What is social media monitoring?
By monitoring this data, you’re doing research that is both quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative (inspiration for posts and strategies). You’ll get information that can help you determine things like:
For brands, social monitoring is an essential part of being a good social citizen, and succeeding on social, period. For instance, you wouldn’t launch into a high-pressure sales pitch (or informative lecture, or even a stand up routine) to a new customer who’s just walked in the door. You’d listen first, and at least figure out what they’re looking for or why they’re in your office.
Note: You’ve probably also heard of social media listening, which is the next step you’ll want to take after social media monitoring. Social listening involves not just gathering and analyzing the metrics, but taking action. Take part in the conversation, and turn your intelligence into audience insights. Read our article about social media listening tools over here.
7 brand social media monitoring tools
For brands and businesses, social media monitoring goes beyond just typing your own name into the search bar on Instagram or Twitter. This is why we’ve compiled this list of our favorite brand monitoring tools for making the task faster, easier, and—dare we say it—more fun? (Ok, ok, you don’t have to give me that look.)
1. Hootsuite
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.
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. Nexalogy
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.
3. Mentionlytics
4. Reputology
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.
5. Tweepsmap
6. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
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.
7. Talkwalker
Social Media: What Now?
Social media monitoring is often confused with similar-sounding (and a few similar-meaning) terms, including social media tracking. Simply put, social media monitoring is keeping an eye on the conversations already happening related to key terms that you search for, such as your brand name, tagline, and product names.
So how exactly do you become a fly on the digital wall of the web? The first step in effective social listening is to create a list of keywords to monitor. Depending on your goals, you may want to monitor conversations about your brand, products, services, industry, competitors, and competitors’ products. You could also monitor keywords associated with recent marketing campaigns or phrases used by people who might be in need of your product. For example, Febreze may monitor terms such as “pet odor” and “the smell test.”
Once you have your list, you’re ready to start monitoring. Most social media networks have a search feature like #tags and @tags, making it easy to bring up just the results you want. Unfortunately, using these tools manually has some potential problems.
Are You Listening? The 19 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools
If they tagged your social media profile in their posts, you could check your notifications. If they didn’t, maybe you could search on each social media platform every time you want to find out. Sounds tedious? Here’s a better way:
There’s a great deal of wonderful social media tools out there. Among them are tools built specifically to help you pick out relevant conversations on social media — social media monitoring tools. Some of these tools allow you to monitor multiple social media profiles on the different social media platforms from a single place. There are even some that let you monitor social media trends and keywords.
Sendible
Seize opportunities via social listening
Description: Sendible is a full social media management tool, built for agencies that manage multiple clients. On top of scheduling and collaborating on social media content, you can also respond to comments and messages from an inbox and monitor hashtags, keywords, and your competitors on social media and the web.
The remaining social media monitoring tools are more pricey than those above. I have not had the opportunity to try them out myself (as they do not provide free trials). I’ve selected them based on reviews and their brand name. If you have used any of them before, it’ll be great to hear your experience.
How does social media monitoring work?
Social media monitoring can be performed by using SMM tools and works by continuously crawling and indexing sites, via keywords, some are crawled in real time, such as Twitter. After the sites are indexed, they can be searched to find mentions, comments and other texts that include the opinions, and sentiment on specific products, brands, companies, etc.
Social media monitoring is not only for social media channels. In fact, SMM tools can also crawl various types of websites which include review sites, news sites, RSS feeds, forums and blogs. Usually, monitoring tools use some kind of search string that the customer writes to find mentions of specific words and expressions on those pages. You can find some of these tools online.
Collecting random data generated from social media can empower you to have some the following advantage.
You must choose monitoring tools of which you think could match your business goal. The SMM tool will crawl the internet and collect a number of mentions and information. Then the next step is to analyze the data gathered. But what you should do with the information gathered?
- Observe related search keywords to find out which words are trending.
- Evaluate your customer emotions towards your brand. One way to do so is by using sentiment analysis that answers the question “What do people think or feel about the brands, products, and services?”
The areas you should monitor on social media
Brand Terms
Sometimes, there are instances that people may forget to include the @ or # when directly mentioning your brand. For twitter, to locate conversations that may have slipped off your radar, use the advanced search operators that offer a much-extended range of results.
Customer Needs
According to Sprout Social Q2, 2016 Index 89% of social messages are being ignored. Your business should take it as an opportunity. Make sure that you are not just there to listen to your customer sentiments, but also take time to consider their needs and respond to them.
Customer Sentiment
You’ve heard that the greatest ideas sometimes come from the customers’ opinion. You may or may not agree with that statement, but everyone ought to agree that customers opinion is very important. Most of the time your customer’s voice are louder than what you are trying to say about your business. You may say that your business is the best customer support company in the whole country, but your customer opinion may perceive your business as the worse customer support company. This can happen to your business if you did not properly monitor your customer feedback. The more customer concern left unanswered the more customer will be going to hurt your business. In contrast, the faster you can adapt to accommodate customer needs, the stronger your company’s reputation.
Competitors
Every company aims to be ahead of their competition. Social listening and monitoring are important to refine your social strategy. Begin by benchmarking and tracking competitors activity and updates to gather info on:
You also need to be careful about reaching out to the followers of your competitors. It is better to drive a smooth relationship and perhaps not directly to avoid being perceived as desperate and aggressive.
Here at adish , we got you covered! We can help your brand step ahead of your competitors. Our social media experts will guide your business on finding the best monitoring tools that suit your brand goal. We ensure to deliver proactively create positive relationships with your users, listening to your customers, analyzing the data and achieve customer success.
Through monitoring and listening conversations on social channels and web, your brand can identify new opportunities while collecting worthwhile feedback and information about competitors for your business improvements. The possibilities of being successful are not confined in a small box, but the pieces of information you’ve gathered today might give you powerful ideas in the future.
Resources:
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-monitoring-tools/
https://blog.hootsuite.com/social-media-monitoring-tools/#:~:text=%20How%20to%20set%20up%20social%20media%20monitoring,software..%20This%20will%20depend%20on%20which…%20More
https://www.salesforce.com/products/marketing-cloud/best-practices/social-media-monitoring/
https://buffer.com/library/social-media-monitoring-tools/
https://cs-agents.com/blog/social-media-monitoring/