Social media is now a vast advertisement platform for many businesses. Therefore, observing and analyzing how your target audience expresses itself across social media is vital. You can spot trends and quickly react to changing market conditions by analyzing your target audience like this. Social media monitoring tools allow you to track and evaluate your brand’s image and your competitor’s social media presence. With countless new posts published, commented on, shared, or liked every minute, social media is a massive resource to market yourself or your business. By learning about your target audience and competitors through social media, you can adapt your social media strategy to attain better results. We will discuss some of the best social media monitoring tools available for you to use to keep your social media strategy effective.
Social Media Platforms
Before we get into the social media management tools, let’s look at social media itself. What are social media platforms, and what platforms does social media management cover? Social media management covers the following platforms:
- YouTube
Let’s start with the most popular social media platform of all time, Facebook.
Facebook is the pioneer of today’s social media algorithm. It has started the rise in social media usage and made it famous worldwide. Facebook is a huge social network with more than a billion daily active users.
Facebook has a crucial history with social media management. Even though companies recently understood the power of social media, they started appearing on Facebook first. As for Facebook accounts of major companies, answering the comments of the customers or people who are interested in their products was considered as something different. This is because major companies usually would not return to the complaints and feedback. However, doing so on social media accounts such as Facebook changed things, and they saw the potential in being active on Facebook.
Facebook truly contributed to social media marketing. It offers a wide variety of ads and content. Users can share photos, videos, and texts as advertisements. One other good feature of Facebook is groups. They are one of the best feedback sources for companies. For example, a car brand’s marketing department may look for their models’ groups on Facebook and see how the owners talk about it. In fact, some brands intervene in these groups.
Nowadays, Facebook is losing its impression. The trend supports other social media platforms. However, Facebook, as a company, invests in most of these companies. One of them is today’s popular platform, Instagram.
Twitter is a unique social media platform. Unlike any other, it focuses on the news and the statements of popular and important people. Twitter has around 330 million monthly active users. This number may not be as high as other social media platforms, but Twitter holds a more serious image of being a social media platform.
Many statements from leaders worldwide are made on Twitter, and the platform has proved its significance regarding these statements. Twitter may not offer the same reach as Facebook; however, it provides you access to users who engage with brands daily.
Like on other social platforms, brands also took their place on Twitter. It is a great platform for making viral advertisements. If brands could catch the trend on Twitter and use it for their interests, they could be successful and become a trending topic themselves.
Perhaps today’s most popular platform is Instagram. Instagram is a huge social network with more than a billion monthly active users. What is special about Instagram is its short but entertaining content. Of course, nowadays, adding longer content to Instagram is possible. In 2018, Instagram introduced its new feature called IGTV. Here people can watch videos longer than a minute and add videos up to 60 minutes.
Instagram is widely used in terms of marketing. The ads on Instagram are not the greatest because it is possible to skip them very easily when looking at Stories. However, what is good about it, you can promote your business account to related people and gain many possible customers. It is also possible to sell items with price tags. In 2012, Facebook saw the potential future of Instagram and bought it for $1 billion. It was a smart move, considering the rise of Instagram while leaving Facebook behind. Also, don’t forget to check our new buy Instagram channel members service to boost your creator account on the platform!
LinkedIn is one of the unique platforms on the internet. It is also one of the oldest social networks, and it has been around since its release. LinkedIn has more than 575 thousand users, and 260 of these are active monthly. The user number may not be as high as Facebook and Instagram, yet LinkedIn comes forward as a professional social media platform.
LinkedIn has proved its significance with its features, such as finding jobs and providing feedback for companies, especially in the HR field. It is considered a professional Facebook.
Having a LinkedIn account is a must for major companies. They make their announcements and give industry-specific news on LinkedIn, and users may follow companies. It is also quite important for B2B collaborations and marketing because companies check each other and people on social media.
YouTube
Many marketing professionals state that YouTube is the future of marketing. In fact, YouTube is not the future anymore. It is today. YouTube has over a billion users, and it is possible to find almost anything. It is almost like a video-based search engine.
YouTube offers many marketing opportunities. From advertisements to informational videos, there are many possibilities to grow your brand awareness. Then, there is something called ‘influencer marketing.’ This is also a marketing style that has been used on Instagram. However, YouTube is the pioneer of it.
YouTube is a platform where people go after entertaining content. To attract attention, you should either have entertaining videos that would be creative or collaborate with YouTubers who can promote your products in compelling ways.
Pinterest is all about visual content. You can see any visual art here. Pinterest has more than 200 million users. It features companies with a visual focus, such as architectural manufacturers, clothing stores, and flower shops.
Unlike any other social media platform, Pinterest features a higher female population. So, it may be a platform for marketing to women. It is a good platform for showing your products in a non-promotional and artistic way.
What Is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring allows you to analyze and monitor brands across many social channels. You may be trying to network on LinkedIn or sharing hundreds of posts on Instagram to get interaction. However, none of these work if you don’t acknowledge the market. Monitoring social media will enable you to compare yourself with your competitors. Another critical benefit is that it gives you the power to drive conversations about your brand on social media.
Social media is a potent tool. You can use it to engage with your customers more intimately than previously possible. Social media monitoring helps to identify trends over time. It also helps monitor your competition, informing you of their strategy changes. Thanks to this, you can remain competitive with them as well. Using the data social media monitoring provides, you can prove your return on investments (ROI) by showing results clearly and keeping track of many other metrics to help your social media presence thrive. Engaging with your customers using social media is also a great way to build trust and respect for your brand.
How Social Media Monitoring Works
There are some specially designed tools to help you monitor social media. Some tools are known as social listening tools. These report to you about the social media buzz around your chosen phrases or topics. Social listening tools are excellent for social media managers to analyze the engagement with your brand before and after a campaign to prove the ROI of the campaign.
Some companies have combined SEO and social media monitoring software. It is to give you even more valuable tools in a single package. All of the data gathered using social media monitoring tools feed into an easy-to-analyze database. There, social media managers can evaluate any metric they want to improve. Some monitoring tools only scan one platform, while others run cross-platform. After conducting analyses of the gathered data, companies can view how they are perceived online and find answers to strategic questions from the investigation. Additionally, many social media listening tools provide continuous analysis and evaluate current marketing campaigns and competitor comparisons in real-time compared to past results. You can also learn more about social media automation.
What Social Media Management Requires
The job description of social media management is a broad concept. There are many things you should consider when managing your social media accounts. From content management to ads, social media management is a whole other department. It is a must for major companies, especially for e-commerce websites.
Creating Social Media Accounts
The design of your social media account is the starting point of social media marketing. All of your accounts should be accurate and reflect the design of your brand. If you manage the accuracy of your design, it will be easier for your brand’s followers to find your accounts and interact with them. This is also good for building trust because it clearly states that you are the brand and in charge of these accounts.
Social media design focuses on the header and background on Twitter, the header, icon, and profile picture on Facebook, the profile picture and bio on Instagram, and other similar elements. The design should always be accurate when updating your accounts.
Determining Target Audience
Analyzing your target audience and determining it is a part of social media management. Based on your SWOT analysis, you must know which social media platform to use. Determining your audience on social media will give you a much better return on investment, so it is always good to know who your audience is.
Create a Social Media Strategy
Before starting your social media campaigns, you have to develop a strategy. Mostly, social media management agencies will focus on each platform differently. This is because the demography of each platform differs. Therefore, you would need a different approach for each one of them.
Considering the platforms’ audience, your goals, industry, and brand are what you need to focus on in your strategy.
First, you should set up goals for your business. What do you want to achieve? Awareness, loyalty, or increasing sales. Then, you should determine what the target audience expects from your industry. For this, you can guide your audience through informative blog posts or such creative ideas that would lead them to your brand. Lastly, your brand has to have a set of standards. You should be consistent with your approach to the target audience as a brand.
Advertising
Once you have created a social media strategy, you can now decide how to make your ads on social media. Your audience and your goals play an important role in advertising. Many brands use the same advertisement for all of their social media accounts. Yet, how successful it gets is something debatable.
Since the audience will not be the same on different platforms, it may be best to change the ads according to them. However, this will be something pricy. Yet you cannot put a YouTube ad on Instagram, because on YouTube, users have to watch at least five seconds of the ad, yet they can easily skip it on Instagram. You can get an idea of how to advertise on Instagram from our related posts as well.
Scheduling Posts
Suppose you want your business to be successful on digital platforms. It is better to post accurately everywhere. Scheduled posts about your campaigns and announcements will create an awareness wave, and everyone following your accounts will remember your existence on social media. You may build a content calendar for your accounts. This way you can get a reference about your marketing strategy.
Creating Content
The term content management has never been so important when it comes to social media. Social media management is not only about advertising, campaigns, and promotions. Creating content actually covers all of them and should be made periodically. That is why many social media agencies and in-house social media management departments exist.
Social media specialists work with graphic designers and copywriters to create the best content. It is essential to inform the people who are working on the content projects to be accurate on every platform. Brands always have a message, and the marketing department usually determines this message. The message you are giving on social media should lead to the same intention of your company. It is also important to catch the accuracy when you are working with third parties such as agencies or influencers.
Responding Your Audience
Perhaps the most significant part is this. Your target audience or your customers tend to be very happy and satisfied when they get a return from their favorite or chosen brands. When major brands started to answer the asked questions and return their complaints, it was a major deal. Customers expect the digital zone to be an easier place to contact the companies, and it should be.
If you want to succeed on social media, you should not only return to questions and complaints on social media. It is also important to create events that would include your customers. For example, Opel makes a photo context on Facebook, and Opel owners post their favorite photos of their cars. In the end, one of the photos is selected and shared by Opel. Think about the feeling of the winner when he/she sees their car on the brand’s official page.
Analyze Results
Once you have implemented a social media management strategy, you should analyze your results to get feedback and make changes in your strategies according to your target audience. If you are working with an agency, it is best to work with one that can develop different strategies if your performance is dropping on social media.
It is possible to see your results through some of the most common tools, such as Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics. Even Instagram offers an analytics feature for business accounts. However, it may not be the most detailed service you get.
Social Media Monitoring Tools Examples
Here are some excellent examples of social media monitoring and listening tools.
- Brandwatch
- Talkwalker
- Hootsuite
- Google Alerts
- Awario
- Buffer
- Sendible
- e-clincher
- Sprout Social
- Zoho Social
- Loomly
- Google Trends
- BuzzSumo
- Canva
- Animoto
- Todoist
Above, you can see the best tools for your business. Now, let’s analyze these tools in detail!
Brandwatch
Brandwatch targets how a brand is perceived online to help you learn and analyze all of the metrics surrounding your brand’s online perception. Using Brandwatch allows you to quickly analyze current trends within your industry and discover new opportunities and threats your brand could face. You can keep track of your saved searches through Queries. On your mention dashboard, you can see the post’s date and on which platform it is posted. There’s also the impact score which gives you an idea about how much your post will get interaction. You’ll see faces showing the sentiment on the mention, which you can adjust by clicking on them. While searching, you can filter it by categories such as sentiment, tag, author, status, etc. You can also add multiple filters to your search.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker offers you a social listening tool capable of utilizing AI analytics to provide you with accurate real-time insights into social channels across a total of 187 languages. With a quick search function, Talkwalker lets you quickly identify content ideas and new social media influencers for you to network with. Talkwalker also enables you to analyze conversations on social media or other platforms. Afterward, thanks to this customer intelligence, you can closely get customer insight into your brand. Talkwalker gives you access to critical metrics such as volume, emotion, engagement, geography, and demographics. Based on the results, you can create better content, protect your brand assets, track social campaigns, and integrate this data to increase your brand’s reputation. Additionally, you can access historical data going back up to 13 months.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite currently operates in 175 countries across the globe, with an estimated 18 million users. The company focuses on helping other brands manage their multiple social media networks and improve their social media strategies. Firstly, link your multiple social network accounts and choose which categories you will be working on. You can also view your scheduled posts on the dashboard. You can simultaneously post on multiple platforms as well. Hootsuite is ideal for use as part of a team as its layout works efficiently with many team members. The dashboard allows you to filter streams by posts, mentions, or updates. You can assign incoming messages to specific team members, allowing for smooth collaboration and effective communication. Using the app directory, you can also install free apps that might be useful.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts monitors the internet for any mentions or your business, known competitors, or relevant information to your chosen topics. This tool is incredibly easy to use. You can spot mentions that don’t have links, detect spam before it’s too late, or expose unanswered questions. Log into a Google account and head to the Google Alerts page to begin using this monitoring tool.
Awario
Awario focuses on building brand awareness for its customers similarly. It monitors social media with features like influencer marketing, social selling, and competitive analysis. Users store key terms in all languages they wish to track continuously to achieve increased brand awareness. You can type any word in the search bar and see the specified mentions on your dashboard accordingly. Hence, you can follow the news in various industries and learn what your customers and competitors say about your business. This then leads to new contacts and an increased customer base.
Buffer
Like Hootsuite, it allows you to schedule posts in multiple accounts. It works with Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. You can schedule posts even for one year. This way you can save time for you in an easy way. Another good side of Buffer is that it offers you content suggestions. You can choose from its suggestions if you are kind of short of ideas.
Sendible
In Sendible, you can schedule posts across different platforms and integrate them with blogs and other social sharing sites. Sendible creates organized editorial calendars and reports brand mentions. This way, you can respond to people ASAP and show your presence on social media. Sendible also comes with a mobile app that sends notifications about your business.
e-clincher
With e-clincher you can do many things for social media management. Its services include a content scheduler, auto posting, Social inbox or social CRM, integration of RSS feeds, suggested content, keyword monitoring, influencer discovery, analytics reporting, URL shorteners, campaign tracker, and many more. It is interesting because it offers analytics reporting, which is very useful and time-saving.
Sprout Social
SproutSocial is one of the most usable and best social media tools. It is quite popular because it offers advanced publishing features to its users. Another feature that makes SproutSocial one of the best social media management tools is its deep analysis feature. Thanks to SproutSocial, you may analyze all major social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It is also very useful for social media marketing management.
Zoho Social
This tool stands out from other social media management tools with its all-in-one features. We may list the features of Zoho Social as follows: Advanced CRM tool Integration with all major social media platforms A free version, albeit with limited features A full version starting at $10/month payment terms It’s possible to say that Zoho is a good alternative when it comes to social media planning tools.
Loomly
You are in the right spot if you need extensive collaboration to manage your social media channels. Loomly allows its users to add up to 26 team members. The tool also has core features such as advanced analysis capabilities and automatic publishing.
Google Trends
Do you need to be aware of all the trends in time to plan your social media posts? Google Trends is ready to give you exactly what you need. You won’t miss any trends with this completely free tool from Google. Moreover, you have the opportunity to follow the past trends periodically with Google Trends.
BuzzSumo
Another tool that may help you follow social media trends more closely. Thanks to BuzzSumo, you will be informed about the trending posts on all major social media platforms as soon as possible. Buzzsumo also allows you to analyze the performance of this trending content on a topic basis.
Canva
If you don’t want to need a designer for the posts you’ll share on social media channels, Canva is just for you. Canva may not be a social media management platform on its own, but it’s very useful. You may use the tool’s dozens of ready-made templates to make your posts look more professional. The tool also has many illustrations and icons that will add a different color to your visuals.
Animoto
Animoto caters to those who need a fast video editing tool for their online marketing campaigns. Users describe Animoto as a quite fast and surprisingly simple social media tool. Animoto is one of the rare tools that can be successful in meeting the needs of video editing, especially for social media.
Todoist
Todoist is an unrivaled social media planner tool for those who need productivity in social media management. Thanks to Todoist, you can have total peace of mind about regularly posting on your brand’s social media channels.
Conclusion
Overall, there are many different social media monitoring tools available for you to utilize. These tools vary in their features and offer you a vast database of analytics created around your social media data. Social media monitoring allows you to track your brand’s performance across many platforms, allowing for in-depth analysis after a marketing campaign. These tools can also significantly increase your engagement by highlighting the types of content your target audience frequently responds well to. Hopefully, you have enjoyed the benefits of using these tools and some of their many uses on the whole. Thank you for reading.
5 Comments
Thank you for providing such a comprehensive overview of social media monitoring tools. Your post was extremely helpful in understanding the various features and capabilities of the different tools. It was also great to see the pros and cons of each tool outlined, which made it easier to make an informed decision. I appreciate the time and effort you put into this blog post!
This article was a goldmine of information on social media monitoring tools! The comparison between different platforms really helped me understand which tool fits best for my business needs. Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for your interest!
Great read! I wasn’t aware of the full potential of social media monitoring tools before this. It’s clear that these tools are indispensable for any serious social media strategy. Appreciate the detailed overview!
Glad you liked it!