Social media monitoring tools are the best way to find out what people are saying about your brand. And also what they say about your product, your competitors, your industry, your Super Bowl ad, your response to the pandemic, your customer service wait times, your new mascot, basically anything your audience might have an opinion on..
In other words: social media monitoring software collects and presents audience and competitor information for brands that want to pay attention to them.
In this post, we’ll take a look at some of the best tools on the market, as well as walk through setup and best practices so you can start the conversation today.
Social media monitoring means keeping track of hashtags, keywords, and mentions related to your brand to stay on top of your audience and industry.
By tracking this data, you conduct research both quantitative (metrics and analytics) and qualitative (inspiration for posts and strategies). You will receive information that will help you determine things like:
- Social share of the voice (i.e. what percentage of the conversations are about you and not about your competitors)
- Analysis of social sentiment (i.e. mood of the conversation)
- Social ROI (i.e. how much your dollar investment in social media pays off)
- Relevant hashtags and keywords (such as which Instagram hashtags or YouTube keywords you might want to use in the future to expand your reach)
- Trends (i.e. what your audience is talking about, what new ideas, aesthetics or memes are emerging, whether the platforms are offering new tools and services, etc.)
For brands, social monitoring is an integral part of being a good citizen and doing well on social media. For example, you won’t start a pushy sales presentation (or an informative lecture, or even a stand-up show) to a new customer who has just walked through your door. You would listen first and at least find out what they are looking for or why they are in your office.
Similarly, on social media, you need to pay attention to what people say in order to be relevant, attractive, and not make fake mistakes.
Get customers who love you as much as Johnsonville Sausage customers love them.
Note. You’ve probably also heard of social media snooping, which is the next step you’ll want to take after social media monitoring. Social listening includes not only collecting and analyzing indicators, but also taking action. Take part in the conversation and turn your knowledge into audience understanding. Read our article on social network listening tools here.
For brands and companies, social media monitoring goes beyond simply typing your own name into the search bar on Instagram or Twitter. That’s why we’ve put together this list of our favorite brand monitoring tools to make the task faster, easier, and dare we say, more fun. (Okay, okay, don’t look at me like that.)
1.Hootsuite
What is he monitoring? All major social media platforms
Paid or Free: Free Tool
Possibly the simplest social monitoring tool on this list. Hootsuite’s customizable search feeds will track any social platform you like so you can see what’s happening at a glance. Focus on important topics, trends, and social media mentions based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
Streams are included with the free Hootsuite plan, but if you need access to detailed user analytics, try the Hootsuite pro plan for free for 30 days.
2.Nexalogy
What is he monitoring? Most Major Platforms + Wider Internet
Paid or free? Free Tool
The hallmark of Nexalogy is first-class data visualization: interactive timelines, geolocation-based heat maps, lexical cluster maps that show common topic patterns. Plus the “basic” things that would take a person weeks to learn, such as popular keywords and most active accounts.
3.Mentionlytics
What is he monitoring? All Social Platforms + Wider Internet
Paid or free? Free Tool
Mentionlytics is a professional-grade social media monitoring app that tracks mentions, keywords, and sentiment in multiple languages.
4. Reputation
What is he monitoring? Yelp, Google, Facebook reviews + other review sites
Paid or free? Free Tool
For customer-focused businesses, a bad review can be a real blow if not dealt with correctly and quickly. Reputology lets you track major review sites like Yelp, Google, and Facebook from a single dashboard.
You can track activity across multiple storefronts and locations and respond with quick links.
5. Twipscard
What is he monitoring? Twitter
Paid or free? Free Tool
This combined analytics and social monitoring tool is designed to show advanced Twitter users how hashtags and topics move, so you can tune in to what your audience is talking about.
6. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
What is he monitoring? Reddit
Paid or free? Paid tool
Reddit, with an average of 430 million monthly active users, is an often overlooked social platform where communication is often deep and honest. This tool allows you to track the site’s 138,000 active communities for conversations that interest you.
7. Hootsuite Insights by Brandwatch
What is he monitoring? All major social platforms
Paid or free? Paid tool
Ready to get to the heart of the conversation? It’s powerful enough to qualify more as a social media sniffing tool than a social media monitoring app, but Hootsuite Insights will give you an instant, real-time overview of millions of online conversations.
Search by any topic or keyword and filter by date, demographics, location and more. You will be able to identify influencers or brand advocates, understand how your brand is perceived by the market, and receive immediate alerts if and when your mentions skyrocket (good or bad).
This is a tool that really tells you a lot about your audience and how they feel about you. It can tell you if a burst of mentions is a win or a disaster. And it can help you benefit from or avoid any of them, respectively.
8. Talkwalker
What is he monitoring? Most major social platforms + wider network
Paid or free? Paid tool
Talkwalker offers over 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social media.
You can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand attitudes.
Step 1: Choose the best social media monitoring tool for your purposes.
Refer back to this list above if you haven’t already narrowed it down.
Step 2: Think about your search terms.
What words or names do people use when talking about your brand?
If you represent a fast food chain, people may mention your veggie burgers more often than your CEO. Whereas, if you run a five-person AI, the name of this well-known investor could be the starting point for discovery. Here are a few places to start:
- Brand or company name as descriptor and mention (e.g. @MoodyBlooms and #MoodyBlooms)
- Product name (e.g. #PeekFreans #MoonPie)
- Names of thought leaders, CEOs, representatives, etc.
- Slogans or catchphrases
- Branded hashtags (e.g. #optoutside, #playinside, etc.)
You will also want to repeat all of the above for each of your main competitors.
Then expand your field of vision to include your industry, vertical, or niche.
- Industry hashtags or keywords (e.g. #inboundmarketing, #SEO)
- Community or group hashtags or keywords (e.g. #banffcentrartist)
- Platform-specific hashtags or keywords (e.g. #containergardenersofinstagram, YouTubers)
- Location hashtags or keywords (e.g. #MileEnd, #JasperNationalPark, #QueenWestWest)
For a detailed overview of the most common search monitoring requests that brands use, check out our recent webinar with Brandwatch.
Step 3: Set up a search in your brand monitoring software.
This will depend on which tool you choose. In our humble opinion, the more concurrent and saved searches a tool offers, the better. (It’s too depressing to type the name of your archrival into Instagram’s search bar every day.)
Here’s a short instructional video that walks you through how to use Hootsuite’s streaming feature if you’re wondering how it works:
Step 4: Check your streams regularly.
If you are the brains and leader of the Instagram company, you will check your feeds daily or even hourly, or perhaps you will never go unchecked.
On the other hand, if shaking hands and kissing babies on social media isn’t part of your job responsibilities (because it involves cutting bouquets or training horses), consider setting yourself a reminder to review search results. Trust us, you will thank us later.
Step 5: Remember to review your search terms periodically and adjust them accordingly.
Like all social media jobs, social monitoring is never really done. After you’ve set yourself up and monitored for a few weeks, take another look to see if your search is actually catching everything you need and filtering out what you don’t.
If you’re getting too many results, especially unrelated ones, consider tightening up your search options. If you don’t see a lot of pop-ups, expand them. (Tip #2 in this research article explains how to use logical operators to your advantage.)
Social Media Monitoring Tips
Track in all languages spoken by your customers.
For North Americans who are accustomed to working in one language, this is easy to miss. But if your company just opened a startup in Montreal, don’t forget to customize your search using French, English (and French??) words and phrases.
Meanwhile, if your new client works a lot in a language you don’t speak, work with the local team to learn how to spell “love it”in Vietnamese or “worst”in Russian.
Depending on the size and relative importance of your audience, you may want to use a language-specific social monitoring tool. For example, Crowd Analyzer does a great job of social monitoring in Arabic.
Many social media monitoring tools (ahem, Hootsuite) let you share permissions with team members so you can get help where you need it, like your French or Spanish colleagues.
Submit your hashtag and keyword strategy while monitoring.
If you’ve ever been stumped on what hashtag to add to an Instagram post, or stopped in horror wondering what will happen to your views if you don’t find the right keyword for your YouTube video, social monitoring can help..
For example, the word cloud in Hootsuite Insights will give you an idea of what keywords or hashtags you can add to your current monitoring activities. But it can also provide the keywords and hashtags you’ll want to use in your posts as part of your overall hashtag strategy.
Knowing the language your followers speak (e.g. do people talk about “container gardening”or “balcony plants”?) will help you find your amazing content.
Identify influencers and brand advocates you might want to partner with.
Another smart way to increase your level of social monitoring is to keep an eye on repeat offenders. When looking out for endless scrolling, look out for people who are constantly interacting with or mentioning your brand.
If they are always cheering or cheering and they have their own following, you might consider including them in your influencer marketing strategy.
Choosing a tool that can do the complex math to figure out who your biggest fans are is an easy win.
Set alerts for unusual activity.
If your sentiment plummets when your new TV ad comes out, or your competitor launches a terribly cool new product, the social team should be among the first to know.
A social media crisis (or a regular PR crisis) can arise at any moment. Social media monitoring can alert you if you mention volume spikes or social media sentiment indicators showing red all over the board.
The right tool will not only warn you, but also provide you with real-time information to help you decide how to fix the problem.
Share your results.
Speaking of sharing: let the rest of your team (or company) know what you see.
Sometimes social media managers – the humble people that we are – forget that we have an unparalleled view of our organization’s reputation and status in the world. How much are you willing to bet that your sales team, let alone your CEO, has the time, know-how or tools to sift through the Niagara Falls of opinions and feelings shared online by the world’s 4.5 billion social media users?
Social media monitoring reports are important for two reasons:
1) proof that your work is worth 24% of the marketing budget (I’m not pointing fingers, but sometimes people need to be reminded) and,
2) make sure your ideas about your customers and potential customers get through to the decision makers.
So, whether your company is customer-obsessed or data-driven, we recommend choosing a tool that seamlessly integrates social media monitoring with custom reporting.