You want to track everything, but your budget is tight. Your boss wants to know exactly what people are saying about the company in social media. You need to meet that demand if you want to keep your job. That can be a tall order if you’re meeting it alone. Don’t stress – these free social media monitoring tools 2021 are here to help.
Social media is one of the most important aspects of your marketing arsenal. Whether you want to start using social media for business or learn about free social media monitoring tools 2021, you’ll need to know which tools are out there.
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.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a large-scale social marketing tool, aimed predominantly at large businesses and enterprises. One of its components is Talkwalker Analytics, which is a social listening and analytics suite.
It analyzes online, social, print and TV/radio content in one. It incorporates image recognition technology to track 30,000 brand images.
Not only can you monitor results in real-time, but you can also access more than two years of historic data.
Talkwalker provides the tools to undertake social listening for your brand over 10 social networks. It goes further than that, however, and monitors discussion on online news sites, blogs, forums, and even offline databases. In total, it monitors 150 million websites.
Of course, social listening is only one of Talkwalker’s features, and heavy-duty tools don’t come cheap. The Basic plan (for smaller brands or owned media-focused organizations) costs $9,600 per year, with Corporate and Enterprise plans available on request.
Keyhole
Brands like Google, Alibaba, L’Oreal, H&M, and Mashable, trust Keyhole’s analytics. Keyhole is a social media analytics solution allowing you to track hashtags and keywords to monitor relevant conversations online.
Keyhole’s social analytics dashboard gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like. So, you don’t have to look too deep before seeing key analytics like total impressions, engagements, impressions, and posts.
Looking for a tool that allows you to tap into your customers’ minds, gives key information on your brand, and turns raw data into actionable insights that inform your strategy and accelerate critical decision-making? Then Keyhole might be exactly what you need.
Best of all?
Not only does the tool allow you to track @mentions and customer conversations across social media, blogs, and forums. It will also give you key analysis into relevant topics, sentiment analysis, demographic breakdown, and surface the top influencers in the conversation.
Also, Keyhole was designed to best position our clients to succeed, and in any business knowledge is power. This include knowing your audience and your competitors.
With Keyhole, users can monitor all their competitors at the same time, getting key benchmarking metrics as well as competitive intelligence to help them beat the competition.
The best part is how easy Keyhole makes your life. Neil Patel describes it this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”
Now, on top of planning a data-driven strategy, managing your social media campaigns, influencer marketing, and social listening, you can also schedule and execute your social content strategy with Keyhole’s Social Publishing.
Pros: The data reports are comprehensive, but also simple and easy to understand. It’s an affordable tool that keeps everyone in the know about ongoing conversations, brand health, and competitor performance.
Price: Starts at $79 USD per month. You can view various plans and pricing here.
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:
Maybe you’re just getting started with social media marketing. Or perhaps, you already have established accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, Google Plus, LinkedIn and more. Either way, if you are into social media at all you have probably heard about social media monitoring tools 2021.