Do you have a monitoring tool set up to track important mentions on Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more?
Are you monitoring the trends related to conversations about your brand? Is all that social media activity paying off?
I have a business mentor called Bill Liao who is a highly successful business person. Listening is one of the most important things he taught me.
What are people saying that is negative or positive about you or your business?
There are many things to consider when looking for monitoring tools but the most important thing is that you are monitoring conversations!
Listening is just as important as sharing on social media
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In this guide, we go through free social media monitoring tools, paid ones suitable for small businesses, and social media monitoring tools suitable for enterprise-level brands.
You may also be monitored!!!
Who is monitoring you?
What You Will Learn From This Post?
What monitoring you should do
Free tools you can use for monitoring social media
Paid tools you can use to monitor social media
What Should You Monitor?
There is much that you can monitor so you need to filter what’s important.
Image from kenburbary.com
For a monitoring tool, you ideally want to track:
Your brand name/your name/product names
Is your brand or product being mentioned across different channels? Are these mentions positive or negative?
Who is discussing your brand or product? If someone really influential is talking about your business, you want to know about this so you can jump in on the conversation!
Your competition
It’s also useful to track your competition. Who are the key influencers interacting with them? What is the majority of the conversation about? Are there any major spikes in activity related to their brand or any particular topics?
Getting the answers to these questions can provide you with really useful information about your competitors, their audience and your own brand and followers.
Here is an example: I have been testing Rival IQ for monitoring and I set up Social Media Examiner as a company to track. They are not really a competitor but our audience is quite similar. Rival IQ showed me a post that was getting more attention than any other post:
An alert from RivalIQ
This is a good post that got 68 retweets and 53 favorites. If the Social Media Examiner audience really likes it then my audience will, too. This is a great way of getting ideas for content that your audience will certainly find interesting.
Your Prospects
Imagine you are about to close a deal with a customer. Doesn’t it make sense to track what they are saying? Maybe they are on Twitter asking about other solutions!
Your Industry
It’s useful to monitor what’s going on in your industry. Make sure you know the latest news in your sector!
Trends
As well as monitoring individual instances, it’s important to monitor trends. Are more people talking about you or your company this month or was there more chatter last month? What is the sentiment of the conversation (i.e. is it positive or negative?) and how is this trending?
Summary of All Tools
Here is an infographic of all the tools discussed below. Save it as a reference guide when you are considering which tools you want to use.
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<div style=”clear:both”><a href=”http://www.razorsocial.com/social-media-monitoring”><img src=”http://www.razorsocial.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Infographic-SocialMediaMonitoringTools.png?new” title=”26 Social Media Monitoring Tools (INFOGRAPHIC)” alt=”RazorSocial” width=”600″ border=”0″ /></a></div><div>Courtesy of: <a href=”http://www.razorsocial.com/social-media-monitoring”>RazorSocial</a></div>
Multi-Platform Tools
1. Brand24.net
We came across Brand24 about a year ago and starting testing out the tool. We really liked it.
The results provided through the tool are very comprehensive and they provide visually appealing reports.
You can monitor mentions using a graph that shows activity over a period of time. Then, you can filter those mentions based on the channel e.g. Facebook, Twitter, blogs etc.
Brand24 main dashboard
The influencer report is cool – you can view the top influencers who are sharing your content.
View more influential people sharing out your content
Brand24 has some great functionality and the results displayed are pretty impressive.
Price: From $19 to $999 per month.
2. Mention
Mention provides a really good user interface with a very nice mobile app for monitoring mentions across many platforms.
It tracks mentions of your brand in 42 different languages. There’s good team functionality for assigning mentions for your team members to deal with.
Respond directly within Twitter
Price: From $29 to $299 + Enterprise pricing available on request.
3.Trackur
Trackur is a social media monitoring tool that provides executive reporting, sentiment analysis and influence scoring. It’s unusual to have sentiment analysis available for a monitoring tool with a relatively low starting price ($97 per month).
Price: From $97 to $447 per month.
4. Ubervu
Ubervu was recently acquired by Hootsuite. It analyzes over 100+ million data sources in 55 languages and provides real-time analytics.
Ubervu provides full demographic analysis, which helps you understand the audience that is sharing content related to what interests you.
5. Talkwalker [Alerts are Free]
Talkwalker offers an enterprise-monitoring solution but it also has a free alerts application. When Google phased out Google Alerts, Talkwalker stepped in with a good alternative.
You cannot monitor Facebook, Twitter and other social networks but you can monitor forums, blogs etc.
You can set up multiple alerts for your brand name, keywords etc. and define how often you want to get the alerts.
A better alternative to Google Alerts
Talkwalker will then send you an email with the alerts. It’s not as comprehensive as a paid solution but still provides some very useful results.
Price: Alerts are free. We discuss the paid version later in this post.
6. Rival IQ
Rival IQ, which I mentioned above, is a competitor-intelligence platform with very useful monitoring capabilities. You can track a group of your competitors to identify how they are performing in relation to SEO, social media etc.
One area of monitoring that is really useful is to get alerts when your competitors change some key content on their profiles and/or they have a break-out post.
We have shown an example of an alert where there is a break-out post. This is when your competitor has shared a piece of content that has done extremely well. This is always useful to monitor.
Another type of alert is when your competitor changes something on their profile on any of the social networks. For example, if they change their Twitter profile description, you get alerted on what they had before and what they have changed it to.
This is really useful because a change is generally related to a change in the positioning of their business, so it’s well worth tracking.
Price: Prices start at $199 a month.
7. TrendSpottr
Trendspottr predicts trends related to the content that is shared out on social media. It then alerts you when trends happen.
Based on a complex set of algorithms, it will monitor for content shared online through social media and predict whether any of these posts are likely to trend.
Get email alerts for articles about to trend
You enter your keywords and then you will start to get notifications.
Imagine if something was about to trend that was really negative about your brand, I think you’d want to know about it!!
Price: Prices start at $199 a month.
8. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool for competitor research. It will analyze content based on keywords or a domain name and show the most shared content, the most linked-to content and it will give you details of any influencers who are sharing the content.
You can also set up four different types of alerts to get notified of certain things. For example:
If a keyword/domain name is mentioned in a piece of content shared more than a certain number of times.
If someone links to your website.
To get alerted when an author publishes a piece of content.
To get alerted when any particular domain has a ‘break-out’ post (i.e. one that’s shared a lot).
Price: Prices start at $99 per month.
9. Nod3x
Nod3x supports monitoring on Google+, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
As well as finding conversations it does detailed profile analysis on the people driving the conversation, which will help you identify the relevant influencers you should be engaging with.
Price: Free option with monthly subscriptions starting at $9 and going up to $80.
Enterprise-Only Monitoring Tools
10. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social media monitoring platform that supports 27 languages and provides results from millions of social news and media sources across the web.
Nicely presented reports
Brandwatch has a really flexible query build that allows you to build up complex queries so you can filter only the most relevant results. There’s a great feature where authors can be displayed, so you can track the most influential people. They also have really good alerts.
Brandwatch provides direct integration with Spredfast, which is a nice feature because you need a management tool to work alongside a monitoring tool.
Price: Starting at $800 for up to 10k mentions.
11. Radian 6
Radian 6 is a well-established player in the listening category with over 3,000 clients. It is part of the Salesforce suite of products and has a broad range of functionality.
One of the dashboard views
It covers over 150 million sources ranging from blogs, forums, Facebook public API, Twitter, and photo and video sharing sites. It has a nice workflow and automation features to help track and respond to mentions.
Price: Starting price is $1000 per month, which includes 20,000 posts/month and unlimited users. For $3000 you get 250,000 posts/month. If you are an agency, you get 1 million posts/month for the same price.
12. Sysomos
Sysomos has two products: Heartbeat is a real-time monitoring tool and Map is a listening tool, where you can monitor conversations and track key influencers.
You can look up topics over specific periods and analyze them by demographic groups, geography and much more.
Nicely presented charts with Sysomos4. Talkwalker
Price: MAP is $2,750 per month with unlimited queries and 1 seat license.
13. Cision
Visible Technologies (recently acquired by Cision) is a listening tool that provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities with a focus on actionable insights. Here are some of the key areas of functionality:
Social media listening – Unlimited on-demand search and analytics, ability to track brand buzz, competitors, industry news, market events, sentiment and trending topics.
Global multi-language capabilities – A truly global solution with data from the major languages around the world.
Enriched data analytics – Understand consumer habits, preferences, unmet needs and how to maximize return on your marketing investment.
Customer engagement – Engage with the customer directly through the platform on Facebook or Twitter.
Price: Contact Cision for pricing, depends on requirements.
14. Attensity
Attensity is a social analytics and engagement platform specifically designed for very large companies. It uses natural language-processing techniques to analyze and identify the most important and relevant conversations.
An example of what Attensity Provides
There are four key areas to Attensity:
Analyze – Use Attensity natural language processing to analyze content in emails, social networks, call centre notes, CRM and other sources and produce actionable insights.
Pipeline – This is a real-time, semantically annotated social-media stream that uses text analytics and natural language processing to filter social conversations to find the most important and relevant conversations for your product, service or industry. Listening solutions will find conversations but Pipeline will filter this and remove the noise. For a large company, there is far too much to do this manually.
Respond – This uses natural language processing to uncover customer-generated insights, requests for information, and to identify complaints, and product issues. Then, through a business rules engine, these can be acted on and responded to accordingly.
Command Centre – This is a solution for monitoring online channels in relation to product launches and evaluating and predicting the success or failure of these products, based on detailed analysis.
Price: Each client of Attensity is large so it uses custom pricing, depending on requirements.
15. Talkwalker [Paid version]
We already mentioned a free alerts application provided by Talkwalker but their main application is an enterprise social-media monitoring tool.
Coverage in 187 languages.
Extensive filters available to help you identify the most relevant data.
Real-time data plus access to historic data.
Benchmark your brand against industry peers.
Price: Prices start at $700 a month.
16. Bottlenose
Bottlenose is primarily a trending-analysis platform that monitors trends on social media. Here is its main functionality:
Automated trend alerts – It monitors over 3 billion messages every hour to find emerging people, content and topics.
Live dashboard – You can monitor a real-time dashboard to keep an eye on trends.
Real-time search and discovery – You can search for relevant conversations in real time.
Price: Contact Bottlenose for pricing.
17. Digimind
Digimind is a nicely designed monitoring and analytics platform. When you are monitoring content, you can filter it by:
What: A tag butt showing the most mentioned topics related to your conversation.
When: A trending graph showing mentions over a period of time.
Where: A breakdown by channel.
Who: A table showing the influential people who are sharing content.
How: Sentiment analysis on the mentions.
Mentions: The content found across each of the platforms (Twitter, Web, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram).
Price: One price, $499 per month.
18. Meltwater Buzz
Meltwater is a general monitoring solution that also has social media management capability. It also provides the ability to create customized Facebook applications.
Meltwater monitoring
Monitoring solution – Tracks Twitter, Facebook, over 200 million blogs, forums, and more. Their access to Twitter is via Topsy and GNIP. They do not have direct access to the Twitter firehose.
Media monitoring – This is a separate product (not built from the same source code), which focuses purely on monitoring news sites and is ideal for a PR team. They have 230k news sites in their index. You can create a basic query or create a very advanced boolean query to return relevant results.
Social media management – There is a management component that currently only supports Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook connect – This is a suite of customizable applications for polls, surveys, contact forms and a promotion builder for building applications such as contests on Facebook.
Price: Prices are available on request.
19. Nuvi
Nuvi is a real-time social media monitoring tool that provides full social media coverage across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, Google+, Delicious, Reddit and over 5 million RSS feeds.
Nuvi dashboards provide instant feedback on campaigns and allow you to monitor trending concepts in real time.
Price: From $500 to $2500, which includes a dedicated support manager.
20. Crimson Hexagon
Crimson Hexagon is suitable for large enterprises that need to analyze large volumes of data, using intelligent algorithms to make sense of it.
Conversations are monitored, categorized, analyzed and presented in a form suitable for digestion. There is advanced topic-analysis functionality to track and analyze topics within topics.
For example, if you were tracking a hashtag you can automatically tracking the topics within the hashtag.
Topic wheels shows the grouping of conversations related to a topic.
Their ‘ForSight’ product is a very advanced social media research tool and goes beyond monitoring and sentiment analysis.
21. Synthesio
Synthesio monitors across 50 languages in 200 countries through social media and traditional media outlets. Data is aggregated and presented in a suitable form.
SynthesioRank will rank websites and users to help you identify the most relevant and important conversations.
Synthesio SRS (social reputation score) provides a benchmark, comparing you with your competitors so you can understand how you are performing in relation to them, e.g. sentiment score, SWOT analysis and crisis monitoring.
Monitoring is available across 50 languages in 200 countries.
22. ViralHeat
ViralHeat was originally a social media monitoring tool, which added on social media management functionality.
Monitor conversations across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, FourSquare, Yelp and others.
Competitive analysis features are available so you can track and compare your performance with your competitors.
Single-Platform Tools
23. Pin Alerts For Pinterest
Using Pin Alerts, you can set up an alert so that you receive an email whenever anything is pinned from your site or your competitors’ sites.
When someone pins content from your competitors’ sites, it’s useful to keep an eye on who they are, and whether they are influential. Do they have a lot of followers and engagement? Are they relevant to your brand?
If they are, then it would make sense to start interacting with them so they can start sharing out your content, too.
Pinned content from competitors sites will also be clearly outlined. This will help you identify popular content on their sites.
Price: FREE
24. TweetReach for Monitoring What Happens to Your Tweets
With TweetReach, you paste in a tweet or some keywords and it will show you who are the most influential people who are sharing out this tweet. It also shows the tweets sent, the number of people who shared the content etc.
Find out how many people got to see your tweet!
Price: The free version analyzes 50 of the tweets, the paid version looks at more.
25. Twilert – Twitter Monitoring
Twilert is a real-time (well… close to real-time) Twitter-alert application where you get alerted by email if tweets mention your brand name, any particular keyword or a hashtag online.
Example: Wifty Doubles Their Twitter Followers using Twilert
Wifty is an online retailer that recently launched. To gain initial traction on Twitter, they set up Twitter alerts to identify influencers sharing relevant content. Through the real-time alerts, they were able to engage with the influencers immediately and this helped them to build followers. They were also able to track mentions of their competitors!
Price: From $9 to $97 per month + Enterprise pricing.
26. Topsy – Twitter Monitoring
Topsy is a Twitter monitoring and research tool that has full access to all Tweets sent from 2006 onwards.
You enter in some keywords and Topsy will return a list of Tweets containing these keywords. You can then apply various filters. For example:
View tweets by time – Last hour, last week, specific date range.
View tweets by type – View photos contained in tweets, video, links in tweets or just plain tweets.
Filter by language – English, Spanish, German and many more.
Filter by influencer – Show only the top influencers sharing.
You can also enter the URL of a blog post and see every tweet that contains that link.
You can’t set up alerts with Topsy so you have to do these searches manually.
Price: Free and paid options.
Summary
Monitoring is a really important part of managing your social media presence. By monitoring, you will learn so much about your customers, competitors and your industry.
Which monitoring solutions do you use, or will you use, after reading this post?
What have I missed in this post?
I’d love to hear from you.
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The post 26 Social Media Monitoring Tools [Reference Guide] appeared first on RazorSocial and was written by Ian Cleary