For any brand to be relevant to the social media platforms having the right content is the key. However, what is right is the most difficult part. Getting the content right is a continuous process as both the brand and the consumer evolve. This constant evolution makes it important for marketers to be aware of what people are talking about the brand in the social media space. For starters, manual monitoring works fine. Tracking your brand hashtags, google alerts and generally keeping an eye on the conversation is helpful. But like any manual monitoring, once you reach a scale, there needs to be an automated process to monitor and report. Another limitation of manual monitoring is that many mentions don’t include brand hashtag. They get missed out.
This is where social media listening tools come into play. Social Media listening tools are equipped to report and analyze what people are talking about you and your competition in the social media space. Most of these social media listening tools can also be used to respond to these conversations.
Here is the list of top 5 Social Media Listening & Monitoring tools that the brand could consider.
- Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools. Hootsuite monitors all social media platform including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Blogs and Google. You can also use Hootsuite to schedule posts, measure performance and analyze performance. Hootsuite has a freemium pricing model with free social media monitoring providing enough features for first-time users.
- Keyhole in one of the most user-friendly social media monitoring and listening tool. It can track the performance of keywords, URLs, topics, hashtag and @mentions around your brand, audience, and industry. Keyhole also provides engagement metrics of the social posts in terms of reach and engagement. The sentiments monitor classifies the social chatter in various buckets of positive and negative chats. Keyhole can also be used to track mentions of any brand or keyword across news, blogs, and forums.
- Radian6 from Salesforce is another social listening tool. Radian6 collects all online talk about your brand and then presents it in a manner that makes sense for a marketer. The conversation cloud feature of Radian6 shows the top 50 words from the last 1000 posts about the brand. The topic trend widget is helpful in crisis monitoring. Radian6 can segment the mentions through the topic trends widget by sentiment. Through this widget, you can see if a rise in the number of negative mentions should be a cause for alarm. A rise in positive mentions can also indicate a resounding favorable outlook of people towards your brand.
- Mention with a basic free plan is one of the easiest tools to experiment and understand the power of social media measurement, monitoring and responding. Monitor covers over 1 billion sources daily including social media, reviews site, forums, blogs, and the rest of the web to capture the conversation happening about your brand. With the visual dashboard of Mention, it is easier to analyze and understand the plethora of data that gets generated every day. One can use mention to monitor online media, analyze your competition, listen to what people are talking around and also schedule posts.
- Brandwatch is used by Walmart, Unilever, Microsoft, and Loreal among many others. This social media monitoring and listening tool track both your brand and your competition. One of the features of Brandwatch is its ability to monitor influencers. Brandwatch covers blogs, news sites, forums, videos, reviews, images, and social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Brandwatch covers more than 80 million sources. Brandwatch allows both text and image search. The reporting tool of Brandwatch showcases the captured data using charts and other visual tools. The data is categorized in various buckets indicating the platform, sentiment, and relative strength.
