What do you think is the key to make most of the social media? Well, it’s knowing what people are saying about you, your competitors and the market on different social media platforms. Keeping up with what different people are sharing across multiple social media platforms is often very tricky. To deal with this issue, we have formed a list of some of the best free social media and brand monitoring tools. Note nearly all these tools are free to use, but some offer paid versions too which have added features and capabilities. Let’s take a look at each one now.
Best Social media and Brand monitoring tools
1. BuzzSumo
This is one powerful online tool which allows tracking content across all social networking sites and grades them based on the total number of shares on different social media platforms. This tool monitors content on topic/user and uses a very innovative search engine to deliver results which are highly accurate. BuzzSumo works best for monitoring your competitors’ content as it allows you to make comparisons and improve your own website’s performance. This tool also allows you to find the influencers and get to know what they have been sharing online.
2. Hootsuite
This indeed is one of the best available free social media monitoring tools. HootSuite covers a number of social networks, like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, WordPress, Foursquare, and Google+. This tool is most popular for its social media management functions. Features like weekly reports and excellent team management options (like delegating tasks and sending private messages) prove out to be very useful when multiple people in an organization handle the social media accounts.
3. Klout
This tool basically indicates how influential your activities on the social media are. It can be very useful to determine and be recognized for the influence you have in the social world by reviewing your activities. With this tool, you can easily connect your social accounts to the service, which then scans them to see how engaging and influential your content has been. Klout basically gathers data about the content created by you, how people interacted with it, and also the size and structure of your network, further it gathers the data and breaks it down into an easy to analyze manner.
4. Mentionmap
Mentionmap is all about monitoring Twitter; this tool connects to your Twitter account and displays exactly what is going on your Twitter network. It shows you, who mentions you the most and also who retweets you the most. Mentionmap allows you to click through and see how your interactions are connected. This app creates an interactive map of connections that you can easily explore.
5. Social Mention
This tool permits you to choose the social media platform where you wish to search a keyword across. There are several options to search across, the categories can be chosen either individually or search across all. The options include:
- Blogs
- Microblogs
- Images
- Events
- News
- Videos
- Audio
- And much more.
In addition to the actual search results, Social Mention also embraces huge amount of statistics relating the search. These data include the top keywords, sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), Postrank rankings, top users, and sources.
6. TweetDeck
TweetDeck allows you to build a more customized Twitter interface which helps to watch different users, search terms, hashtags, and lists. It basically offers one single panel which displays Twitter content from the groups you wish to see ( can be customers, competitors, or employees). This tool is great to use during live-tweetstorms or events to keep up with live interactions and at the same time keep an eye on yourself and your brand’s mentions and notifications.
7. Google Alerts
Google Alerts are extremely easy to set up and it’s just perfect for those who just started their journey in social media monitoring. This tool allows you to monitor the web for new and interesting content, your competitors, the industry leaders, and mentions of your brand or even yourself. Google alerts send receive email notifications to you every time Google discovers a new result on a topic which interests you across websites, blogs, and forums.
8. Hubspot
This is an automation tool which brings all your multi-channel marketing efforts into one single easy-to-use dashboard. This is one great, all-in-one marketing platform for all digital marketers, designers, and developers. It can be used to:
- Manage & update website content
- Produce specialized landing pages
- Generate extra traffic for the website
- Set up automatic marketing workflows
- Schedule social media posts
- Enhance search engine optimization (SEO)
This tool also generates reports on website analytics to help you make more data backed decisions for your content and SEO strategies, which are useful to determine ROI.
9. Boardreader
Boardreader is an application which searches for, discovers, and displays information from several web sources (Like, online forums, blogs, message boards, news sources, and videos). This tool enables you to trace what people are talking about your brand on the message-boards. This tool allows you to make searches by domain, language, and date range; also you could set up email alerts on a series of keywords.
10. Twazzup
Using this tool is very easy. Just enter a keyword on Twazzup and it creates a dashboard which tracks that particular keyword on Twitter. The results are broken down and categorized by link reputation, news, contributors, users and tag clouds. It also displays who said what, how influential the commentators are and how many times something was said.
Importance Of Using Social Media Monitoring Tools
Listening to what is being said about your brand, product, campaigns, and market is one important thing in social media monitoring. But that’s not the only reason why you should use social media monitoring tools. Monitoring social media as much as possible is extremely important for a multitude of reasons some of them are:
- Stay on top of brand mentions
- Manage your brand reputation
- Find engagement & leads
- Learn more about your audience
- Stay on top of trends
- Enhance Customer service
- Improve your social media posts
- Competitor research
I feel, with social media monitoring you basically have your eyes and ears all over the social media channels and at all times. Here are top 25 social media podcast that will help you become a pro in it.
Final Thoughts
It would not be a good idea to say there’s one ‘best’ monitoring tool your business could use. This is because different tools would suit different needs. It would be absolutely wise to use a combination of tools as it would provide a more comprehensive analytics package.
