There are so many digital marketing tools out there that sometimes it is difficult to tell which one is the best free social media monitoring tool. How can you get the highest ROI? Here, we will talk about some of the online social media monitoring tools in detail, and you will be able to choose the one that fits your needs and will help you achieve your goals when it comes to social media.
You want to monitor your brand on social media, but wonder what to look for when choosing a social media monitoring tool? There are many free tools out there, which makes it hard to find the best free social media monitoring tools for your company. I’ve made a list of free social media tools you can use and will show you how to choose the best free online social media monitoring tools that work for you.
Free online social media monitoring tools provide all the information you need about how your website is doing on social media. These are tools that help you to keep track of the site’s traffic and the number of visitors who arrive on your site from social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest.
What is social listening?
Social listening, also referred to as social media listening, is the process of identifying and assessing what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet.
Conversations on the internet produce massive amounts of unstructured data. Because of that, it’s important to know what an organization wants to achieve with a social media listening initiative. Depending on the goal, the right tool might be a series of free Google Alerts or an expensive software suite that includes ad hoc analysis and full integration with legacy customer relationship management (CRM) applications.
Both social media and person-to-person information-gathering have value, but social listening is quickly becoming an important customer intelligence tool. Among the many ways to use social media to gain insight are the following:
- monitoring online customer support forums;
- using software tools to gather comments from social outlets, such as Facebook and Twitter; and
- encouraging customers to suggest new product features and vote on their favorites.
Social media monitoring tools can mine text for specific keywords on social networking websites, blogs and in discussion forums and other social media. Monitoring software transposes specific words or phrases in unstructured data into numerical values linked to structured data in a database. That way the data can be analyzed with traditional data mining techniques.
Union Metrics
Social intelligence. Designed for marketing teams.
Description: Union Metrics provides the social intelligence that can help you improve your social media strategy. With Union Metrics, you can track and analyze social media posts, monitor your competitors and trends, conduct research, and more.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr
Prices: $99 per month, $199 per month, and enterprise pricing
HubSpot
Connect with the people you care about
Description: HubSpot is a comprehensive marketing automation software that includes everything from social media and emails to SEO and lead management. The social media management features are included in the plans starting from $200 per month.
Because HubSpot integrates many parts of marketing together (such as customer relationship management and social media), it allows you to better monitor your leads and customers on social media.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Google+, Xing, YouTube, blogging platform with RSS feeds, and Pinterest
Prices: Starting at $200 per month, $800 per month, and $2,400 per month
NUVI
Real-time social intelligence
Description: NUVI gathers all your social media data in real-time and displays it in insightful visualizations to help you make decisions quickly and effectively. Like most social media management tools, NUVI can help you publish and schedule posts, analyze your social media activities, and create reports.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, VK, blogs, and RSS feeds
Price: Custom pricing
Falcon.io
Manage your brand
Description: Falcon.io is a marketing platform that helps social media marketers with social listening, customer engagement, content marketing, and audience management. Its social listening features help you monitor your brand, stay on top of popular topics, and engage influencers.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, and YouTube
Prices: $1,000 per month, $1,750 per month, and enterprise pricing
Talkwalker
Put social data intelligence to work. Instantly.
Description: Talkwalker is one of the most powerful media monitoring tools. Besides being able to monitor social media platforms and websites, it can also monitor print and TV and radio broadcasts.
It even has image recognition technology to help you pick up social media posts of your brand or product even when your brand isn’t mentioned in the caption.
Platforms supported: More than 10 social platforms, websites, print, and broadcasts
Prices: $8,400 per year, $12,000 per year, and enterprise pricing
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 is a social media listening software that allows you to organize social profiles and social conversations in one dashboard.
How it works:
First, connect your Twitter account by clicking on the ‘Add Account’ or ‘Connect’ button under the social accounts heading.
After connecting social web profiles, you can view recent activity directly on each social network page.
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.
Twilert
Twilert is social media listening software that sends email notifications when specific terms are mentioned online.
These email alerts help keep you informed of what’s being said about your brand or business.
How it works:
To get started with this social media monitoring tool, first sign up for a free trial and log into the social media listening software.
Next, enter your social network name and social media keywords (separated by comma).
After setting up a keyword alert, you’ll be able to configure the parameters for email notifications (which social networks will receive the alerts? Which social accounts will they come from?) and selecting an email address that you’d like to send them to.
As with many social networks, mention frequency type, social networks and frequency can all be changed as needed.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that allows businesses and organisations to execute campaigns across multiple social networks. The focus of the tool is the scheduling and distribution of content in 35 social networks. But it can also be used for monitoring. With Hootsuite, you can measure the performance of all your social media channels. Content can be shared based on location, language, and demographic preferences to target different groups. To get an impression of Hootsuite, companies can request a free-of-charge 30-day trial.
Social Mention
Social Mention is one of the most popular free social media monitoring tools. SocialMention.com searches several media such as blogs, news sites, Twitter and Facebook on desired terms. Numerous statistics such as sentiment, top keywords, and sources are displayed. Social Mention aggregates data, for example about your brand name, from over 100 social media pages. Your data will be analysed based on four categories:
- How often the keyword is mentioned (Strength)
- Sentiment (positive or negative)
- How likely is it that the content is shared? (passion)
- Reach (reach).
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a content change detection and notification service offered by Google. It can be used for monitoring online channels to identify new content, industry trends, conversations about your brand or information about your competitors. Google Alerts sends automatic email notifications once a result, such as articles or blog posts, matches the user’s search term(s).
Twazzup
Twazzup is a real-time monitoring and analytics application for Twitter. You only have to enter a search term and Twazzup provides you with real-time updates about the top influencers, the frequently shared pictures as well as the top 10 keywords that match your search query.
Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter Advanced Search allows you to find recent tweets containing specific words or phrases.
How it works:
The interface is fairly intuitive – log into your Twitter account, then click on ‘Advanced search’ link in the top right of the social media dashboard.
Here, you can enter a keyword or phrase that you’d like to monitor (Twitter will only return results containing your keywords).
BoardReader
BoardReader is a search engine that crawls message and discussion boards. Users can search for keywords in posts and comment sections of those forums to see what people say about their brand.
HowSociable
HowSociable is a social media monitoring tool that measures brand names or keywords. With this tool, you can start to measure your brand’s visibility on the social web. You can also compare your brand with your competitors and learn from best practices of other businesses.
Tweetdeck
Tweetdeck is a social media dashboard application for managing Twitter accounts in one single platform. Users can add multiple Twitter accounts, schedule tweets and monitor users, hashtags, search terms and lists.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a content marketing platform that offers data-driven content discovery, social insights and influencer analysis for digital marketers. The platform assists in the identification of current topical themes and influential opinion leaders. It is a popular tool for content marketing managers. You can decide whether or not you want to receive alerts when your search term is used online. The free version is limited to the results of a maximum of 5 pages.
Why is social listening important?
Social listening helps companies understand the conversation surrounding their brand and the products and services they offer. It provides valuable consumer data that companies can use to gauge brand awareness and improve their products and services.
Companies gain the following benefits from social listening:
- Campaign analysis provides feedback on how a particular marketing campaign resonates with audiences on social.
- Competitive analysis reveals insights into how competitors are doing based on conversations on social media.
- Event monitoring enables a company to see how audiences respond in real time to a specific event, such as a virtual conference.
- Industry trends surface when a company listens for discussions mentioning its industry, using social functions like hashtags.
Conclusion
The job of a social media manager has become increasingly important in recent years, from small businesses all the way up to large corporations. However, managing Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts can be time-consuming. In order to increase productivity, some social media managers use free online social media monitoring tools to increase insight and improvements.
Social media has become a force that almost all small businesses can’t ignore. With some basic resources, you can harness its power to build and grow your business. But managing multiple social media accounts, for example Twitter and Facebook, is quite time-consuming. Which is why you should consider using online social media monitoring tools when it comes to tracking your brands mentions. These tools will not only help you find relevant discussions about your business but also scan the web for influencers that are talking about you as well as alert you whenever there’s something new.