“Social media monitoring” is a term used to describe the practice of using tools to track, measure, and analyze mentions of your brand or industry on social media. It’s a great way to keep up with what people are saying about your brand, as well as stay on top of trends in your industry. And of course, it’s fun to keep up with the conversation and feel closer to your audience.
Table of Contents
Monitor Social Media Tools
1. Hootsuite
What does it monitor?: all major social platforms.
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 profiles based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
2. Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch
What does it monitor?: all major social platforms.
Ready to get to the meat of the conversation? It’s powerful enough to qualify more as social listening than a social monitoring app, but Hootsuite Insights will give you an instant overview of millions of online conversations in real time.
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.)
3. 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.
Bonus: Watch our AMA with Talkwalker here to learn more.
4. Nexalogy
What does it monitor?: most major platforms + broader web
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.
5. Mentionlytics
What does it monitor?: all social platforms + broader web
Mentionlytics is a professional-grade social media monitoring app that tracks mentions, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. 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.
How to set up social media monitoring
Step 1: Choose the best social media monitoring tool for your purposes.
Refer back to that list above, if you haven’t narrowed it down yet.
Step 2: Brainstorm your search terms.
What words or names do people use when they talk about your brand?
If you’re a fast food chain, people might mention your veggie burgers a lot more than they mention your CEO. Whereas if you’re a 5-person AI startup, the name of that famous investor might be the entry point for discovery. Here are some places to start:
- Brand or company name as both handle and mention (i.e., @MoodyBlooms and #MoodyBlooms)
- Product name(s) (i.e., #PeekFreans #MoonPie)
- Names of thought leaders, CEOs, spokespeople, etc.
- Slogans or catchphrases
- Branded hashtags (i.e., #optoutside, #playinside, etc.)
You’ll also want to repeat all of the above for each of your major competitors.
Next, expand your sightlines to include your industry, vertical or niche.
- Industry hashtags or keywords (i.e., #inboundmarketing, #SEO,)
- Community or group hashtags or keywords (i.e., #banffcentreartist)
- Platform-specific hashtags or keywords (i.e., #containergardenersofinstagram, YouTubers)
- Location hashtags or keywords (i.e., #MileEnd, #JasperNationalPark #QueenWestWest)
For a detailed rundown on the most common searches brands are running, watch our recent webinar with Brandwatch.
Step 3: Set up your searches in your social media monitoring software.
This will depend on which tool you choose. In our humble opinion, the more simultaneous and saved searches a tool offers, the better. (Typing your chief rival’s name into the Instagram search bar every day is just too depressing.)
Bonus: Download a free guide to learn how to use social media monitoring to boost sales and conversions today. No tricks or boring tips—just simple, easy-to-follow instructions that really work.Get the free guide right now!
Here’s a quick how-to video that goes over how to use Hootsuite’s stream feature, in case you’re curious about how it works:
Step 4: Check your streams regularly.
If you’re the brains and the thumbs behind the company Instagram, you’ll be checking your streams daily, or even hourly, or perhaps you’ll never really not be checking them.
On the other hand, if shaking hands and kissing babies on social is not your job description (because cutting bouquets or training horses is) then consider setting a reminder for yourself to browse your search findings. Trust us, you’ll thank us later.
Step 5: Remember to revisit your search terms and adjust accordingly every so often.
Like all jobs that involve social media, social monitoring is never really done. After you’ve set yourself up and monitored for a few weeks, take another look to see whether your search is really catching everything you want, while filtering out what you don’t.
If you’re getting too many results, especially unrelated ones, consider tightening your search parameters. If you’re not seeing much pop up, then widen them. (Tip #2 in this article on research explains how to use Boolean operators to your advantage.)
Social media monitoring tips
Monitor in all the languages your customers speak.
This one can be easy to overlook for North Americans used to working in one language. But if your company just acquired a start-up in Montreal, remember to set up searches using French, English (and Franglais??) words and phrases.
Meanwhile, if your new client does a lot of work in a language that you don’t speak, work with the local team to find out how to spell “love it” in Vietnamese, or “the worst” in Russian.
Depending on the size and relative importance of your audience, you might want to use a language-specific social monitoring tool. Crowd Analyzer, for instance, excels at social monitoring in Arabic.
Many social media monitoring tools (ahem, Hootsuite) allow you to share permissions with team members so that you can get help where you need it, like for instance from your French or Spanish colleagues.
Feed your hashtag and keyword strategy while you’re monitoring.
If you’ve ever been stumped by what hashtag to add to an Instagram post, or paused in horror as you consider what will happen to your views if you don’t find the right keyword for your YouTube video, social monitoring can help.
For instance, the word cloud in Hootsuite Insights will provide ideas as to which keywords or hashtags you might want to add to your ongoing monitoring activities. But it can also provide keywords and hashtags that you’ll want to use on your own posts as part of your overall hashtag strategy.
Source: Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch
Knowing the language your followers are speaking (i.e., are people talking about “container gardening” or “balcony plants”?) will ensure you can help them find your amazing content.
Identify influencers and brand advocates you might want to partner with.
Another smart way to level-up your social monitoring is to keep an eye out for the repeat offenders. As you babysit the endless scroll, pay attention to people who repeatedly engage with or mention your brand.
If they’re always applauding or cheerleading, and have a following of their own, you might consider including them as part of your influencer marketing strategy.
Choosing a tool that can do the complicated math to figure out who your biggest fans are is an easy win.
Source: Hootsuite Insights, powered by Brandwatch
Set alerts for unusual activity.
If your sentiment takes a nose-dive when your new TV ad rolls out, or your competitor launches a terrifyingly cool new product, the social team should be among the first to know about it.
A social media crisis (or just a regular PR crisis) can arise at any time. Social media monitoring can alert you if mention volume surges, or the social sentiment meters are ticking over to red all the way down the board.
The correct tool will not just warn you, but make sure you have real-time insights at hand to help make decisions about how to solve the problem.
Share your results.
Speaking of sharing: let the rest of your team (or company) know what you’re seeing.
Sometimes, social media managers—humble people that we are—forget that we have an unparalleled view into our organization’s reputation and status in the world. How much do you want to bet that your sales team, let alone your CEO, have the time, know-how, or tools to sift through the Niagara Falls of opinions and feelings that the world’s 4.5 billion social media users are sharing online?
Social media monitoring reports are important for two reasons:
1) proving your work is worth 24% of the marketing budget (I’m not pointing fingers, but sometimes people need to be reminded) and,
2) making sure your insights about your customers and potential customers are getting to the people who are making decisions.
So, whether your company is customer-obsessed or data-led, our advice is to choose a tool that easily integrates social media monitoring with custom reporting.
best social media tracking tools
1. 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.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a very popular, freemium, social media monitoring software that can track activity across a number of social networks and platforms – those networks and platforms include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, and WordPress. You can also manage social media accounts by scheduling posts across multiple platforms. If more than one person is handling a social media account, you can also delegate tasks.
3. 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.
4. Digimind
Digimind measures sentiment, enabling you to see if the perception of a keyword is negative, neutral, or positive. You can also see how the public perceives your brand versus the competition.
5. TweetReach
If you want to see how many people your tweets reach, TweetReach is a great monitoring tool. You can measure the impact that social media discussions have, and you can also learn about your most influential followers, which points you toward the right people. Target those people, and you’re most likely to see better results.
6. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools because it gives you the analytics you need to increase social media engagement. You can also publish posts from the Sprout Social Dashboard and collaborate with your team.
7. Klout
Klout is slightly controversial – there are people that don’t like it and there are others who swear by it. Klout’s influence scoring system has a reputation for being inaccurate, but it can be used to fine-tune posts in order to achieve optimum engagement. Overall, Klout is a worthy Twitter tool for measuring influence through engagement. It gives you information on how people feel about your brand and what influences them.
8. Buzzlogix
Buzzlogix is all about ‘catching the buzz’ about your products and services so you know what the public is saying in real time. You can also see what people are saying about your competitors and manage all of your social media channels all in one product. If you or a certain keyword is mentioned, you can reply directly from the dashboard, making it a great tool for managing your interaction with the community. The social media analytics and reports are also helpful. You can get started by signing up for the free version.
9. Simply Measured
Simply Measured keeps track of a number of metrics. You can gather data on and analyze earned, owned, and paid activity. This is a paid platform, but you can use the free version to create free reports for Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Twitter. You can receive insights on competitor fan pages, your Facebook content, Instagram engagement, customer service metrics, and trends.
10. Zoho Social
Zoho social enables you to schedule unlimited posts across your social networks, which makes it a useful social media network manager. You can measure performance and track conversations from one dashboard.
Conclusion
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