Social Media Examiner is the ultimate guide to monitoring and managing social media for your business. Whether you’re a small business or a large organization,Social Media Examiner can help keep you up-to-date on all the latest social media news and trends. You’ll also find helpful tips and tools to help manage your social media accounts from start to finish. So dive in!
How to Get started using social media.
Social media is a network of websites, applications, and services that allow people to communicate and share information. Social media websites are where you can post your photos, videos, thoughts, or anything else that could be considered a “message” with other people. Applications that use social media include Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. The benefits of using social media include the following:
1. Increased communication – With social media tools you can easily connect with others who might not be able to be reached on traditional methods such as email or in person.
2. MoreFFMable – With the ease of sharing photos and videos online, it has made it easier for people to connect with one another on a deeper level than ever before.
3. Easier access to information – Using social media platforms allows you to keep up with current events and trends much more easily than if you had to wait for news articles or sources from other sources.
Best Social Monitoring Tools
1. Hootsuite
What does it monitor? All major social media platforms
Paid or free: Free tool with paid options
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 mentions based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
This paid tool is powerful enough to qualify more as a social listening tool than a social monitoring app, but Hootsuite Insights can 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.)
Hootsuite Insights can tell you a lot about your audience — and how they feel about you. It’s only available to enterprise users, but if you’re serious about social listening, Insights is the only tool you’ll need.
2. Meltwater
Meltwater is the Swiss Army knife of media monitoring tools, with social media management, audience insights, social listening, sentiment analysis, and influencer management — all housed in one easy-to-use interface.
Trusted by over 30,000 clients worldwide, and ranked as the #1 media intelligence platform by G2, it’s a sophisticated option, ideal for everyone from enterprise teams to SMEs.
The Meltwater social monitoring platform offers intuitive, highly customisable monitoring dashboards, where you can track conversations in real-time, pinpoint developments in community sentiment, and capitalise on the most valuable mentions.
The Meltwater social monitoring platform covers networks like
- Twitter (the whole tweet archive, not just a 10% sampling)
- YouTube
- Asian Socials
- Message boards
- Forums like Reddit and Quora
- Over 300 million blogs
- Podcasts
- Broadcast
3. Keyhole
Keyhole helps you monitor your Twitter and Instagram accounts – you can look at keywords, hashtags, URLs, and usernames. You can both see data in real-time and historical information, while you can also view heat maps that show you activity levels in certain parts of the world.
4. Nexalogy
What does it monitor? Most major platforms + broader web
Paid or free? Free tool
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. Sprout Social
While Sprout is primarily a social media management tool for SMEs to handle day-to-day content publishing, it offers media monitoring functionality too.
With the Smart Inbox sitting at the heart of the monitoring dashboard, you can bring messages, mentions, and tags from core channels into one central hub, instead of switching between networks to track notifications. Set up inbox filtering and tagging options to help you prioritise interactions, and save time to focus on the most valuable opportunities online.
6. Twitter Counter
Twitter Counter is a tool used to track your Twitter stats. You can track millions of Twitter users and stats, and there are also buttons and widgets that can be added to websites, blogs, and social media profiles to show the number of followers and the most recent Twitter visitors. You can also see retweets, mentions, and historical data, you can add multiple accounts so you can keep track of them all in one place and you can create custom reports and graphs, and download .pdf reports.
7. Reputology
What does it monitor? Yelp, Google, Facebook reviews + other review sites
Paid or free? Free tool
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.
8. Cyfe
Cyfe offers you the chance to centralise insights from your media activity (as well as site data, sales journeys, marketing spend, and customer support) into widget-filled dashboards. The emphasis is on visualisation over interaction, so if you need something with both monitoring and interaction functionality instead, you’d do better with a tool like Meltwater or Hootsuite.
9. Klout
Klout is slightly controversial – there are people that don’t like it and there are others who swear by it. Klout’s influence scoring system has a reputation for being inaccurate, but it can be used to fine-tune posts in order to achieve optimum engagement. Overall, Klout is a worthy Twitter tool for measuring influence through engagement. It gives you information on how people feel about your brand and what influences them.
10. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a great tool for content research, but it also has an excellent way to analyze and monitor your Facebook pages. Along with metrics around each individual post, more interestingly is the ability to see what content performs best.
BuzzSumo will tell you what day is the best to post, how long your posts should be, what types of content work best, and monthly stats over time.
Social Listening Tools
1. Brandwatch (Formerly Falcon.io)
Plans: Essentials $108/mo, Full Suite Custom Pricing. 14-day free trial
Brandwatch 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.
Brandwatch 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.
Brandwatch 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 Brandwatch, 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.
2. HubSpot Social Media Management Software
Price: $890/month+
With HubSpot, you have the power to easily monitor interactions, conversations, and audiences on social media. You also have the necessary tools to manage day-to-day interactions and engagement on social and target specific audiences using context from the contacts database in your free CRM to better understand what these people mean to your business.
What does that mean for you — the user? You can manage your entire social strategy — from planning to sharing to analyzing — from one, central location.
You can handle all of your social accounts from the tool as well as easily turn your content offers into social posts. With HubSpot, you don’t need to worry about logging into your social profiles to post content — rather, you can schedule posts weeks in advance on all of your profiles from within the tool to free up valuable time.
You can also post to social from anywhere — whether you’re in HubSpot, on a specific social platform, or on another social tool that you connected to HubSpot. And how you post won’t ever affect your ability to report on the success of those posts.
Don’t worry about having to open specific platforms to converse with your audience either — instead, reply to anyone who commented on posts you published through HubSpot.
Lastly, on Twitter specifically, HubSpot helps you stay up to date on what’s current and trending by monitoring specific keywords you deem as important to your brand — this way, you never miss a beat when it comes to the things that matter most to your business and audience.
3. Brand24
Plans: Individual $49/month, Team $99/month, Pro $149/month. 14-day free trial.
Brand24 provides you with social insights into what people say online about your brand. Unlike some of its competitors, Brand24 targets businesses of all sizes, with a $49/month package for small or new businesses.
It shows you a mentions feed, where you can discover what people say about your brand and take action in real time. You can join in and engage in discussions directly from Brand24.
It shows you a Discussion Volume Chart, graphically depicting your brand’s mentions, so you can easily see any surges in brand mentions, and discover if there is a problem. Indeed, it provides full mention analytics, giving you a better understanding of who is talking about your brand online.
Brand24 has developed their own Influencer Score, to help pinpoint your industry influencers, so you can begin making contact with the people that matter in your niche.
It also includes sentiment analysis – not only can you see mentions of your brand, but it gives an indication of whether these mentions were positive, negative, or neutral in tone.
4. 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.
5. AgoraPulse
Plans: Pro $79/mo, Premium $199/mo, Enterprise custom
Agora Pulse is another highly professional social media management app that includes social listening features.
It features an extremely clean and straightforward interface.
You can easily set up relevant brand-listening parameters, that allow you to listen to relevant conversations about your brand. You can further refine your YouTube, and Twitter searches by providing words NOT to include in your saved searches. Boolean operators allow you to hone in on only what you want to listen to. Add location and/or language parameters to your Twitter searches if you want to be even more specific.
Perhaps even more critical is that Agora Pulse helps you take action on what you hear. You can click on a monitoring item and like, retweet, reply, or reply in DM/PM. You can also label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client so that they can act accordingly.
6. Falcon.io
Price: $108/per seat/month+
Falcon.io is an all-in-one social media management and customer experience (CX) platform for medium-to-enterprise-size companies.
The software has capabilities related to scheduling, engaging, social listening, publishing, advertising, and analyzing all aspects of your social media strategy. The platform makes it easy to segment and target your customers for customized social campaigns.
Falcon.io Features and Compatibility
- Use a single dashboard for all of your social media management needs (e.g. social listening, publishing, engagement, reporting, audience data management).
- Manage private messaging channels with the Engage inbox feature (which is compatible with WhatsApp).
- Enhance community management and support by creating custom response templates for your FAQs.
- Route specific messages from audience members to internal team members so they can collaborate on solutions — and keep those messages in one, customizable, and filterable inbox.
- Use Falcon.io to manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts.
- Integrate Falcon.io with your HubSpot CRM to sync all customer data for social campaigns, create custom or lookalike audiences, and offer personalized and engaging customer service.
How to use social media to monitor and manage your social media accounts.
To use social media to monitor and manage your social media accounts, you first need to configure them. This can include setting up passwords and account settings, adding contact information for people you want to follow, and selecting which platforms (such as Facebook or Twitter) you want to use.
Use social media to share your ideas and projects
One way to share your ideas and projects on social media is by using the hashtag #socialmedia. You can also post updates about your project on different platforms, such as Twitter or Facebook.
Monitor your social media accounts to ensure that you are meeting your goals
Your goal should be to keep your social media accounts up-to-date with the latest news, events, and developments in your industry or field of work. By monitoring each account regularly, you’ll be able to stay ahead of any potential competition and make sure that your brand is well-represented online.
Tips for managing your social media accounts.
When you have a social media account, it is important to use it to build relationships with your followers. You can do this by sharing your thoughts and ideas, promoting your business, and following other people who share similar interests.
Use social media to share your thoughts and ideas
You can also use social media to share your thoughts and ideas. For example, you could post a comment on a blog post or retweet a message from another user. You can also write articles or create videos about topics that interest you and share those online.
Use social media to promote your business
You can use social media to promote your business by writing articles, creating videos, orsharing information about your company online. You can also connect with potential customers through social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. By using these platforms to promote your business, you’ll be able to build relationships with potential customers and increase brand awareness。
Conclusion
Social media can be a powerful tool for marketing your business. By using it to share your ideas and projects, monitor your social media accounts, and promote your business, you can ensure that your products are well-received by potential customers. In order to make the most of social media, be sure to understand its various features and use them in a way that suits your business goals. Thank you for reading!