Tools for Social Listening
Managing, Measuring, Monitoring
When it comes to social media, we think in terms of posting, tweeting, pinning, commenting, liking, following, and sharing—but the most critical activity is listening. What does all that activity say about your audience? How do they feel about you, your businesses, your competition, and everything else for that matter? The more you know about them, the better able you’ll be to formulate a more engaging, more effective marketing strategy.
But how does one collect, categorize, and analyze that ever-growing, vast amount of user-generated information?
The following is a summarized shortlist of online tools. They will help to determine what your audience is up to, the best use of your platforms, and assess the performance of your campaigns. Are you listening?
All-In-One Platforms
1. Sendible
Sendible is a social media’ productivity’ tool with a comprehensive list of features that lets you manage social networks, schedule and automate messages, effectively engage your users, and measure the ROI of your campaigns, all from a single, customizable, dashboard.
Sensible uses Google Analytics to quantifying the cross-channel impact of your campaigns. It makes Social Listening easy by enabling marketers to track everything that customers are sharing, liking, or mentioning about you, or your client, in their social media interactions. Add to that email marketing, detailed reporting, and integrations with WordPress, Medium, Canva, Tumblr, Flickr, Dropbox, and more—it’s a complete package.
2. Brandwatch Consumer Research
For larger businesses, Brandwatch’s social media monitoring tools provide you with comprehensive marketing research, giving you deep insights into what is being said about you, your products, and your business. Brandwatch examines data from over 80 million sources, including social networks like Facebook and Twitter, news, blogs, and even product reviews, delivering data for social media and sentiment analysis. Its extensive filters and customizable reports make data easy to analyze and use in your marketing campaigns, and product research. It’s especially useful for agencies that do monitoring and analysis for multiple clients.
3. Hootsuite
Hootsuite has long been a popular, robust social media management tool, allowing users to manage multiple profiles, schedule posts in advance, and track performance, giving you a bird’s eye view of what’s happening across your social world. It is excellent for social media listening, covering 35 networks, including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, among others. You can also monitor specific search terms in real-time, tracking mentions of your brand, products, or relevant keywords. Hootsuite also lets you use RSS feeds to post to your personal or organization’s social networks. The weekly reports and team management functions allow you to delegate tasks efficiently.
Specialty Platforms
HowSociable
HowSocialable believes in the potential of social media and the power of comprehensive research. Social Media Trends, Reviews, Tools, How-To`s—an incredibly comprehensive source of Social Media information. They rate the best individual Social Media Services by….. Their Social Media University aggregates information on online courses in social media from Wharton Business School, Hootsuite, and a number of Social Media Experts. Finally, their Blog contains articles on how to get the most of your digital marketing, efforts with articles about increasing your online presence, building your brand, and connecting to people all over the world!
5. Buffer
Buffer focuses on the creation of social media content. You’ll be able to easily engage your target audience, schedule social messages quickly, and access basic reporting. You set a time and date, add posts to your dashboard, and posts will be released at the intervals you indicated. Buffer integrates with Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and App.net. Simplicity is what makes this such a great tool. With a small learning curve, it’s user-friendly and self-explanatory. Anyone can use this tool regardless of their social media skills. Paid plans add team collaboration, higher message limits, and better analytics.
https://buffer.com/library/free-twitter-tools
6. Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is an excellent tool for content research. It also analyzes and monitors your Facebook pages. Along with metrics around each post, more interestingly is the ability to see what content performs best. Buzzsumo will tell you what day is the best to post, how long your posts should be, what types of content works best, and monthly stats over time
7. Mention
Mention monitors millions of sources in 42 languages, helping you stay on top of all your brand mentions on social networks, news sites, forums, blogs, or any web page. The app lets you keep track of your team’s actions, share alerts, and assign tasks. Generating reports and exporting mentions can help you get a snapshot of your mentions by source or language over a selected period of time.
8. Keyhole
Keyhole is excellent for tracking keywords and hashtags. It’ll track them live and create a dashboard showing all the mentions, letting you sort by engagement, date, and other metrics. You can also get a look at influencers, sentiment, and trending topics based on the mentions collected.
