Social media has given businesses a voice and transformed the way they interact with customers. From launching a new product to creating awareness and dealing with customer queries – this medium has become the most popular, go-to marketing avenue today.
If you thought just posting on social media was enough then you are highly mistaken because it does not end there. Social media marketing is a two-way street – your posts need to spark conversations and engage customers.
As a business, if you are sharing something with your followers on social channels, you need to invest time and effort in analyzing how your posts are performing and how your brand is being received by the audience. This is where social media monitoring comes in.
Why is social media monitoring important?
For a business, listening to customers is the key to their growth and that is exactly what social media monitoring and listening lets you achieve. By keeping a close check on how the audience reacts to a newly launched product or marketing campaign, you can analyze what works for them and what doesn’t, thereby helping you improve your marketing efforts.
Social media monitoring also lets you enhance customer service by responding to all the queries and complaints your business receives. As per Q2 2017 Sprout Social Index, answering a customer’s question on social prompts 48% of consumers to purchase, which goes to prove that it is imperative for brands to be responsive on social.
In order to achieve these social media marketing goals for your business, we list down 10 FREE social media monitoring tools that every business must use –
Social Mention
A real-time social media search and analysis tool, Social Mention puts together everything that is being spoken about your company across 100+ social media channels. It also gives users access to useful tools such as Sentiment, Top Users, Top Hashtags and Post Rank.
Sentiment gives you an overall view of the audience’s attitude towards your company – positive, negative or neutral. Top Users tells you who is talking about you the most while Top Hashtags notifies you if there any popular hashtags being used in relation to your company or search query. Finally, Post Rank measures your posts in terms of engagement, giving you a clear picture of what is being well received by your followers.
To make matters convenient, Social Mention lets you extract all this information in CSV/Excel file or receive it via email.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that lets you manage your social media profiles from one place. While it is particularly known for its social media management function, the free package also gives you access to basic analytics such as tracking follower growth, analyzing what content resonates best with your audience and what the digital world is saying about your company, product or campaign.
The analytics feature includes Google, Facebook and Twitter analytics. You can also upgrade to paid plans for assessing your social media performance in real-time and other advanced features.
Hootsuite also has a robust easy-to-use mobile application which lets you be on the top of your social media game even when you are on the go!
How Sociable
Started in 2008, How Sociable, as the name goes, calculates your brand’s visibility and popularity in the social space. It calculates magnitude score from a range of 0 to 10, which indicates the level of activity that has taken place around your brand.
It rates each of the social media platforms your brand is present in, giving you an idea, on which one works best for you. This useful measurement can help you decide which platform you should devote more time to and spend money on.
A free account lets you track up to 12 social media platforms and if you want to track the rest, you will need to upgrade to a paid account, starting at $3 per month.
Twazzup
Companies who have a strong presence on Twitter and want to focus on Twitter analytics should consider using Twazzup. This tool gives you real-time insights from Twitter. A great way brands can utilize this tool is by monitoring all conversations surrounding them on Twitter.
Twazzup also displays the most active users, photos and retweets on Twitter. Also known as the all-in-one Twitter Search Engine, Twazzup features an easy-to-use dashboard that makes it a popular Twitter monitoring tool among users.
SumAll
If you are someone who isn’t into numbers and elaborate graphs, you ought to love SumAll. A social media analytics platform, SumAll integrates social media sites on one dashboard and gives you detailed insights into your social media presence. This cross-platform marketing analytics tool has a sleek and user-friendly interface, connecting all the major services such as Google, Twitter, Facebook analytics among others.
image source: Crazy Egg
Through SumAll, you get a better idea of how your audience is reacting to your posts and your company in general. With weekly emails and reports being sent out, all the analysis you ever need comes to you, directly in your inbox.
Simply Measured
Simply Measured is a social media analytics platform that lets you understand the social conversations taking place around your brand and competitors. It lets you understand your audience segment and filter them by age, gender and location. It helps you identify the sentiment the audience holds and reach out to top influencers who speak about the similar niche for collaboration opportunities.
Brands can also use Simply Measured to discover the trending conversation themes or keywords in the social space that are relevant to your product. Simply Measured sends you detailed reports with all the key metrics to help you analyze with ease and take necessary action.
Klear
Considering influencer marketing is on the rise, Klear should be on every business’ social media monitoring tool list. One of the largest influencer marketing platforms in the world, Klear helps brands build, scale and measure influencer programs. With access to a comprehensive database of over 1 billion influencers, this tool helps you discover influencers in categories relevant to you, manage relationships with them and measure campaign results.
Klear uses PeopleRank, a topic-sensitive influence ranking algorithm which ranks people based on relationships they share with ‘influential’ people. This visually-appealing platform offers an overview of influencers’ activities and lets you filter as per age, location, and categories.
Measuring influencer marketing campaign results has always been dicey. However, owing to Klear’s detailed performance reports, measuring the results of such campaigns becomes much easier.
Facebook Insights
The world’s leading social media platform, Facebook has its own very powerful monitoring tool, Facebook Insights. Free of cost, this tool gives admins an in-depth analysis of your posts, engagement, followers and reach.
Facebook Insights helps you reach your marketing goals be it generating leads, creating awareness or increasing follower base. It guides you on the kind of content that works best with your followers, the best day and time to post.
Not just that, you can also keep a watch on your competitors using Facebook Insights’ ‘Pages to Watch’ feature.
BoardReader
At many times, we focus too much on analyzing our brand’s performance on the major social media channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, conveniently forgetting the forums and message boards that may also be holding a lot of insight on your brand health.
BoardReader’s convenient interface lets you search about specific topics or keywords on forums and boards, and in turn generates charts to display the conversations taking place about your brand.
Google Alerts
If you have a small business and are looking for some basic social media monitoring, the good old Google Alerts will very well suffice. Even though it does not particularly look into the social media channels, it is a vital, free tool that monitors specific keywords or topics across the internet and sends you email or RSS feed notifications regarding the same.
With Google Alerts, you can not only keep an eye on conversations surrounding your brand, but you can only use it to check on competition and learn about trending topics.
Monitoring your brand’s social media activity is an effective way to understand if you are on the right path as far as your marketing efforts in the social space are concerned and hence needs to be an integral part of your social media strategy. It not just helps you improve your engagement level but it also helps you learn more about your audience and competition as well as enhance customer service and manage your brand’s reputation.
So, use these FREE social media monitoring tools and maximize your brand’s presence in the digital world.
Adela Belin is a Social Media expert and a writer at Writers Per Hour. She creates content surrounding marketing with a focus on social media and digital marketing. Feel free to contact Adela on G+.
