Social media has opened up the world for businesses to reach millions of customers. But it can be hard to determine what is being said about your product or brand without using social listening tools. Many people consider social media listening tools to be vital pieces of their online marketing strategy. They are used to help you create authentic relationships with your customers by acting upon all the data that social media has to offer.
SSocial media is a great source of information and opportunity. I am sure that you have experienced this already. Chances are that when you began using Facebook or Twitter for example, you saw that unknown people could send private messages to your personal account. That is because they found you somehow in their networks. Social media can also be used to discover what people are talking about. If you check the little camera icon beside each status update, you can find out how many people have liked or reacted to it. Keep reading to find out how listening to social media can help your business in 2021
Falcon
Plans: Essentials $129/mo, Full Suite Custom Pricing. 14-day free trial.
Falcon is a social media listening, publishing, advertising, measurement, and customer data management platform. Its social listening tools give a clear picture of what’s happening and who’s involved.
You can use them to identify popular topics and hashtags to follow to better design your campaigns and content. You can keep tabs on conversations taking place around your brand and products.
Falcon.io gives you much flexibility. You can track anything from brand names, topics, and keywords to phrases, refining your queries with advanced parameters. Indeed, if you have a global audience, you can track and engage wherever you have followers. In addition, you can filter extensively, accessing and viewing data by keyword, source, demographics, influencers, and content type.
Falcon offers sentiment analysis in multiple languages, marking mentions as positive, neutral, or negative to help you prioritize engagement. Users can set notifications to alert if there is a spike in specific mentions. You can react to negative publicity before it gets out of hand. To assist with this, you can set up automated reports of trending topics and mentions, sending them directly to your inbox.
With Falcon.io, you can identify influencers who interact with your topics of interest and, as a result, create strategies for collaboration and brand growth. You can also produce audiences from any social listening project – groups of people who meet specific criteria you set.
Awario
Affordable social listening and analytics with Enterprise-level capabilities.
Awario is a relatively new tool that (finally!) makes social media and web monitoring affordable for businesses of any size: with plans starting at $29/mo, Awario offers a lot of capabilities that you’ll find in Enterprise-level tools.
You can use the tool to monitor mentions of your brand, competitors, industry, or even set up complex Boolean queries for the less obvious use cases. For instance, Awario lets you detect plagiarized copies of your content, find linkless brand mentions that you can turn into links, and monitor new backlinks to your site.
The platform also offers a social selling tool, called Leads, as a free add-on to all users. The tool uses predictive insights to find people who’re asking for recommendations about a product like yours or looking for an alternative to your competitors.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, news and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- A Boolean search mode to set up flexible queries and improve the accuracy of the results.
- An Influencers report outlining the most influential people talking about your brand, competitors, or industry.
- A free Leads add-on for sales prospecting on social media.
- Enterprise-level analytics such as sentiment analysis, location and language breakdown, and unlimited historical data available in all plans.
Pricing: Awario offers a free trial that lets you fully test the app out. Pricing starts at $29/mo for the Starter plan, with 3 monitoring alerts that let subscribers find 30,000 new mentions per month. Awario’s most popular Pro plan costs $89/mo with 10 alerts and 100,000 monthly mentions. Enterprise is $299/mo and includes 50 alerts and 500,000 mentions. If you choose to go with an annual plan, you’ll get 2 months for free.
Agorapulse
Social media management and monitoring for a growing business.
If you aren’t quite ready to invest into a standalone social listening or reputation management platform, Agorapulse is an excellent 2-in-1 option: it offers both the scheduling and monitoring bits. The tool will find @mentions of accounts you connect as well as comments on your social media posts, plus allow you to search for keywords of your choice across Twitter. The tool also lets you identify influencers within your social media audience and assign conversations to your team in a mouse click.
While Agorapulse doesn’t offer web monitoring, it’s a great choice if you’re mainly interested in social mentions.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
Benefits:
- The ability to tag important mentions.
- Being able to assign conversations to team members.
- Audience insights that let you identify influencers and brand ambassadors.
- A built-in CRM that lets you create lists of prospects and influencers.
Pricing: Agorapulse has a free trial if you’d like to test the app out first. The pricing starts at $49/mo for the Small plan, which comes with 3 social media profiles and a single user. Large is their most popular option at $199/mo, with 25 profiles to manage and 6 users. Agorapulse’s Enterprise solution is $299/mo with 40 profiles and 12 users.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social listening solution hyper-focused on consumer and competitive intelligence. Completely focused on delivering high level insights into consumer sentiments and trends, and doing so in the fastest manner possible (i.e before the competition), Brandwatch parses millions of conversations happening online every day to deliver distilled insights to their users.
Brandwatch also has a trove of historical data available to its users, and invests heavily in its AI and ML capabilities. A cutting edge solution focused on a hyper-specific set of use cases, Brandwatch is an excellent tool for those who are looking for a consumer intelligence and trendspotting solution.
Digimind
Digimind’s platform offers real-time social listening and brand monitoring with an emphasis on sentiment analysis over community management and customer care. Thus, Digimind’s solution focuses more on informing strategy and is not tailored towards actual audience engagement.
The platform’s emphasis on audience research and analysis shows in its functionality and design: Digimind works with millions of online sources (not just major social media channels), and features a robust dashboard that emphasizes insight generation in real-time. Digimind also supports Chinese data, like Weibo, WeChat, etc.
NetBase Quid
Consumer and Market intelligence platform NetBase Quid offers a variety of products, including a Social Listening tool. With historical and real-time social media analysis, their AI-driven platform gives insights into any topic or brand you wish to track.
Like Brandwatch, using NetBase Quid’s social tool takes the leg work out of gathering social data, whether for brand management or market research, meaning users can focus on the tasks that really matter. In an instant, this platform can uncover consumer insights, help to identify consumer trends and help the user to understand brand perception.
Best for:
Market Researchers
Marketing Professionals
Sprinklr
Although Sprinklr is billed as a Customer Experience platform on their homepage that offers a multitude of programs for marketers and customer success managers alike, among their most powerful products is “Modern Engagement”. This social listening tool is one of the most comprehensive available, giving users the ability to track 35 channels.
From one platform, you can monitor influencers, manage 1-to-1 relationships on social in person or using AI, analyse content trends, gather user-generated content featuring the brands you manage and so much more; as if all that wasn’t enough. On top of these features, Sprinklr users can create customized reporting dashboards, create presentation decks and monitor brand mentions and performance on social media. It’s a social media manager’s dream!
Best for:
Marketing Professionals
Customer Engagement Managers
Sprout Social
Price: $89/per user/month+
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform that provides powerful solutions for social listening and analytics, customer care, and employee advocacy.
Sprout Social Features and Compatibility
- Monitor and manage engagement across social networks in the unified Smart Inbox.
- Map out a content strategy and schedule posts with the Publishing tool.
- Uncover trends in social conversations, learn about your audience, and gain actionable insights to inform your marketing strategy with the integrated social listening tool.
- Integrate Sprout Social with your HubSpot software to collect accurate social reports all in one place.
Conclusion:
Social listening is more of a science than an art. In order to fully utilize the potential of social media listening tools, marketers need to understand how people interact with them on a daily basis. This allows them to adjust their messages on a regular basis which boosts the chances of making their message received and distributed by a large number of people.