’t use
- Lack of comprehensive or detailed insights on the dashboard
BrandWatch
BrandWatch is a social listening & analytics tool that helps you dig out relevant data from blogs, forums, as well as social media and news or review sites. Basically, this tool tells you what/how your customers talk about your brand online.
You can use BrandWatch to get an overview of your brand mentions’ volume and compare it with competitors. Also, you can monitor brand sentiment in real time, and find out who your audience (demographic) is and what topics they are interested in.
It also provides a data visualization tool that lets you bring your data to life. That is, your data can be represented in the form of graphs that make hard stats and numbers easy to understand.
Pros: A flexible, highly customizable social listening tool. The data visualization feature makes data easy to understand and share.
Cons: There is a steep learning-curve in getting the software running properly. Also, the loading time is reportedly slow.
Price: Varies based on mentions per month and historical data access.
Hootsuite
What does it monitor?: all major social platforms.
Arguably the easiest social monitoring tool to use on this list, Hootsuite’s customizable search streams will monitor any social platform you like so that you can see what’s going on at a glance. Zero in on essential topics, trends, and social profiles based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
Nexalogy
What does it monitor?: most major platforms + broader web
Nexalogy’s top-tier data visualizations set it apart: interactive timelines, geolocation-based heat maps, lexical cluster maps that show common patterns of topic. Plus the “basic” stuff that would take a human being weeks to figure out, like popular keywords and most active accounts.
BrandMentions
BrandMentions was founded in 2015, but it didn’t launch its platform until December 2017. In its first 16 months, it had indexed nearly 10 billion mentions for 11,000 clients.
It offers three tiers of service, with the feature list growing alongside the price. The top tier plan (giving ten users, ten projects, 50 keywords, 500,000 instant mentions, 50,000 historical mentions up to five years old) is still affordable and within reach of just about any sized business.
BrandMentions keeps its “ears” wide open for brand mentions. It “listens” to every major social media platform, along with many non-social websites, including review sites, news sites, and blogs. If it finds a mention of one of the company’s clients, it will index it into the system, and notify the client for quick action (if needed).
BrandMentions offers ways to save, organize, and report on the mentions it finds, effectively turning them into data points available for ongoing analysis and business intelligence. The business intelligence you’ll get from it will pay for itself in no time.
Conclusion:
With millions (yes millions) of websites and blogs across the internet it can be a challenge to keep track of what’s going on with your competitors and how you stack up against them. Social media has helped companies connect their business to their customers like never before. Information travels faster than ever before, and now more than ever (get it?) monitoring your brand on social media is crucial. Social media analytics tools help businesses that are active on social media track their progress and optimize their posts for better conversions.