There is little doubt that social media has played a large role in helping to shape businesses around the world. However, it takes more than just having a presence on various social media sites to have an impact. You must understand just who are reaching and how your business is being perceived, and various social media monitoring tools can be used to fulfil these objectives.
Why Monitoring Tools Are Essential To Your Business
Too many businesses fail when it comes to using social media because they do not understand everything that it entails. This is because they participate in just reaching out, like with traditional media. Instead, they should be interacting, actively participating and building relationships with their customer base.
In a nut shell, they’re not using social media monitoring tools to listen to the online environment and react accordingly.
Social media monitoring tools are needed to find out what’s happening in your online spaces as well as your industry. Social media monitoring tools can also be used to gauge how well your efforts are performing - it can be quite difficult to fully understand the effectiveness of your efforts on social media just by looking at the customer subscriptions and responses.
Using a mixture of different social media monitoring tools will help you to fully understand everything you need to know concerning your social media marketing campaigns.
What You Need To Monitor
The first thing about effectively using social media monitoring tools is knowing what you need to keep track of. What follows are the basics in terms of what areas you should be watching:
- Your Business
- Customers
- Competitors
- Prospects
- Industry
- Keywords
- Hashtags
- Content
By using social media monitoring tools to effectively listen to all of these areas, you can make better informed decisions about where you can make improvements, spot opportunities and shore up any weaknesses that you might have in your social media output.
Of course, you will need the right monitoring tools in order to make the best decisions possible…
30 Effective Social Media Monitoring Tools
Of course, you are going to need to know the social media monitoring tools that are right for your needs. Some of the following tools offer real-time information, while others help you manage multiple accounts and even allow you to respond quickly.
Basically, a combination of quick response, easy use and functionality is what you need in order to effectively run your social media campaigns.
1. Brand24
Discover what people are saying online about your brand - as it unfolds in real time. Brand24 gives you instant access to mentions about your brand across the web, from social networks to influential publishers.
2. Curalate
Using image analytics of social media conversations, you can gain more insight on your efforts on visually-oriented social media such as Instagram.
3. Trackur
Helps monitor all of your tweets, blogs, websites and social networks. A good overall report on the general trends of your social media efforts.
4. Collective Intellect
An Oracle platform that captures a plethora of conversations on a daily basis. From this you can help find the information needed to act.
5. Talkwalker
This scans social media to keep track of your brand and what your competitors are up to. You can use it for market research, customer service and tracking marketing campaigns as well.
6. Crimson Hexagon
You can actually listen in on social conversations which will help you engage with your customers. That way, you’ll have a better idea of how to present your business.
7. Back Tweets
This free service lets you see just how many people are talking about your business, what they are saying and who they are. This is highly valuable to your Twitter account because you can see just exactly who is responding.
8. Topsy
A good way to monitor your output on social networks and analyze their rankings, content and trends that you can then use to plan your next efforts.
9. CARMA
Here, you can look at your entire social media image, including how you stack up against other companies, your strengths, weaknesses and so forth.
10. Media Vantage
Looks at traditional media sites along with social media to help you coordinate your efforts.
11. Meltwater
A combination of engagement tools with monitoring that helps you create marketing campaigns.
12. Mention
Uses Android and iPhone app to create alerts for you and your company with real time updates.
13. Plugg.io
A free way to manage your accounts, get suggestions and automate syndication services for your blogs and so forth.
14. Social Marketing Cloud
An automated means to let you monitor and analyze blogs, forums, wikis and the like.
15. Pinterest Web Analytics
Pinterest’s own free analytics helps you excel in this particular social media area.
16. NetBase
An intelligence platform for social media that lets you find, react and engage better with your audience.
17. Netvibes
This tracks customers, competitors and clients as well as your brand on many different media sources.
18. NUVI
Shows real-time conversations about your business letting you engage those who may detract from your company.
19. UberVU
Here, you get real time reports on all of your social media efforts and find new opportunities to engage with customers.
20. Google Alerts
Free email updates of your latest Google results.
21. Gorkana
By going through social media conversations, you can find new insight into how your brand is doing.
22. Hootsuite
A free social media system that manages your campaigns over a number of different social media websites.
23. Ice Rocket
This is a free resource to help you track your brand. It uses the web, blogs, Facebook and Twitter to give you readable results.
24. Klout
Another free tool that lets you find what influences your audience so you can target them with the right campaign.
25. Market Me Suite
This uses an easy to read dashboard to manage multiple social media accounts, use geo-targeting and even schedule messages.
26. Media Miser
This web app collects and analyzes data about your brand and spots new trends as well.
27. Pinpuff
Helps you with your Pinterest efforts in showing how people share your images.
28. Social Mention
A free service that lets you search and analyze content on a number of different social media sites into one stream.
29. Shoutlet
A management platform for the community, you can integrate your efforts on several different social media sites.
30. Argyle Social
Helps you collect good leads, connect with prospects and build your relationships on social media sites. You can even link to marketing efforts that you are engaged in with this particular tool.
Bonus Social Media Monitoring Tool
31. Postific
Helps individuals and businesses analyse and increase their social engagement and reach more leads and customers. I did a review of Postific here but they have come along way since it was written and is quickly becoming one of my favourites on this list of social media monitoring tools.
By harnessing the right social media monitoring tools, you can start working towards your maximum potential for your social marketing efforts. You will have the knowledge to tailor your next campaigns properly after listening to what others have to say about you, your business and your content.
What social media monitoring tools are you currently using?
Are you effectively monitoring every important aspect of your social media presence?
