Social media monitoring tools are an important part of an active social media strategy. With these applications, you can track key metrics like engagement, mentions, followers and reach. While there is no one solution for everything since social media monitoring is a wide concept with various approaches applied by marketers, we have definitely found a selection of free tools that are available to everyone and could be just what you need when it comes to keeping up with the action on Facebook, Twitter…
As social media monitoring tools are becoming more popular and widely used, you may be asking yourself: how can I choose the right one? In this post, we will analyze the top 10 social media tools, based on their number of users and other features that they offer. We will also provide a full comparison between them so that you can make the best decision for your needs.
Are you a beginner freelancer who is looking for free tools that would provide useful social media monitoring? You are in the right place. In this article, we will review the best free tools for social media monitoring.
Social media monitoring is important today, even if you’re into digital marketing. Social media has become essential for the growth and development of any business around the globe. From growing their social media following to creating brand awareness to reputation management, businesses need to stay on top of things by tracking what everyone is saying about them online. Here are free social media monitoring tools to find the best mentions of your brand or business across all social platforms and forums.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is a somewhat new term adopted in digital marketing. It helps marketers and companies understand more about the online conversations around specific topics like their brand, competitors, and the market league they are playing in.
Social media listening is the process of scouting brand-related mentions and conversations on relevant social channels, then analyzing them for insights to create new opportunities.
Social media listening is essentially a brilliant method to dive deep into your audience’s monologue, dialogue, or soliloquy.
TweetDeck
TweetDeck lets you create a more customized Twitter interface to monitor different users, hashtags, search terms, and lists. From one panel, you can look at Twitter content from the groups you want — whether that’s customers, competitors, or employees.
TweetDeck is a great tool to use during events or live-tweetstorms to keep up with live conversations — while also keeping an eye on you or your brand’s notifications and mentions.
Social Mention
Social Mention aggregates all of the blog, microblog, image, and video content related to the search term you provide from a variety of search engines and social networks. This makes it easier to digest and view what’s being said about your brand in one comprehensive view.
TweetReach
TweetReach gives you a free “snapshot” report on the potential reach of any tweet that includes a given hashtag, keyword, or username. With analytics provided by Union Metrics, the tool offers a free signup for which you’ll be able to see who’s talking about which topics, how many impressions you’d get on a post about that topic, and more. TweetReach’s snapshot reports are free for the first 100 tweets, and the company offers paid plans starting at $49/month thereafter.
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.
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.)
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.
Twitter Analytics
The free statistics in your own Twitter account. Measure and boost your impact on Twitter. Tweet activity – measure engagement and learn how to make your Tweets more successful. Explore the interests, locations, and demographics of your followers. Track how your Twitter Cards drive clicks, app installs, and retweets.
Zuum Social
Free Facebook page report. Login with Facebook. In your Facebook report you get these 7 insights:
- Know the drivers of your page’s virality
- Know your page’s most influential fans
- Discover the optimal time to post
- Discover how many words to use in your posts
- Understand what media type performs best
- Know where your top fans live
- See where new fans come from
Union Metrics
The free Instagram account checkup from Union Metrics lets you see how you’re doing on Instagram. It uses clever algorithms to provide a free Instagram account checkup that helps you understand your Instagram health. The tool answers questions about your Instagram account like:
- What’s the best time to post to Instagram?
- What hashtags should you use to get the most engagement?
- What should you post more (or less) of?
The free Instagram analytics checkup analyzes the last 30 days of activity on your account, including your posts and engagement from your fans. Run it any time you need a checkup for updated Instagram analytics.
Mediatoolkit
Monitor online mentions of your brand in real-time. Mediatoolkit will let you know about every article, hashtag or comment mentioning your business. Mention monitoring for 100+ million online sources. Find mentions from any source in the world: be it profiles on Twitter and Instagram, or updates from websites, blogs, and forums. Free version includes
- Websites, blogs, forums
- Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, VKontakte
- Location and language filters
- iOS and Android app
- Slack and email alerts
- Engagement and sentiment data
Tweet Indexation Rate Tool
Your Twitter profile and tweets can get crawled and indexed by Googlebot and appear in both Google mobile and desktop search results. Google has been expanding how it displays tweets in Google Search. Tweet Indexation Rate Tool queries Google and returns the percentage of your indexed tweets, the Moz Page Authority, and number of other websites linking to your Twitter account.
SocialGimp
SocialGimp provides Instagram analytics for brands, marketers and analysts.
- Detailed analytics for your Brand. Improve your content quality on Instagram and grow your audience!
- Advanced hashtag management. Find the right hashtags and save them to your own user defined categories!
- Benchmark yourself with competitors and industry leaders. Save your favorites!
Better insights about your audience and with proper analytics you can achieve long term effects. SocialGimp provides you with the tools your brand needs and also with advice, guidelines and benchmarks.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk lets you quickly and easily search users’ Twitter bios and profiles for mentions of you or your brand. Log in with your Twitter credentials to check it out, or subscribe to the paid versions to get even more social insights.
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.
Twitonomy
Get detailed and visual analytics on anyone’s tweets, retweets, replies, mentions, hashtags. Browse, search, filter and get insights on the people you follow and those who follow you.
- Backup/export tweets, retweets, mentions and reports to Excel & PDF.
- Monitor your interactions with other Twitter users: mentions, retweets, favorites.
- Get and export Search Analytics on any keywords, #hashtags, URL or @users
- Get insights on and download any user’s retweeted & favorited tweets
- Browse, search, filter, sort and batch add/remove people to your lists
- Monitor tweets from your favorite users, lists and keyword searches
- Get actionable insights on your followers with Followers Report
- Find out those you follow but don’t follow you back. Get the list of the followers you don’t follow back
- Download your followers and following lists to Excel
- Track clicks on the links in your tweets
- Track your follower growth over time
Likealyzer
Likealyzer takes the guess work out of your Facebook strategy. The recommendations point you in the right direction. Compare your Facebook page to competitors, partners, or brands you admire. Likealyzer will recommend similar pages to watch. Likealyzer converts raw Facebook analytics into a simple yet sophisticated report. Recommendations, not just metrics. Likealyzer is a Facebook tool designed for social media managers, agencies, and entrepreneurs.
BackTweets
BackTweets is a twitter time machine which enables you to search through a tweet history for tweets that link back to your site. As a free web app, BackTweets lets you search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via twitter. URLs are found regardless of the form they were tweeted in and include: full URL links, shortened URLs and URLs without the WWW prefix. BackTweets is a great social media listening tool for tracking your social media pulse – see how many people are talking about you, who is talking about you, and what they are saying.
Buffer
Buffer makes your life easier with a smarter way to schedule the great content you find. Fill up your Buffer at one time in the day and Buffer automagically posts them for you through the day. Simply keep that Buffer topped up to have a consistent social media presence all day round, all week long. Get deeper analytics than if you just post to social networks directly. With Buffer you can manage:
- Facebook: Profile, Page, and Group (for groups you do have to be the admin)
- LinkedIn: Profile and Company Page
- Twitter: Profile
- Google+: Business Pages
- Pinterest accounts
Boardreader
BoardReader allows users to search multiple message boards simultaneously, allowing users to share information in a truly global sense. Boardreader is focused on creating the largest repository of searchable information for our users. Users can find answers to their questions from others who share similar interests. Our goal is to allow our users to search the “human to human” discussions that exist on the Internet.
Why is Social Listening Essential?
Through social listening, brands have the opportunity to access their audience’s reactions immediately and adjust their act (strategy) in direct accordance with what the people need.
When it comes to any business with an online presence, social listening is man-da-to-ty!
Here are all the reasons you should start using a social media listening tool right now:
- Monitor your social media accounts
- Analyze your marketing campaigns
- Be aware of all the conversations around your brand
- Create a customized social media strategy that speaks to your audience
- Identify trending topics and find new opportunities on the market
- Conduct niched market research
- Increase the quality of your public relations and customer support
- Employ user-generated content to create content marketing campaigns based on the consumer’s needs
- Find out when is the best time depending on your social media platform of choice
- Discover untagged and unlinked brand mentions and turn them into links
- Tackle multiple social media channels at once by keeping tabs on each account and quickly replying to mentions
- Identify and resolve crises
Brand monitoring platforms often offer a combination of services like social listening, social monitoring, data analytics, content scheduling, or event content creation.
Conclusion
These days, social media monitoring is a part of any successful marketing campaign. However, this can be challenging due to the huge variety of tools out there (some free, some paid), which makes it hard to know how exactly to begin with your SMM efforts. In addition, it can be challenging to find free social media monitoring tools when so many of them are available only as paid add-ons.
Free social media monitoring tools can help you manage your brand reputation and track your competitors. These top-rated social listening tools will help you keep a close eye on competition and customer sentiment without having to drop a lot of cash.