Adam Marquardt
Creating a strong online follower base is a must for companies who want to effectively position their brand. Social media helps you engage and interact with fans and customers, building your brand’s reputation in the digital world.
But social media never sleeps and that means you need to stay on top of your channels and listen to conversations, to be able to respond and grow your online communities. Luckily, there is a wide array of social media monitoring tools that can help you gain insight into your customers and fans and help you identify the best ways in which you can engage them.
In this article we’ll share 7 of the most efficient social media monitoring tools that you can use to track your brand’s online exposure.
#1 Hootsuite
You can use Hootsuite to track social mentions, key terms or hashtags, influencer and customer lists. Available for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram, the tool allows you to create content streams that load in real-time, keeping you informed of anyone talking about your brand or reaching out to engage in a conversation.
Hootsuite also provides a quick and easy way to view RSS feeds and share them to your social media channels (which reviewers rave about) as well as rich filtering, monitoring and tracking tools, enabling you to track which stories you’ve shared.
#2 Topsy
Topsy indexes and ranks search results based on the most influential Twitter conversations on a specific term, topic, page or domain. You can use it to track the latest tweets mentioning your brand, identify influencers in your industry or search for rich content to curate such as photos or videos.
Keep in mind that Topsy displays results-based on influence so you might not see all your brand mentions.
#3 Social Mention
A popular tool among marketers, Social Mention monitors and aggregates data from several platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, identifying all mentions of a particular search term. It’s a great way to track brand mentions and interactions but also to identify the general sentiment around your content, industry influencers or competitors.
With Social Mention, you can analyze your brand’s strength, calculated by how often it’s being discussed as well as the passion of a certain post, which is how likely someone will repeat the mention.
“We use it as a scorecard for our social performance. That way, when a post does well, we can ask ourselves how we can duplicate our success”, says Tanner Page, CMO at Workcrowd.
#4 TweetDeck
Exclusively for Twitter, this tool is great for monitoring mentions, interactions, hashtags and trending content. You can also use it to identify the most active influencers and monitor their activity.
A particularly useful monitoring feature is list tracking. Also, you can follow the positive or negative sentiment around certain posts, using the sentiment filter, which enables you to search for a topic followed by a happy or sad emoticon. For example, you can create a search column with the keyword “real estate :)” to see tweets regarding education in a positive manner.
#5 Tailwind
One of the fastest growing social networks at this time is Pinterest. Tailwind is an excellent tool to monitor new followers, popular pins, pin engagement and hashtags.
Find out when your audience is most engaged and what type of pins the respond best to.
You can also use Tailwind to track competitors and partner Pinterest profiles.
#6 Piqora
A visual monitoring tool for Pinterest and Instagram, Piqora has some of the best data and analytics for your social profiles, hashtags, images and keywords.
You can even create your own branded page for contests, where you can track reach, impressions, top photos and top participants.
#7 Viralheat
We conclude our list with a comprehensive tool, supercharged with social data from Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, Foursquare, Yelp and Glassdoor. Monitor your social media accounts, as well as those of your competitors, to identify popular topics, trending conversations and which engagement tactics work best. Multiple Streams, a blog that reviews multi-level marketing companies, uses Viralheat to scout trending companies to review about.
You can create streams to monitor ongoing activity concerning your brand or a specific campaign. And, if you’re managing several accounts for a single brand, you can create groups of accounts to have a better overview. In Multiple Streams case, they set up alerts for their recent anti-MLM campaign, which resulted in the ability to reaching out to anyone who engaged with the post.
Takeaways
Boost your social media activity by identifying and joining online conversations around your brand and products. You’ll be surprised how a simple monitoring tool can help you become more efficient and more engaged with your online follower base.
These tools can help you save a lot of time and they enable you to connect with your social communities.
What tools do you use to stay on top of your brand on social media?
