What is Social Media Monitoring and the 6 Best Tools to Use Now?

Staying aware of public opinions is crucial, whether they come from customers, competitors, or the media. Monitoring various social platforms for audience discussions can be challenging every day. This highlights the significance of social media monitoring in today’s landscape.

Presently, there are nearly 4.95 billion active social media users. Close to 61% of businesses have implemented social listening systems to monitor keyword mentions. This article discusses the crucial role of these monitoring in today’s business environment.

What is Social Monitoring?

The concept of “social monitoring” is frequently interchanged with social listening within the domain of social media intelligence. However, it is essential to recognize that these terms carry different meanings. Monitoring discloses what customers are expressing while listening reveals the underlying motives driving these discussions.

• Social media monitoring involves aggregating social conversations and messages to create a repository of valuable insights. Engage with each message separately to address concerns, complaints, and inquiries across various platforms.
• Social media monitoring entails dissecting the insightful dialogues gleamed. Subsequently, you can craft comprehensive campaigns and refine your business approaches in response to discernible patterns within the data.

Listening transmits reactive monitoring by actively engaging with online feedback to drive business evolution while monitoring promptly addresses customer feedback. This distinction between the processes highlights the importance of proactive transformation in business strategy.

Why is Social Media Monitoring Important For Brands?

Social media monitoring involves tracking mentions, hashtags, and relevant keywords related to your brand to stay updated about what conversations are taking place in the market. By collecting information from social conversations or mentions, brands can use this information to convert it into meaningful insights.

The monitoring of social media is not just limited to what conversations take place on social media but also includes other activities on the web, including forums, blogs, and news sites. This helps in expanding the scope of how beneficial social monitoring can be.

Also Read: 7 Best Social Media Analytics Tools For Marketers [Paid & Free]

Which Metrics Should Businesses Track To Measure?

Here are essential metrics for businesses to track:

1. Web Traffic: Measure the traffic driven from social media to gauge organic campaign success.
2. Impressions: Understand the reach of content by tracking the number of times it’s displayed.
3. Engagement: Assess user interaction through likes, comments, and shares.
4. Lead Generation: Measure leads generated to evaluate campaign effectiveness.
5. Overall Sales/Revenue: Monitor social media impact on sales to gauge ROI.
6. Social Sentiment: Analyze user attitudes towards your brand on social platforms.
7. Number of Social Media Followers: Track follower growth for insights into brand popularity.
8. Reach: Assess the unique users reached by your content.
9. Top Posts: Identify high-performing content to inform future strategies.
10. Follower Growth: Monitor follower growth to evaluate content and engagement strategies.

Which Social Media Monitoring Tools Should I Use?

Social listening has steadily gained traction in recent times. According to EveryoneSocial, nearly 79% of online shoppers expect brands to respond to their complaints or queries within 24 hours. At times, users don’t even tag brands, making it difficult for brands to find these posts.

That’s where social monitoring tools come in handy since they help track activities or keywords relevant to your brand. There are various tools available for social media monitoring on the market. A few of these tools are mentioned below:

Semrush

Semrush is an analytics and social media monitoring company that helps you track all mentions on social media and throughout the web by using its brand tracking tool and social media tracker. It aims to emphasize analytics and gathering consumer information.

It is essential for monitoring measures like:

brand sentiment

backlinks

traffic estimates

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the best tools for social listening for businesses with its effective listening capabilities. This can be used to monitor mentions on any website, including Reddit and more specialized websites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Hootsuite

Providing social monitoring services for all major platforms, Hootsuite offers a powerful social listening tool to help you track conversations in real-time. You can apply filters to keywords or topics to see how they are ranking and their relevance to your brand using the Hootsuite Insights feature.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse provides easy and quick social listening solutions with its all-in-one social media tool capabilities. You can track mentions of other brands as well as particular terms associated with your campaign using the keyword search tool, in addition to your brand name. Therefore, it can be beneficial to keep track of what and how your competitors are doing.

Nexalogy

Nexalogy is a social media monitoring company that uses excellent visualizations to interpret data interactively. It helps to track the common patterns of discussions and keep a check on the highest-ranking keywords.

Social Mention

This is one of the social media monitoring free tool that gathers content about the term you search for. It collects blog posts, videos, images, and microblogs relevant to your query. Searching across various engines and networks allows it to provide a comprehensive view. This consolidates what people say about your brand or topic. You can quickly digest and understand public sentiment without searching individually.

Advantages of Monitoring Social Media

Most social media monitoring tools are frequently tied to social listing features. When you use them effectively, these solutions can escalate your communication strategy and fortify your brand. Some benefits of social media monitoring entail:

• Enhancing brand reputation: When you are constantly mindful of the sentiments expressed by your customers, you can promptly cater to their needs.
• Improved customer engagement: Engaged customers facilitate businesses by providing opportunities to engage in meaningful dialogues, fostering stronger relationships over time.
• Enhancing campaign insights: Delve into campaign intricacies through the strategic use of tags and keywords on platforms like Sprout Social. Discover firsthand how diverse audience segments engage with the various messages of your brand.
• Never miss what’s buzzing: Rest assured, you won’t have to stress about falling out of sync with the latest trends in customer sentiment or experience. With social monitoring, you’re always in the loop, understanding exactly what your audience thinks and feels.

Which are the best “choices” for monitoring social media?

Social media monitoring helps identify new market opportunities while also helping your brand grow. According to EveryoneSocial, nearly 63% of digital marketers believe that social monitoring tools are expected to become more important in the coming years. To ensure that, there are several social listening practices every brand should follow. However, these practices need to be chosen and followed. So, here are some of the best “choices” you need to make for monitoring social media in today’s world:

Choose the right tool

There are multiple tools for social media monitoring available on the internet that are either free to use or affordable. Different tools offer different types and levels of monitoring, so do your background research before you invest in a social listening tool.

Choose relevant hashtags or keywords

Have you noticed a negative comment on your brand post or a tweet that went viral about your brand? Make sure your social media team responds quickly to such posts. In case your brand is not tagged, the best way to track down such comments is through hashtags or relevant keywords.

Choose to listen intently

Every brand, from small to big, needs to stay updated with the latest trends and conversations around their brand or industry. Analyze user-generated content, may it be product or service reviews or positive reviews about your brand.

End Note

Whether you’re going to opt for a paid or free version, make sure your social media monitoring tool has all the features built (at least the important ones). Remember, this is not just about tracking metrics but also about understanding the story behind the numbers.