All social media marketers have their favorite free tools to help them track their advertising and branding efforts. I’ve gathered a few of the most interesting listening tools into one list. Download this file to get links to all of these great free tools!
Using free listening tools is one of the best ways to learn about social media — to hear what people are saying about your brand and for you to hear what people are saying about your competitors. Here were some of our favorite free listening tools that journalists and bloggers shared on Twitter in August.
Mention.com
Mention is a social media mention monitoring tool that tracks social media conversation across the web, blogs and social networks.
It’s a very simple way to see what people are saying about your brand or industry, especially considering you’ll be able to track keywords, competitors and even specific employees–all for free!
Note: at the time of this writing all social media mentions were limited to 1000 mentions unless you have a paid account. Also note that only 3 projects can be created with this version.
After you’ve signed into your account, you can add social media keywords as projects.
How it works:
When adding a social media keyword project on Twitter, you’ll want to include the social network name and mention frequency type . Then enter your keyword once on both screens.
To set up social monitoring of your brand or competitors, click on ‘Social’ from the top nav bar and then select ‘Brand Monitoring.’
You’ll want to specify which social networks you’d like to monitor (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogs). Then decide what kind of mentions you’d like to follow:
- Mentions Only
- Favorites Only
- Mentions & Replies (recommended).
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.
Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a very useful free tool for Marketers who want to focus their social listening efforts on the social media platform: Twitter. Yes, everyone’s favorite tweet-heavy place is the subject of a number of specific social media listening tools that offer free and paid services. What’s different about Followerwonk, and what allows it to stand out from the crowd, is FW’s ability to find, analyze, and optimize specific metrics, such as Twitter profiles, posts, and dynamic relationships between accounts and said accounts’ competitors. As a “Try it for FREE” platform, Followerwonk has cultivated a devoted following, and it’s not surprising that those that utilize the site often reuse it over and over above paid platforms.
Great for those that wish to take advantage of the extensive network of data that Twitter holds, and easy to approach from marketing and insights pros from all levels of experience, Followerwonk makes social listening on a micro level a piece of cake, as well as a comprehensive tool all around. There are two other pricing models that allow paid subscriptions for more features like multiple user accounts on the platform, as well as additional analysis and optimization options, but it’s still a free-to-use tool for those who need to save their green in order to make their brand or agency some green.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a social listening platform that allows you to receive media notifications on keywords and topics.
How it works:
First, create your Google Account.
Next, click the ‘Create alert’ link under the ‘Alerts’ heading (this will navigate you to a page where you can set up social accounts).
In the dropdown menu for social networks (in this example we’re using Facebook), select a social network or list of social accounts that you’d like to monitor.
This social media monitoring platform also offers RSS feeds for each subscription so you can view recent activity from blogs or websites – this feature comes in handy if you want to track social media mentions from an individual blog post or web page.
SumAll
SumAll connects to a variety of different social accounts — including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn — to provide you with insights about your followers, interactions, and engagements. The paid version provides content recommendations and automatic post scheduling.
Keyhole
Keyhole, while an excellent social listening platform, and a reliable tool for marketers who wish to focus more heavily on influencer tracking and social media analytics, it’s important to note upfront that it’s a free-by-trial option, with an available demo that can be acquired upon request with limited features. With all of that said however, Keyhole impresses with a wide, wide variety of services ranging from easy-to-use dashboards and visual graphics, to complimentary how-to videos and customer support. What’s so great about Keyhole, compared to other subscription-based social listening tools, is that it doubles as an in-house internal communications hub that can allow for idea and solutions sharing service. That’s a whole lot crammed into such a neat little digital package.
The Keyhole platform
As the winner of three G2 industry awards (Fastest Implementation Winter 2020, Higher Performer Winter 2020, & User Love Us award), Keyhole has something for everyone when it comes to social intelligence services. We could go on and on about the various other notable elements of KH, like how its optimized for almost every social media platform on the market, or how its paid subscription option is a low low $79.99 /mo, which is way cheaper than the other game in town, but there’s no point. Just check it out for yourself and see how Keyhole is a great platform to try for free and then adopt for very little if you decide that’s the right choice to make!
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social listening tool hyper-focused on consumer intelligence and trendspotting solution. It focuses on producing distilled, vital insights within the billions of conversations happening daily, in the fastest possible manner.
Fundamentally, Brandwatch consists of three functions:
- Analytics – which helps you search, segment and analyse social conversations and sentiments. This is basically the social listening tool of Brandwatch.
- Vizia – it’s data visualisation platform which enables you to share insights
- Audience – which decodes the online content to help you understand the masses better
Brandwatch also has a subset product developed specially for agencies, Brandwatch for Agencies, which merges their social intelligence solutions with agency-specific training and resources to assist agencies in securing new business and retaining clients.
A cutting-edge platform focused on a hyper-specificity, Brandwatch is a great tool for those who are looking for social listening tools that work with consumer intelligence and trendspotting solutions.
Conclusion
Listening tools are a way to streamline your social media outreach by recording and listening back to the conversations that happen.