Do you want to be successful on social media, but you don’t know where to start? This class will give you an overview of the tools available and demonstrate their use. Social Media Monitoring Tools provides an overview of the software required for monitoring new media sources, both traditional and social networks. We show how to integrate the various types of media into a single strategy and evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts. We will use a fictitious firm that is launching a product internationally as an example throughout the class at each stage in a Social Media Strategy Planning Cycle.
Social media monitoring has become a key function among many marketing and business operations teams. Here’s some of the best tools to help you monitor variety of social platforms including Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest.
Hootsuite
Effectively track topics that matter—then respond quickly
Description: Hootsuite’s monitoring tool is part of its entire package of social media management tools. If you were to subscribe to one of their plans, you can also enjoy other features such as scheduling and analytics.
With Hootsuite, you can set up unlimited streams of social media content based on your mentions, selected keywords, hashtags, or locations. Furthermore, Hootsuite integrates with more than a hundred apps to help you do more from its dashboard.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google+, blogs, forums, and more
Prices: Free, $19 per month, $99 per month, $499 per month, and enterprise pricing
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.
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.
Talkwalker
What does it monitor?: most major social platforms + broader web
Talkwalker offers more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks.
You can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment.
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.
Sprout Social
Intelligent, real-time social media monitoring with Sprout
Description: Similar to Hootsuite, Sprout Social’s monitoring and engagement tools are part of its social media management software. Sprout Social has two separate features for social monitoring and engagement.
In the Smart Inbox, you’ll get all your social media mentions and messages. With the discovery feature, you can search for particular keywords on Twitter or Instagram (for example when someone mentions your brand without tagging your social media profile).
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google+
Prices (per user): $99 per month, $149 per month, and $249 per month
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.
Glean.info
Glean.info is a market intelligence and social media monitoring tool that gets audience data from social media sites, online news, blogs, message boards, forums, and photo/video sharing sites.
Similar to Keyhole and BrandWatch, this tool also lets you see your share of voice on social. That is, the percentage of your brand’s mentions against that of your competitor’s.
Here’s what gets even more interesting: Glean.info alerts you when your brand gets mentioned on a fake news site.
They monitor new posts on 2,000 fake news sites and alert you as soon as your brand gets mentioned; this helps you handle bad press before things get out of hand.
Pros: Integrated access to social media insights. Customizable alerting system.
Cons: Fairly expensive, so may not be accessible for everyone.
Price: Varies based on the number of services you need and keywords you want to track. The price for one service starts at $299 USD per month.
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
These tools can help you monitor and prevent crises before they happen!