Social tracking tools have limitless potential and can be very beneficial for both users and businesses alike. However, it can be a tricky task to find the perfect social media tracking tool for your needs. We’ve done our research, tested numerous different tools, and have come up with a list of the best social media tracking tools on the market today.
Social Media Tracking Tools is a collection of applications and web sites which allow you to track social media websites. Some applications, plug-ins and extensions also allow you to automate your activity on these sites.
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.
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.
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great way of identifying which social media sites send the most traffic to your website. More importantly, it will help to determine which platform needs more attention.
Here you can get a quick overview of the social media sites that send across maximum traffic to your site. By understanding the degree of your social media marketing reach in each of these channels, you can prioritize and improve your social media marketing efforts.
And if you have set up a campaign and shared the links to your landing page on various social media channels, you can take advantage of the integrated URL builder.
URL builder is a tool that aids you in adding utm parameters to your campaign URLs and distributing them across social media and other channels. It is like setting a tracker on your campaign URL that is directly reported on your Google Analytics account.
To access this report you need to set up goals on Google Analytics and then track your social media traffic via Acquisition > Campaign.
For more help with Google Analytics check out this post for ‘newbies’.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is primarily a Social Media Management tool, allowing you to schedule and send updates across a multitude of Social Media platforms. It also includes a great analytics tool – with the added bonus being that it compiles data from all of your social media platforms into one, easy to use tool.
Hootsuite integrates with the main social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics, LinkedIn, FourSquare, WordPress and YouTube. But you will have to pay to manage more than several at once.
Hootsuite also includes a URL shortening tool and link tracking mechanism.
Hootsuite’s app directory allows you to add additional social media accounts into your dashboard such as Flickr and Tumblr. It also allows you to integrate marketing tools such as MailChimp, SocialFlow, InboxQ, Constant Contact and many others from its app directory. Shown below is the section on the dashboard that allows you to directly add apps.
Check out what’s available on the basic Hootsuite plan.
TweetReach
If you are a fervent twitter promoter of your business TweetReach is a must-use tool to track how far your tweets have actually reached. It comes in various paid plans but the free plan would usually suffice for a small to mid-sized business.
The free account includes the following features:
- Track any 50 recent tweets using hashtags, usernames and keywords.
- Quick access to past reports of up to 1500 tweets as old as a week.
- Download PDF and Excel versions of reports.
You can also try some other free twitter monitoring tools such as TweetDeck and Twazzup. While you can keep track of hashtags, searches, lists and manage multiple accounts with the former, the latter can be used to track real-time niche updates and top influencers in your industry.
Another handy little free tool that helps track your brand’s rate of growth across Twitter is the TwitterCounter.
Digimind
Digimind is an intelligence software that provides a beautiful visual representation of your brand’s social performance.
This tool also allows you to monitor your own social media posts and run competitive analysis. That is, checking how your brand and/or product stacks up against industry rivals.
The platform gives you an understanding of your brand’s online reputation, as well as relevant consumer insights.
You’re also able to access your data via Digimind’s mobile app.
Pros: Monitors thousands of internet sources to collect brand intelligence.
Cons: Users reportedly find it difficult to backtrack and find previous stats and information. Also, it can become time-consuming to go through all the posts to find relevant information.
Price: To request a custom quote, contact Digimind directly.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is super useful for you if you’re looking for a basic monitoring solution.
It scans through the web and tells you when your brand or product gets mentioned.
You can choose which sources you want to be receiving alerts for — whether blogs, news sites or forums —and the languages you want to get alerts for.
Pros: An easy and free to use mention tracking solution.
Cons: Only contains basic functionalities so it’s not the most well-rounded tool.
Price: Free.
Conclusion
Your social media accounts are a goldmine of information that is valuable to anyone seeking to engage with your customers or promote their brand. You can now keep up with all of the activity on your business’s social media profiles with our two FREE real-time social media tracking tools – Tracklet and Social Beast.
Social media monitoring and analytics tools can give you an all-in-one package for keeping up with your company’s social media presence. With these tools, you can track the online conversations surrounding your brand, and use the data in order to determine what is working and what is not on social media.