A free social media monitoring tool makes it easier for you to track mentions, posts and comments across multiple channels. Here are some free social media tracking tools which should help you to improve your marketing results and meet your targets.
Free Social Media Tracking Tools are essential for monitoring and promoting your brand. Many free social media tracking tools have free trials. You can find lots of free social media analytics tools online that will allow you to monitor your social media performance as well as track user engagement.
Social media monitoring tools offer a solution for marketers who want to look into their brand’s social presence and success. This article provides free social media tracking tools to help you discover, monitor and analyze your brand’s social media activity.
If you are a digital marketer or if your company has social media accounts, you should definitely use some kind of social media tracking tool. Why? Because they make your job easier and they can provide you with a lot of valuable insights into the various social media platforms whose presence is essential in the business world these days.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring, sometimes referred to as social media “listening,” is the practice of examining what’s being said about someone or something — or the topics that entity cares about — by other social media users. The people who are conducting this monitoring can do so for their own personal profile or on behalf of a business’s social media account.
Social media monitoring can take many forms and track keywords, hashtags, and mentions of a specific user. It can also take place on one social network or across several.
Depending on the user and what their goal is in monitoring their social media presence, social media listening can offer all kinds of insight to help a business become more efficient.
For example, if a brand is particularly controversial, or sensitive to how it’s defined by the public, it might want to monitor every social network on which the brand has an account to keep track of its reputation. Or, if the company has a talkative consumer base that it wants to interact with, the company might limit its monitoring to just the social networks where it knows its customers are most verbal.
No matter what your goal is when listening to a social network, checking out your newsfeed, timeline, or conducting a basic search through the network’s search bar simply won’t suffice. There are numerous social media monitoring and management tools out there that can tap conversations you won’t find by yourself. And each tool offers a different set of data to help you adapt your social media strategy over time.
So, we’ve rounded up some of the best free social media and brand monitoring tools from around the vast web of social networks.
Nearly all of these tools are free, but some offer paid versions with more features and capabilities. Let’s dive into each one — and see if you want to test them out today.
Mentionmapp
Mentionmapp connects to your Twitter API and see what’s going on in your Twitter network. You can see who mentions you the most, as well as who retweets you the most (using Retweetmapp). It’s interactive, too. That way, you can click through and see how your interactions are connected — if you want to keep an eye on the impact or reach a positive (or negative) tweet about your brand can have.
Lithium (formerly Klout)
Lithium — which recently acquired the social media monitoring tool, Klout — offers a “social response” tool that allows you to manage, understand, and respond to the direct outreach you get from other users on social media. The tool integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and more to help you visualize where people are talking to (and about) you the most, so you can focus your customer engagement in all the right places.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite works like TweetDeck — but for all of your social networks. From your Dashboard, you can carry out social monitoring, scheduling, campaigns, and analytics — all in one place. Hootsuite integrates with Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Google+, and although it’s free for individuals’ accounts, businesses and enterprises have to purchase paid versions.
Boardreader
Boardreader does what its name suggests — it crawls message boards and discussion panels to see what people are saying about you and your brand in the dreaded comments sections, which otherwise seem impossible to parse through. Commenters often have stronger words than social media posters, so make sure you have a thick skin before diving in.
BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo aggregates data about the number of links to your domain and pieces of content receive — on social media, and via backlinks. These insights can help you determine which content formats perform best on each network, giving you ideas for web pages and pieces of content to replicate again. It’s freeup to a certain number of links, but after that, you have to pony up some cash for the Pro version.
Google Alerts
You can set up Google Alerts to see where people are mentioning you or your brand in search results, too. Enter specific terms that might be included in news story titles, and you’ll receive regular emails updating you to mentions from around the internet.
Native Analytics Tools
A few social networks provide free analytics to users — or, sometimes, analytics viewing is included in a business subscription for brands. Above is an example of what Twitter Analytics looks like for individuals, with more data and insights provided for business accounts.
Reputology
What does it monitor?: Yelp, Google, Facebook reviews + other review sites
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.
Tweepsmap
What does it monitor?: Twitter
This combination analytics/social monitoring tool is built to show Twitter power-users how hashtags and topics travel, so you can tune into what your audience is talking about.
Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
What does it monitor?: Reddit
With 430 million average monthly active users, Reddit is an often-overlooked social platform where conversation is often in-depth and honest. This tool allows you to monitor the site’s 138,000 active communities for the conversations you care about.
Iconosquare
Iconosquare helps you track, grow, and report your Facebook and Instagram accounts’ performance. Agencies can manage multiple brands from a single dashboard and schedule reports to be sent directly to clients. The competitor tracking and benchmarking features help you compare your performance with other brands in your industry.
3 cool features:
- Discover photos, captions, and comments that tag or mention your brand.
- Track engagement on competitors’ profiles.
- Learn when your followers are online and engage them live.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Competitor and hashtag tracking
- Industry benchmark
- Facebook account audit
- Instagram account audit
Paid options: $29, $59 per month, and custom pricing
Tailwind
Tailwind is a Pinterest and Instagram marketing solution that helps you schedule content, monitor conversations, and analyze performance. For Pinterest, its analytics gives you insights such as the number of pins with your domain, the potential impressions, and the number of followers for your boards. For Instagram, it shows basic metrics such as followers, posts, comments, and likes.
3 cool features:
- Identify the best hashtags on Instagram with the Hashtag Finder.
- Use the browser extension to create multiple posts from any site.
- Upload images in bulk using a drag-and-drop calendar to save time.
Social media channels:
What analytics you get for free:
- Basic profile performance
- Basic metrics for individual posts
- Board and website insights
Paid options: $9.99, $799.99 per month, and custom pricing
Likealyzer
Likealyzer is a Facebook Page analyzer tool by media intelligence firm Meltwater. It audits your Facebook Page and returns metrics such as posts per day, engagement per post, timing, and length of posts. Likealyzer also grades the Page’s performance based on more than 70 different data points, and offers recommendations for improvement based on the results.
3 cool features:
- Benchmark your Facebook Page against a million others to know how you are performing.
- Get recommendations based on how your content is performing.
- Export your chosen metrics and insights in the form of easy-to-understand reports.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Analysis of your Facebook Page’s front page, about page, activities, response, and engagement
Cyfe
Cyfe is a custom dashboard tool that you can fill up with integrated metrics from dozens of marketing tools. Its social media section allows you to sync up all the major networks and pull overview reports for the accounts you manage and those you want to track. It offers 50 widgets for Facebook alone, for tracking reach, impressions, clicks, check-ins, and posts.
3 cool features:
- A fully customizable dashboard
- Set up email and SMS alerts to notify you when certain thresholds are crossed.
- Monitor your brand mentions and competitors’ activity using the Twitter search widget.
Social networks analyzed:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- Five widgets
- A fixed view of the trailing 30 days of data
Paid options: $29 per month
Union Metrics
Union Metrics is a social intelligence tool suite that has acquired TweetReach, which provides a free snapshot of your Twitter analytics. Type in any keyword, hashtag, or username, and you get useful charts and graphs for reach, exposure, activity, and contributors. It’s quite valuable for checking in on mentions, tracking branded hashtags, and analyzing industry keywords.
3 cool features:
- Measure the potential reach for any hashtag on Twitter or Instagram.
- Look at your competitors’ activity and measure their share of voice.
- Know what sort of content works in your industry by analyzing conversations in real-time.
Social networks analyzed:
What analytics you get for free:
- Twitter assistant
- Twitter analytics report
- Instagram account checkup
Paid options: $49, $99, $199 per month
Quintly
Quintly is an enterprise-level analytics tool that monitors your engagement on all major social networks. You can mix and match dozens of customizable metrics and automate the deployment of flexible, shareable dashboards. By adding multiple pages belonging to you or your competitors, you can compare them against pre-set benchmarks or each other.
3 cool features:
- Choose from 350+ metrics to effectively set up and measure social KPIs.
- Export data in a variety of formats including CSV, XLSX, PDF, and PPTX and send automated reports.
- Use Quintly’s API to extract data into custom dashboards and integrate it with a BI solution.
Social media channels:
- YouTube
What analytics you get for free:
- All features for 14 days
- Advanced analytics
- Reporting
- Customizable dashboard
Paid options: $100, $255, $480 per month, and custom pricing
Followerwonk
One of our favorite Twitter tools, Followerwonk shows you detailed breakdowns of your followers and activity. Click on the Analytics tab, enter a Twitter username (either yours or someone else’s), and view information on followers and following. See stats like when your followers are online, when you typically post, and how your followers fall into categories like social authority, activity, total tweets, and follower count.
3 cool features:
- Find targeted users by keywords used in their profiles or bios.
- Sort users or followers of an account by insightful factors such as influence or activity.
- Compare your stats to those of competitors or peers with the help of a visual graph.
Social media channel:
What analytics you get for free:
- Search up to 50 profiles per day
- Analyze accounts with up to 25,000 followers
- 20 comparisons per day
Paid options: $29 and $79 per month
Is Free Social Media Management Worthwhile?
Social Media Management, Social Media Analytics and Social Publishing Software has many features and can do a lot to help your business to succeed in social media by scheduling and publishing your post, by monitoring your and competitors social media mentions, and it is not very expensive. There are also plenty of limited free Software available.
Conclusion
Social media monitoring tools are a great way to keep track of your presence on social networks. Social media monitoring tools free allow you to use your social networks for free and can be very useful, as long as you know what you are looking for.
Social media monitoring tools – sometimes called social media analytics or social listening tools – allow users to observe, measure, and analyze what people say about their brand or industry across social media. These tools help you collect, store, filter, and interpret information about your brand, your industry, and the sentiments of your target audience (your potential customers).