If you give them something to talk about (and sometimes even when you don’t), people will be commenting, mentioning, and chatting about your brand on social media.
So you’ll want to listen up.
Though monitoring their conversations is easier when they tag the brand, you also want to know what they say without tagging you. Manually tracking all conversations can be tedious, if not impossible to catch all the important conversations.
Social media monitoring tools can help you better understand and connect with your target audience. The monitoring capabilities can help you analyze performance metrics in real-time, which can assist in measuring the impact of your implemented strategies.
1. Talkwalker
Talkwalker can help you track, monitor, and analyze social media conversations related to your brand or industry in real-time. It also can monitor TV, radio, and print broadcasts. Its image recognition feature lets you see posts of your products or services even when the brand isn’t mentioned.
Price: $9,000/year
Pros:
- Gives comprehensive analytics for multiple social media platforms
- Tracks non-social media, including TV, radio, and print
- Identifies brand images in social posts even when the brand isn’t tagged or mentioned
Cons:
- Presents difficulties in monitoring print media in multiple languages
- Limits historic data and analytics to 13 months
2. Keyhole
A comprehensive social media monitoring tool, Keyhole has been around for a long time. It can monitor multiple platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It also can track hashtags, mentions, usernames, keywords, and more.
Price: $49/month
Pros:
- Gives comprehensive audience insights
- Tracks, monitors, and analyzes conversations across multiple channels
- Monitors hashtag performance in real-time
Cons
- Offers premium plans without the more helpful features
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a widely known tool dedicated to making social media management easy. It mainly provides solutions for social media analytics and employee advocacy. It is one of the most effective customer support and relationship management tools out there.
The smart inbox feature enables you to track, monitor, and analyze multiple social media profiles across platforms. It can also help you uncover trends and plan an effective content strategy to keep your users engaged.
@SproutSocial’s smart inbox lets you track, monitor, and analyze multiple profiles across #SocialMedia platforms, notes Bowin Poe of @trackmyhashtag via @CMIContent. Click To TweetPrice: $99/month
Pros:
- Tracks multiple social media profiles across multiple platforms
- Provides comprehensive audience insights including demographics, interests, and preferences.
- Acts as a scheduling tool for social posts
Cons
- No premium plan to manage a single platform, leaving users to pay for features they won’t use
- Lack of comprehensive or detailed insights on the dashboard
4. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another tool that has been around a long time. It enables you to monitor the real-time engagement metrics of your social media profiles. It can also help you track conversations and posts related to your brand.
You can access engagement metrics for a hashtag and identify trending and popular hashtags. You also can track conversations or social media posts related to any keyword, mention, username, location, etc.
Price: $49/month
Pros:
- Monitors multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, YouTube)
- Schedules posts for all platforms in the same dashboard
- Makes sharing metrics with your social media marketing teams easy
Cons
- Price for premium plans might not fit in budgets of small businesses and newcomers in the social media marketing landscape
5. TrackMyHashtag
TrackMyHashtag, which is my company’s tool, is an AI-enabled tool that lets you track any event, hashtag, tagged handle, or keyword on Twitter. You can monitor the performance indicators of your hashtag campaigns in real-time and all conversations related to your brand, competitors, or industry.
TrackMyHashtag’s customer support mechanism can track all consumer conversations related to your brand. It can help you decrease your response time, which can make all the difference.
Price: $49/month; historical Twitter data priced on the volume of required data
Pros:
- Identifies real-time hashtag trends on Twitter so your brand can jump on them
- Hosts intuitive analytical dashboard with insights into followers’ interests and preferences
- Provides historical Twitter data related to any hashtag, keyword, or @mention in Excel file
Cons:
- Focuses only on Twitter
6. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics can help you identify all posts, trending conversations, and discussions related to your brand. Similarly, you can also spy on your competitors by tracking social media posts mentioning their brand.
It can also track mentions across multiple social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Pinterest. It also enables you to track blogs and news sources related to your brand. You can check all the trending headlines from the analytical dashboard.
Price: $99/month
Pros:
- Tracks conversations related to your brand across multiple social media channels
- Tracks all web sources including blogs and news articles related to your brand or business
Cons:
- Lacks some essential features
- Less-than-friendly user interface
7. TweetBinder
TweetBinder is an effective hashtag analytics tool for Twitter. It also can help you listen and analyze the conversations related to your brand. As a hashtag analytics tool, it can provide trending and popular hashtags related to your industry.
Price: $500/year
Pros:
- Allows real-time hashtag tracking
- Provides instantaneous updates on engagement metrics
- Lets you access historical Twitter data related to any hashtag, keyword, or username
Cons:
- Not so user-friendly interface
- Analytics limited to the past 30 days
8. Brand24
Brand24 is a comprehensive and reasonably priced tool. It can help you track posts related to your brand across multiple social media platforms – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It also enables you to track all web sources (i.e., news articles, blogs, forums) mentioning your brand, products, and services.
Brand24 also provides comprehensive real-time analytical insights. It also analyzes the sentiments expressed by users all over the internet.
Price: $49/month
Pros:
- Provides complete tracking capabilities
- Gives instant updates on performance metrics and access to comprehensive audience insights
- Performs sentiment analysis to understand meaning by the people who post about your brand
Cons:
- Takes time to learn how to use
- Some limitations on features like keyword tracking
9. Mention
Mention is another amazing social media and brand monitoring tool. It can help you track all social media posts and mentions related to your brand. Apart from social media, you can also access brand mentions from content sources all over the internet to understand what people are saying about your brand.
The tool helps you identify trends that can increase your brand’s social media presence. It also enables you to compare your key performance indicators with your competitors. It can help you evaluate their social media presence as well as analyze their social media moves.
Price: $29/month
Pros:
- Tracks and examines all sources of information and conversations related to your brand
- Provides instant updates on performance metrics and access to audience insights
Cons:
- Few glitches in fairly intuitive user experience
- Sometimes an ineffective post-scheduling feature
- Customer support is sometimes unreachable
10. Sendible
Sendible is an intuitive social media and customer relationship management tool. It is the perfect tool for social media managers of brands that have to manage multiple social media accounts. The tool enables you to track hashtags, keywords, and mentions. It also helps in understanding the audience demographics as well as the interest and preferences of your target audience.
The tool is very easy to use and also provides features to schedule content, and you can also respond to messages directly from the inbox. The tool also scrapes information sources (blogs, news articles) that mention your brand.
Price: $29/month
Pros:
- User friendly
- Tracks brand mentions on social media and other web sources
- Makes hashtag monitoring and scheduling easy
- Manages multiple social media accounts
Cons:
- Some image formats are unsupported
Listen up
Listening tools like these can help your content marketing in many ways. Among them:
- Engage with consumers and sort their issues in real-time
- Monitor social media key performance indicators in real-time
- Analyze and understand audience demographics and interests
- Evaluate the impact of implemented marketing strategies in real-time
- Identify and leverage negative reviews to find areas of focused improvement
- Identify and leverage positive reviews or customer interactions for marketing purposes
- Spy on your competitors and dissect their social media moves
- Predictive analytics to help make informed decisions
- Identify and analyze influencers to promote your brand
That’s a lot of power that can be gained by listening, tracking, and analyzing. Are you ready?
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All tools are selected by the author.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
