At the most basic level, social monitoring incorporates scanning the web for potential PR crises, identifying industry trends, gathering intelligence on competitors and identifying sales opportunities. But the quantity of data these tools return can be overwhelming. Many tools have filters to help remove noise, and some include sentiment analysis which helps to categorize comments into positive or negative categories, but this is still a somewhat inexact science. Tools are distinguished by ...
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Social media monitoring tools offer tools to listen, track, and respond to content relevant to an industry, business, product, or event across social media services. Social media monitoring tools can be used to identify, observe, and analyze trends, competitors, and customer sentiment. They are also used to consolidate activity feeds on a central platform, including social media posts and comment responses about a business.They are most frequently used by marketing departments to inform social media advertising and marketing campaigns. They can also be used to gather insight in order to evaluate public relations effectiveness.
Social media monitoring tools provide insight into how to best use your online presence for maximum effectiveness. This includes data on best days to publish, the length of published content, and the best content to include. Social media monitoring tools can also offer user segmentation tools to personalize your social media posts to reach key demographics. Some social media monitoring tools products also offer competitor monitoring services, which includes competitor engagement, reach, impact analysis, and audience sentiment. Social media monitoring tools also automates many of the manual tasks that come with web and social media presence monitoring, allowing for users to focus on content creation and unique interaction with their audience.
Social media monitoring tools share many similarities with Social Media Management Tools. The primary difference is that social media monitoring tools focus on social listening through information gathering, detailed analysis, and impact measurement. Social Media Management tools may include these features, but they are much broader in scope. They manage and control accounts on multiple platforms simultaneously. As such, they are aimed for more responsive or proactive actions, allowing you to use insights gained from social media monitoring tools to take action and strategize effectively.
The most common social media monitoring tools features are:
When choosing the right social media monitoring tools, consider the following:
Listening tools. The social listening capabilities of a social media monitoring tool will determine which one is best for you. If you need robust monitoring tools that expand beyond text information on popular social media sites, then there are specialized options for you. Awario tracks mentions in major social networks, but also from articles, blogs, forums, and news posts. Talkwalker offers tools to monitor video and audio content and extract relevant data.
Competitor insight. If you plan to use social listening to attract customers or develop marketing strategies, you may be interested in a product’s ability to monitor your competitors. Because of the ability for Social Media Monitoring Tools to track hashtags, keywords, and engagement, they tend to have some competitor observation options. However, Semrush offers more nuanced competitor listening tools, such as allowing you to analyze their audience sentiment, reach, impressions, and public relations.
Multilingual support. If you have a globalized scope for your online presence, you’ll want to ensure that your social media monitoring solution listens to content from multiple languages. Talkwalker supports 187 languages, while Mediatoolkit claims to be compatible to monitor in any language.
Pricing plans limitations. Pricing plans for social media monitoring tools are scalable. Paid plans offer a wide listening range, but more listening tools generally indicate a higher price point, which may be a barrier for smaller businesses or startups. There are some free (if limited) tools, but their use may require using multiple monitoring tools. For example, TweetDeck only provides support for monitoring on Twitter, but it is free, making it a great choice for beginning users or businesses who are only concerned with Twitter.
Collaboration tools. If you plan to have multiple users operate the software, or if you plan to eventually collaborate with social media influencers, you’ll want to ensure that the collective work process is simple to use. Socialbakers offers tools to directly contact and amplify social media influencers, including advanced feature that determine how much of an influencers' audience are fake accounts or bots. Sendible offers support for an unlimited number of project collaborators on their plans, making it great for large teams.
Start a Social Media Monitoring Tools comparison
Paid social media monitoring tools prices range from $10 to $1000 per month at the lowest subscription tiers. Many vendors offer client-based pricing to meet your needs. There are several free social media monitoring tools products, but their functionality may be limited in the types of services that they offer or the number of users with access. Most paid options have free trials and demos.
If leveraged correctly, social media can be a powerful tool for your business. The following resources should be helpful in learning to use social media monitoring to your advantage:
