Social media can be a double-edged sword. One morning, you may wake up and notice people are singing your praises on social media sites, and another day, you may feel the pit of your stomach drop when you find a bad review on Facebook. But with social media monitoring tools, you can keep up with the conversation, and respond accordingly.The best way to survive – and thrive! – online is to watch out for negative press, capitalize on positive comments, and use social media tools to make monitoring easy. Keep an eye on your brand name, your personal name, the names of your competitors, and the names of your clients ( if you’re in the B2B field ). Look up important industry terms for blog topic, newsletter, and press release ideas. Keep a pulse on what’s being said so you can improve and decide where you focus your marketing next.
Here are 7 social media monitoring tools to make brand management easier:
1. Talk Walker
This is a serious tool that does just about everything you could imagine for a monitoring resource. It crawls over 150 million websites, lets you track keywords across social media platforms from Flickr and Foursquare to Facebook and YouTube, allows tracking of influencers, lets you sort and filter results, and allows you to track custom sites — like Amazon reviews, for instance.
You can request a free demo here.
2. Mention
Mention is a great free information alert system that sends email alerts based on what users input. The free version allows 1 alert and 250 mentions per month. It sends daily alerts and real-time social media alerts. What we like about it is the ability to export stats and data along with its real-time capabilities.
You can try Mention free here. 3. Hootsuite
We monitor our Twitter accounts using Hootsuite, where we have created social listening streams for multiple keywords and phrases. We keep a pulse on geographic terms and check our “conversations” tab daily.
Check out this post from Hootsuite University to learn more about how to use Hootsuite for monitoring purposes.
Get Hootsuite here. 4. Platform-Based Social Media Analytics
These are the free analytics tools built into social media platforms themselves – on
Facebook,
Twitter,
YouTube and more. Looking at platform-based analytics allows you to look at the engagement on each account as a unique entity, devising different strategies for each social media platform.Though it doesn’t show you specific posts people make about your brand, these analytics allow you to keep an eye on when there’s an uptick in the conversation, where people talking about you are located, and more.
5. Icerocket
Although Icerocket specializes in blog searches, their “Search All” option also tracks activity on Twitter and Facebook. Icerocket doesn’t require registration and is 100% free. You won’t be able to set up email alerts although with some
handy tricks you can set up RSS feeds of your mentions.
Check out Icerocket here. 6. Google Alerts / Google Search Console
With Google Alerts, simply
enter a few keywords and wait for the emails to arrive, letting you know when those words pop up in online.You can also track how often people are searching certain terms when finding your website by using
Google Search Console. That way you know which terms people are associating with your brand and can publish content relevant to your audience.
7. Sprout Social
Sprout Social offers advanced social media monitoring for brands across popular social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, and LinkedIn.Sprout Social has a single stream inbox feature which allows you to engage with customers in one place, a collaborative calendar which allows team members to draft and queue posts for approval, an integrated analytics suite, and more.
Get Sprout Social here.Related:
11 Best Facebook Groups for Entrepreneurs and Marketers Beyond Social Media Monitoring Tools: Other Ways to Monitor Your Brand Online
Your Social Media Sites
It pays to check your social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Pinterest, etc.) pages daily. While services promise to check for you, they may not catch everything in real time. So stop by and see what people are saying — or not saying.Don’t have the time? Try
outsourcing this task to a virtual assistant. You can train them on how to use social media monitoring tools and have them log in to your social media sites every day.
Review Sites
What do your customers think about your products and services? It can be hard reading some of these reviews, but know what’s being said on: Yelp, Urban Spoon, Google Reviews, Angie’s List, Yahoo Local, Trip Advisor and Foursquare.Each industry has dozens of different review sites and it’s vital that you are aware of them all so you can properly monitor them and on a regular schedule. Prospective customers will know what people are saying, so you should too. Remember that having no reviews can be as bad as having poor reviews, so
make sure you’re asking your audience for reviews often. If you’re hurting for feedback, you could
try running a survey among existing customers, too.
Brand Monitoring Apps
There are loads of brand monitoring apps out there. You could end up spending a pretty penny, but there are also free brand monitoring tools and
reputation management tools that can do the trick just fine.
Social Media Consulting for Agencies and Healthcare Companies
Here at Mod Girl Marketing we offer
social media consulting for digital agencies, tech, and healthcare companies. We’ll teach you how to monitor social conversations for well-timed interventions that translate to real sales and loyal fans for life!
Contact us today to learn more!
