Is It Time to Increase Your Social Media Monitoring?
With so many networks and interactions on social media, it can be difficult to track your engagement data.
The thing is, those engagements are invaluable to your brand.
According to the Sprout Social Index™, 60% of brands analyze their social data every day. Putting your social interactions in context can reveal how to do business better. This includes reinforcing your sales strategy and uncovering the desire of your audience.
Below we’ve broken down some of the best social media monitoring tools and how to choose the one that makes sense.
What is social media monitoring (and why does it matter so much)?
Consider that the stakes are high when it comes to your social mentions. Based on Sprout’s own research, sales strategy support (65%) is the number one use of social data by brands. From competitive analysis to figuring out how to better serve your customers, monitoring serves as a treasure trove of insights.
And a focus on genuine customer conversations means you can take action with confidence.
If nothing else, comprehensive monitoring also helps you understand how customers feel about your brand. After all, social media is a place for consumers to have a voice. Since social mentions are completely transparent, uncovering those mentions is largely a matter of having the right tools.
10 social media monitoring tools that should be on your radar
Again, it is important to own and understand your social interactions.
But it’s easier said than done when you’re trying to track activity across multiple platforms.
When some brands deal with dozens (or hundreds!) of interactions on a daily basis, it’s easy to lose track of important interactions. Similarly, basic social analysis focused primarily on direct @mentions and @tags.
With dedicated social media monitoring tools, you can track meaningful engagements of your brand wherever and whenever they are.
There’s no shortage of monitoring tools out there. The following list can help you find a tool that makes sense for your brand based on your needs.
1. Sprout Social
Sprout Social gives you everything to not only track important interactions but also to act on them.
For starters, our platform keeps track of mentions, comments and keywords across multiple networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter And TIC Toc.
The ability to condense all your interactions into one platform is a massive time saver. Doing so ensures that you don’t miss any notable mentions or leave customer service concerns unanswered.
For example, Sprouts Smart Inbox provides a real-time, up-to-date list of all your social interactions. This includes communication between leads, followers and customers.
With a collaborative inbox, you and your team can respond to mentions and call-outs without leaving the forum. These features speed up response times and allow your team to deliver a consistent experience to your customers.
Beyond monitoring, Sprout’s suite of social listening tools is equally powerful. You can use Boolean operators to track specific questions to zero in on the conversations that matter most. We make it easy to trace call-outs and shout-outs when they happen.
And with Sprout’s social analytics, you can report on all of the above to track the progress of your social presence.
Keep track of metrics including average response time and engagement volume to make sure you’re constantly growing and improving. Consider that the best social media monitoring tools work across multiple platforms and encourage growth wherever your team is active. That’s exactly what Sprout does.
2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse’s platform lives up to its name with features to help brands keep a better pulse on their social mentions.
The platform’s monitoring and listening features are designed to help brands focus on “what matters.” With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.
To combat comment overload, Agorapulse allows users to set parameters to filter on specific phrases and platforms out Monitored their feed. The platform also makes it a cinch to label and organize remarkable customer conversations and competitive activity. This activity includes negative competitor mentions and opportunities for interference with your brand.
These features highlight the fast-paced, high-stakes nature of social media surveillance and the tools that matter so much.
3. Rival IQ
Perhaps not surprisingly, RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis to help brands keep track of their business rivals.
Monitoring and benchmarking features help brands understand their share of voice and how they are faring in comparison to their competitors.
The most notable features of RivalIQ are the platform’s wide variety of real-time alerts. For example, the platform can recognize when a competitor has changed their social media bio as soon as this happens. Recent features also include the ability to see when a competitor boosts an organic post as an ad.
These alerts can give you a head start in understanding your competitors’ positions, promotions and campaigns.
4. Mention
Mention is yet another monitoring tool that lives up to its name as a powerful @mention tracker.
For brands and agencies alike, the platform claims to monitor more than one One billion Source for relevant mentions and comments. Through so many conversations, the platform offers so many filtering options to help brands “eliminate the noise.”
Similarly, the platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop. Additional features of the platform include identifying spikes in the mentioned volume. These examples can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity early.
5. Keyhole
Keyhole’s monitoring capability is primarily focused on helping brands find influencers to work with.
Automated keyword and hashtag searches reveal influencers posting about topics related to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to uncover influential accounts, posts, and conversations on any topic.
6. HubSpot
If you’re already using HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring tool of choice.
HubSpot’s features don’t differ fundamentally from most of the tools on our list. Tracks platform interactions, engagement and content performance.
Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the relationship between top-performing content and social interaction with salespeople. For example, you can see whether customers interacted with a certain piece of content or a team member via social. This goes along with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.
7. Brand 24
Brand24’s media monitoring features include sentiment analysis and instant notifications for all your social mentions. The platform can also detect trending hashtags that are related to your brand.
One notable feature of the platform is its mention feed that detects spikes in activity. The platform’s “Summary” feed makes it easy to track your brand’s PR efforts week-by-week.
8. Atribus
Atribus is a consumer intelligence tool with an emphasis on social media monitoring. Helping brands uncover “unmet needs,” the platform digs deep into customer interactions and data.
Specifically, the platform uncovers common complaints within any industry through sentiment analysis. This provides an opportunity for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Atribus is able to automatically categorize mentions in complaints vs inquiries.
9. Zoho Social
If you’re using Zoho as a CRM, the platform’s complimentary social media monitoring features are incredibly useful.
In addition to the standard monitoring features we talked about, the platform lets you create a custom listening dashboard. From hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets, it gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence at a glance.
10. Avario
Avario’s monitoring features are also similar to many of the platforms mentioned above.
That said, Avrio Leeds is a notable addition to the platform’s regular monitoring and listening capabilities.
In short, Avario can identify specific examples of people seeking a recommendation for a particular industry. This again shows how monitoring is a proactive process that can help you win more business.
How can social media monitoring help you build better campaigns?
Advancing your social surveillance should be a top priority, regardless of your industry.
The closer you look at what people are saying about your brand, the better you’ll be able to serve your target audience.
Similarly, you can build more meaningful relationships with your followers and customers. This is because you are already connected to their wants, needs and pain points.
Doing so means having the right social media monitoring tool at your fingertips. With an all-in-one tool like Sprout, you can align your publishing and customer service strategy with your monitoring insights in one place.
Looking for more inspiration to level up your social marketing campaigns? Be sure to grab our collection of social media templates if you haven’t already!
Post 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools to Inform Your Campaigns first appeared on Sprout Social.
