There are a lot of social media monitoring tools available. Here’s a list of the best social media monitoring tools, sorted by categories.
Join the conversation on social media to gather feedback and inform your customers. Our list of the best social media monitoring tools includes: Hootsuite, TweetDeck and Buffer.
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.
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.
Agora Pulse
Discover what people are really saying about your business
Description: Agora Pulse is also an all-in-one social media management tool, which comes with scheduling, monitoring, engagement, and analytics features.
Its inbox collects all your social media mentions while its listening feature allows you to search for keywords, URL, and handle on Twitter. Agora Pulse also allows you to monitor comments on your Facebook and Instagram ads.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube
Prices: Free, $79 per month, $159 per month, plus enterprise options
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.
Digimind
Digimind is an intelligence software that provides a beautiful visual representation of your brand’s social performance.
This tool also allows you to monitor your own social media posts and run competitive analysis. That is, checking how your brand and/or product stacks up against industry rivals.
The platform gives you an understanding of your brand’s online reputation, as well as relevant consumer insights.
You’re also able to access your data via Digimind’s mobile app.
Pros: Monitors thousands of internet sources to collect brand intelligence.
Cons: Users reportedly find it difficult to backtrack and find previous stats and information. Also, it can become time-consuming to go through all the posts to find relevant information.
Price: To request a custom quote, contact Digimind directly.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is super useful for you if you’re looking for a basic monitoring solution.
It scans through the web and tells you when your brand or product gets mentioned.
You can choose which sources you want to be receiving alerts for — whether blogs, news sites or forums —and the languages you want to get alerts for.
Pros: An easy and free to use mention tracking solution.
Cons: Only contains basic functionalities so it’s not the most well-rounded tool.
Brand24
Smart social media monitoring for businesses of all sizes
Description: Brand24 is a powerful yet affordable tool for those who want to dive deep into social media monitoring. Besides the major social media platforms, Brand24 also monitors blogs, forums, and other sites for mentions of your brand.
Apart from collecting your mentions and allowing you to reply, Brand24 analyzes your social media reach, interactions, sentiment, and more.
Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, and more
Prices: $49 per month, $99 per month, and $399 per month
Trackur
Simple, fast, and affordable social media monitoring
Description: Like Keyhole, Trackur is a monitoring and analytics tool. It can help you find mentions of your brand (or your keywords) on social media, blogs, forums, and more and then analyze the trends, sentiment, and influence level.
Buzzlogix
Social media monitoring and engagement made simple
Description: Buzzlogix helps you with both social monitoring and social engagement. For social monitoring, you can track content with your preferred keywords and get the statistics in easy-to-understand graphs. For social engagement, you can monitor multiple social media profiles and response to social mentions and messages.
Meltwater
From tracking brand mentions to monitoring campaigns in real time, Meltwater gives you a rundown on conversations about your brand on social media.
Meltwater’s AI engine helps you listen to relevant social media conversations, and gather historical audience data to make more informed marketing decisions.
Moreover, the platform enables you to dig deeper into your audience insights. Allowing you to discover the exact segments that are engaging in conversations related to your brand, and identify significant influencers among them.
Similar to other tools on this list, Meltwater offers a social media management functionality. It enables you to plan and schedule posts and engage with your audience via a centralized inbox.
Pros: A great tool to identify media contacts and influencers in your industry.
Cons: Pricey, especially considering the limited number of users for the cost you pay.
TweetDeck
The most powerful Twitter tool for real-time tracking, organizing, and engagement
Description: TweetDeck is the official Twitter management dashboard, where you can manage multiple Twitter accounts and monitor mentions, keywords, Twitter lists, and more in separate columns. And it’s free!
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.
Conclusion
Social monitoring tools are the gateway to discovering what it is your target market or customers are saying about your business, products or services on social media these days. You can find some great resources if you know where to look online.