As businesses adopt Social Media in its DNA there are new opportunities and also challenges in what regards tools for monitoring and managing their profiles and stats. Social media monitoring tools are critical as companies and brands realise the full potential of social media to move and shift their business models.
comScore Report released deatialing usage stats that highlight the continued rise of social networking and it’s rapidly increasing value it brings to the web and businesses.
Here are some interesting findings from the comScore report:
- 1 of every 6 minutes spent online is credited to social networking
- As Facebook reaches its market capacity – 157.2 million visitors and 73% of the total U.S. Internet population each month – it’s growth has not been limited. Facebook has increased the average U.S. visitor engagement from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month in one year
- Although Myspace has declined in popularity, LinkedIN, Twitter and Tumblr have grown at impressive rates
The website Dreamgrow.com has released a list of 68 social media monitoring tools that will let you know whats happening on the social web and keep you informed. All of these tools are free and give you endless ways to track the trends that are forming across social networks. IntelligentHQ decided to do our version of this list and include two additional tools, one being our own IntelligentHQ Social Media Shares Tool and Sentiment140.
Social Media Monitoring tools collect, analyse, index and deliver data related with social media activity, profiles, sentiment and signs. Bellow an interesting infographic by http://www.basistech.com/social-media-monitoring/ that highlights some of the principle areas used by these growing tools.
The Rosette linguistics platform enables social media monitoring tools to identify language of incoming feeds, analyze sentences for sentiment analysis, extract entities for metadata, and improve search results. Source: basistech.com/social-media-monitoring/Dreamgrow has given their top 7 tools that have proven to be elite in versatility and usability, followed by 61 more tools that are definitely worth checking out.
The key to properly utilizing social media platforms is to be consistently active and aware of your influence and actions. Every tool in this list has a unique way to provide acute, strategic improvements in specific areas of your social media marketing scheme and social media activities that are aimed to promote your business, brand, or yourself. Some of these tools make it easier to track your performance, others make it easier for you to be active on social media sites when you just don’t have the time. Either way, the art of utilizing social media as a valuable outlet for your brand or company is a hard one to master. Using a handful of these tools will make your life a whole lot easier and will help you begin to build your database of consumer and social media trends.
For many companies, having a social media monitoring tool is important because it helps them manage their reputation, find content that’s suitable to share on social networks and help them promptly respond to social mentions on behalf of the brand. There is a social media monitoring tool for practically anything, so it’s important to know how to choose the right ones for you.
How to Choose the Right Social Media Monitoring Tools for your Business
The most effective way to choose a tool that best suits your company is to create a list of requirements that you expect to get out of your social media monitoring tools. This includes what you’ll be monitoring, what types of things you’re going to monitor and what you’re going to do with the data you collected. An in-house marketing department that works for a company is going to have a completely different set of needs than an ad agency who deals with several clients. You need to figure out what you want before you start shopping.
If you’re a huge brand name who appears all over the web and world, you’re probably going to need a set of tools that help you monitor and develop an online marketing strategy. If you’re a small startup or local company, you may just want a tool that will monitor social media networks and catch negative comments, or positive comments so you can promptly respond and begin to grow your brand.
Whatever the case is, there is a tool here for you in this list (probably several). I have provided a description that’s as detailed and short as possible for each tool (excluding the top seven) so you can easily scroll through and decide which ones will work best for your company.
Top 7 Social Media Monitoring Tools
HootSuite: This tool allows users to monitor and post to multiple social networks, create customreports to share with clients and colleagues, track things like brand sentiment and follower growth, and draft and schedule messages to be sent at a certain time to your audience.
SocialBro: It will help you manage and analyze Twitter communities by using social media marketing tactics to figure out what your communities are like. Then it shows you how to manage them and drive your company strategies.
Social Mention: It’s a social media search and analysis platform that takes user generated content and compiles it into a single stream of info. It does things like tracking and measuring what people say about you, your company, a new product, or topics related to the company in over 100 social media sites.
SocialSeek: This tool allows you to get all the latest tweets, news, videos and photos on any topic you want.
TwitterCounter: Amazing for tracking your statistic on Twitter. It provides statistics and usage patterns of over
14 million users. It also has a variety of widgets and buttons that people can put in their blogs, websites and social network profiles to show recent Twitter visitors and number of followers.
Wildfire Social Media Monitor: This tool measures your performance in the growth of your social media fanbase. It gives you daily tracking statistics and allows you to see the growth and trends in small and large groups. It also lets you compare your follower bases across the leading social networks and offers an alert system that will inform you of meaningful trends and activity that are relevant to you and your social presence.
Klout: This tool is designed to help you understand the leverage of your influence. Your Klout score measure your influence in Twitter and identifies the top influencers in the world.
IntelligentHQ Social Media Shares Tool: This tool is designed to let you enter any URL into the counter and see how many times it’s been shared across the most popular social media networks. This tool is valuable for professional content creators who are trying to see how far their networks extend and how much of their material is being shared.
Sentiment 140: This tool allows you to discover specific Twitter sentiments relating to a brand or product in order to discover which topics are trending the most. The tool simply lets you type in what you’re interested in and gives you a list of tweets about the subject along with a sentiment analysis. This sentiment analysis includes the percentage of positive and negative reactions toward the subject and the count of positive and negative reactions.
61 Social Media Monitoring Tools Worth Checking Out:
- Addictomatic: Finds latest news, blogs, videos and images from the top live sites.
- Argyle Social: Gives software to help participate in conversations that drive brand awareness and provide social intelligence through crunching your SM data.
- Antavo Promotion Builder: A web-based marketing software designed to build promotions.
- BackTweets: Allows you to search through past tweets that link back to your site.
- BackType: Sends you an email whenever a search term mentions you on social media platforms.
- Buffer: Allows you to schedule posts and fill your post bank, so it will automatically post for you and social media feeds.
- Boardreader: Search multiple message boards at once and share information globally – the goal is to search the “human to human” discussions.
- CoTweet: This is for people who have several Twitter accounts and need only basic features to engage and manage their conversations – includes scheduling, conversation history, email notifications and mentions.
- Cyfe: An all-in-one dashboard software that lets you monitor and analyze data across online services.
- Edgerankchecker: An algorithm that ranks objects in Facebook’s News Feed.
- Facebook Search: Helps you search Facebook more accurately.
- Followerwonk: An analytical tool for Twitter that gives you unique statistics on you and your followers, such as how active people you follow have been in the past year.
- Google Alerts: Gives you email updates in categories you choose for the latest content posted on Google.
- Google Blog Search: Enables you to find what people are saying about certain subjects on Google.
- Google Trends: Compare search terms and websites and get insights on traffic and geographic visitation patterns of websites and keywords.
- HowSocialable: Lets you measure your brand impact or keyword impact using data from 32 social networking sites.
- Icerocket: Provides you with blog tools, such as creating your own trend graph, seeing trends change over time, or monitor specific terms and find when they’re trending.
- Kred.ly: A social media scoring system that measure a person’s online influence.
- Mention: Lets you create alerts for your brand, industry, company, name and competitors to be informed in real-time about any mentions on the web.
- Mentionmap: Helps you explore Twitter, find relevant people to follow and see what they’re talking about.
- Monitter: Monitors your Twitter account, the Twitter world and Twitter trends.
- Nearbytweets: A geographic-centric Twitter tool for social networking and building relationships.
- Netvibes: Allows you to analyze everything and anything in a single, easy-to-use platform.
- NutShellMail: Helps you organize, monitor and interact on social networks from a single email digest delivered on your schedule.
- Omgili: Lets you measure the Buzz of any term.
- PeerIndex: Brings exclusive rewards, offers and discounts from brands who want you to try their new products. It also analyzes the millions of likes, retweets and comments daily to calculate everyones social media influence.
- Pinerly: Users can schedule pins on Pinterest, find out which pins are the most effective, use multiple accounts and create bookmarks.
- Pinpuff: Measures users Pinterest influence, reach and virality.
- Pinterest for Business: Shows how many people pin your website, see your pins and click your content.
- PlagTracker: Detects any online plagiarism using a simple algorithm. Great for teachers, students, website owners and authors.
- Pluggio: Helps individuals, businesses, orgs and marketers grow and manage their social media profiles.
- Quintly: Social media benchmarking and analytics solution that tracks and compares performance of your social media marketing activities.
- Samepoint: Tracks conversations that take place in blogs and social media sites.
- Seesmic: A suite of social media management and collaboration tools that help businesses build their online brands.
- Sentiment Metrics: Monitor and measure social media activity that helps you understand how people view your brand and products.
- SharedCount: Tracks shares, likes, tweets and any other social media share.
- ShoorK: Analyzes the stats from your Facebook profile, such as profile views or likes.
- Socialbuzz: A real-time search engine for Facebook, Twitter and Google+ – provides with deep analytics for marketing professionals.
- SocialOomph: Lets you schedule tweets, track keywords, extend Twitter profiles, view @mentions and retweets and much more.
- SocialPointer: Real-time social media marketing platform – tracks, monitors and responds in real-time to relevant social mentions and conversations.
- StepRep: Gives a synopsis of conversations people are having about your business online.
- Technorati Blogsearch: Gives the authority and ranks of blogs.
- Tinker: Shows you the latest buzz on Twitter and social web to help you track your favorite events.
- TipTop: Twitter-based search engine that finds the most current advice, opinions and answers for any search, and people involved.
- ThinkUp: Captures posts, tweets, replies, retweets, friends, followers and links on social networks.
- Topsy: Real-time search engine that ranks and indexes search results based on the most influential conversations.
- Twazzup: Real-time news platform that filters the news out of live Twitter content.
- Tweetalarm: Gives email alerts when someone tweets about your company or product.
- TweetBeep: Keeps track of conversations that mention you or your product or company.
- Tweetdeck: Social media dashboard app that lets you manage your Twitter accounts.
- TweetPsych: Uses linguistic analysis algorithms to build psychological profiles of people based on their tweets, analyzing the last 1000 tweets.
- TweetReach: Measures the impact of social media conversations — helps you understand how many people were reached by a certain topic on Twitter.
- Twendz: Twitter-mining web-app that uses Twitter search to highlight conversation themes and sentiment of tweets that talk about topic that pertain to you.
- Twentyfeet: An “egotracking” service that helps keep track of your social media activites and monitor your results.
- Twitalyzer: Shows you who’s in your social network and where they live — this allows you to reach your followers with a more targeted effort.
- Twitrratr: Provides a list of positive and negative keywords to use on Twitter.
- Twitter Search: Helps you find out what’s happening in the world beyond your Twitter timeline.
- Twitter StreamGraphs: Shows the last 1000 tweets that contain or pertain to a specific search word.
- Veooz: (pronounced “views”) Get a quick overview and draw insights from millions of different users on the most popular social media platforms.
- WhatHashtag: Helps you find the most used Twitter hashtag for keywords you enter.
- WhoUnfollowedMe: Shows you who unfollows you in real time on Twitter without having to wait for a DM or email.
Trevor Micklow is a business writer and content curator based out of Chicago, IL. US. He specializes in digital strategies, social media, psychology, executive education and business school related topics. He has been working and coordinating the general content of IntelligentHQ’s business school directory, which gives key information and programme details on the top business schools in the world. He has a BS, Psychology from Central Michigan University.
