Social media monitoring refers to analyzing the data about your company on various social media platforms, which means what your customers are saying about your company, identifying influencers, competitive analysis, etc.
Monitoring your social media accounts help you identify quality control or customer care problems that may have gone unnoticed. While monitoring, it is important to find out who is saying what, and where the conversation is happening; so you can respond to them accordingly.
Even though many tools are available to monitor social media accounts, most of them would cost you dollars. But here is a list of top ten tools that are free. So, just try them out based on your requirements and see what works for you.
1. HootSuite:
HootSuite is one of the popular social media monitoring tools that help you manage multiple accounts across Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Tumblr and Foursquare.
Although HootSuite could be categorized as an account management tool rather than a monitoring tool, I believe it really deserves to be mentioned here, because of its larger userbase and powerful functionality.
By using HootSuite you can push one or more profiles, deploy timed updates, track click-through rate and monitor your social media buzz across web services. Again it is an excellent tool for team management (sending private messages, assigning tasks among team members based on roles, etc). HootSuite is extremely helpful when multiple people are handling the social media accounts.
2. Klout:
Klout helps you measure influence on topics across different social media platforms. Some people hate to use this tool to monitor their results on social media. They say that its scoring system is inaccurate and also trying to interact with them is very difficult.
But still some people find this tool useful. Klout measures the influence on topics across different social media platforms. It allows you to track the impact of your recommendations, links and options across various social media platforms.
It further helps you to collect the data about the content you create, how people interact with your content, the composition and size of your network, etc.
It is recommended to monitor what people think about your brand and to see what influences them the most. By doing this, you can easily change your posts based on your audience’s interests and can increase the engagement rate.
3. Social Mention:
If you are only looking to see who is talking about your brand and where, then Social Mention would be a great tool. Just type your brand name into it and it will start “Searching content across the globe” as the search page says while it works.
After that, you will receive a list of results of the mentions of your brand in comments, videos, images, blogs, microblogs and more. Just keep the tabs on all the conversations with their email alerts and receive real time mentions.
The Social Mention monitors more than 100 social media websites. It does indepth analysis and measures the influence across four categories: Sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), Strength, Reach and Passion.
4. Google Alerts:
It is an oldie but a goodie! It allows you to set up keyword searches for the name of your company or competitors. You can receive updates via your email or RSS feed.
Here are the steps to monitor your results on Google Alerts:
1. Type in the search term.
2. Choose which kind of search type you want: Blogs, Groups, News, Video, Web or comprehensive (it includes all the above mentioned platforms).
3. Choose how often you want the updates (Daily or weekly).
4. Select the email length (upto 20 or 50 results).
5. Then again select whether to deliver to your RSS Feed or email.
6. Finally, hit Subscribe.
If you combine it with iGoogle, you can create a nice consolidated page that contains the latest findings for your selected keywords.
5. Addictomatic:
If you want to know an overall view of your brand, then this tool will be helpful for you. It focuses on various social networking sites which includes: Bing News, Flickr, Delicious, Google, WordPress, Twitter, YouTube, etc. It is extremely helpful to keep an eye on brand reputation as well as recent industry developments.
It is very easy to use:
- First, enter a keyword to track.
- Modify the boxes – add or subtract.
- Bookmark it and check back.
6. HowSociable:
This tool lets you track 12 different social networking websites including WordPress and Tumblr. If you want 24 or more, then you need to go for a Pro account instead of a free one.
This tool is somewhat different; it shows a separate score for different social media platforms. Due to this, you can analyze which social media works best for your business and which needs more care to develop your company on particular platform.
7. Twazzup:
If you are a newbie to social media marketing then this tool will help a lot especially in Twitter monitoring. In this tool, you just have to enter the name you want to track; you will get real-time updates. It means you will get the updates of top influencers, top RTd photos and links, top 10 keywords related to your search, etc.
8. Buffer:
This app helps you to monitor the clicks, comments, reshares and +1s of each item posted and then it is reported in aggregate under a handy “Analytics” tab. It is available in a free version for you to try out. So, get this tool for iOS and don’t forget to use the bookmarklet in your desktop.
9. IceRocket:
This tool lets you monitor your blog, Facebook and Twitter account in 20 different languages. Another special thing about this tool is that it lets you choose the time period you want to monitor for.
It is extremely helpful to monitor your blogger activity, since they have nearly 200 million blogs in their database. They further provide the possibility to find the latest trend terms related to your search.
10. Reachli (formerly Pinerli):
One special thing about this tool is that it is useful to measure and optimize video and image content. It offers various features for this purpose. The Reachli tool is particularly famous for its Pinterest analytics.
Rachana Khanzode says
Hi Satish,
You should also check out the free version of webfluenz.com that allows unlimited keyword analytics, monitoring and alerts. The tool also allows you to manage upto 5 social media accounts including Facebook profile, Facebook Page, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Best,
Rachana Khanzode
Social Media Marketing Manager-Webfluenz
Sathishkumar says
Hi Rachana,
I will surely do that and will post a review about your tool here in this blog. Thanks again for taking the effort to reach me.
Sathish