Social media monitoring has long been used by large brands and corporations to monitor their marketing campaigns and gain additional insights into the social marketplace. Now, as well-known social media monitoring tools begin to offer subscriptions costing thousands of dollars, SMMTorrent.com is revolutionizing social media monitoring for small to medium sized businesses.
Being able to identify opportunities throughout the global social web has been invaluable to growing Pluggio. What started out as a passion project in 2009 through to today, has grown into a full-time venture for us. We are an agency focused on helping companies leverage social media by making it easy for them to do social monitoring and due diligence — everything from Twitter trending topics, Facebook advertising, to Instagram hashtags, YouTube trends and Wikipedia publishers. We have worked with startups to Fortune 500 companies such as Oxford University Press , The Guardian and Ford.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring means tracking hashtags, keywords, and mentions relevant to your brand in order to stay informed about your audience and industry.
By monitoring this data, you’re doing research that is both quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative (inspiration for posts and strategies). You’ll get information that can help you determine things like:
- Social share of voice (i.e. what percentage of the conversation is about you, as opposed to being about your competitors)
- Social sentiment (i.e., what’s the mood of the conversation)
- Social ROI (i.e., how much your dollar investment in social is paying off)
- Relevant hashtags and keywords (i.e., which Instagram hashtags or YouTube keywords you might want to use in the future to expand your reach)
- Trends (i.e., what is your audience talking about, what new ideas, aesthetics or memes are popping up, are the platforms offering new tools and services, etc.)
For brands, social monitoring is an essential part of being a good social citizen, and succeeding on social, period. For instance, you wouldn’t launch into a high-pressure sales pitch (or informative lecture, or for that matter a stand up routine) to a new customer who’s just walked in the door. You’d listen first, and at least figure out what they’re looking for or why they’re in your office.
Likewise, on social media, paying attention to what people are saying is necessary to be relevant, engaging, and to prevent yourself from making off-key blunders.
@Johnsonville It’s not hoarding if you convince the couple behind you to buy the last package, right? Can we just cancel the #LimitedEdition on the firecracker? This needs to be available everywhere, all the time. 2020 needs some good news! pic.twitter.com/C7PShzpY7H
— Jim Prendergast (@jimpren) July 3, 2020
Get you some customers who love you as much as Johnsonville Sausage’s customers love them.
Note: You’ve probably also heard of social media listening, which is the next step you’ll want to take after social media monitoring. Social listening involves not just gathering and analyzing the metrics, but taking action. Take part in the conversation, and turn your intelligence into audience insights. Read our article about social listening over here.
8 social media monitoring tools
For brands and businesses, social media monitoring goes beyond just typing your own name into the search bar on Instagram or Twitter. This is why we’ve compiled this list of our favourite tools for making the task faster, easier, and—dare we say it—more fun? (Ok, ok, you don’t have to give me that look.)
1. 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.
2. Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch
What does it monitor?: all major social platforms.
Ready to get to the meat of the conversation? It’s powerful enough to qualify more as social listening than a social monitoring app, but Hootsuite Insights will give you an instant overview of millions of online conversations in real time.
Search for any topic or keyword, and filter by date, demographics, location, and more. You’ll be able to identify thought leaders or brand advocates, understand the perception of your brand in the market, and get immediate alerts if and when your mentions spike (for good or for bad.)
3. Talkwalker
What does it monitor?: most major social platforms + broader web
Talkwalker offers more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks.
You can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment.
Bonus: Watch our AMA with Talkwalker here to learn more.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Social Mention
Real-time social media search and analysis
Description: Not to be confused with Mention above, Social Mention is a free social media search engine for user-generated content across the web. It lets you find and measure what people are saying about your brand and products on places such as Twitter, YouTube, and blogs.
Since an account is not required, I believe Social Mention doesn’t save your searches.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google, and other websites
Price: Free
8. Keyhole
Hashtag tracking for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
Description: Rather than finding individual mentions of your brand, Keyhole provides trends, insights, and analysis of your preferred hashtags, keywords, or accounts. This makes it better for gathering data and reporting results than replying your social media mentions.
If you want to test out its tools, it offers free hashtag, keyword, and account tracking.
Platforms supported: Twitter and InstagramBROUGHT TO YOU BY
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Prices: $165 per month, $349 per month, $599 per month, $999 per month, and enterprise pricing
9. Trackur
Simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring
Description: Like Keyhole, Trackur is a monitoring and analytics tool. It can help you find mentions of your brand (or your keywords) on social media, blogs, forums, and more and then analyze the trends, sentiment, and influence level.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Google+, blogs, forums, and more
Prices: $97 per month, $197 per month, and $447 per month
10. Buzzlogix
Social media monitoring and engagement made simple
Description: Buzzlogix helps you with both social monitoring and social engagement. For social monitoring, you can track content with your preferred keywords and get the statistics in easy-to-understand graphs. For social engagement, you can monitor multiple social media profiles and response to social mentions and messages.
Platforms supported: Google+, Twitter, YouTube, blogs, forums, and news sites
Prices: $19.95 per month, $49.95 per month, $99.95 per month, and $399.95 per month
11. TweetDeck
The most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement
Description: TweetDeck is the official Twitter management dashboard, where you can manage multiple Twitter accounts and monitor mentions, keywords, Twitter lists, and more in separate columns. And it’s free!
Platform supported: Twitter
Price: Free
12. Iconosquare
Instagram analytics and management platform
Description: Iconosquare is one of the most popular Instagram analytics and management platforms. Besides its robust analytics and management features, Iconosquare offers custom feeds, which you can use to monitor specific Instagram content. For each feed, you can add up to 50 users and 20 hashtags.
Platforms supported: Instagram
Prices (per Instagram account): $9 per month, $29per month, $49 per month, and from $990 per month
Conclusion
A social media monitoring tool will help you gather, store and analyze conversations across the web. It’s important to use this information to meet your social media marketing goals. But picking the right one from hundreds of tools out there can be a daunting task. That’s why we created this list with the best social media monitoring tools for every business.