Social media monitoring is the act of monitoring social media for information relevant to your business. For example, you might want to know about: Brand mentions (with or without direct tagging) Relevant hashtags (branded and unbranded) Mentions of your competitors General trends that apply to your industry Social media monitoring helps you track key social metrics like brand awareness and social share of voice. 16 social media monitoring tools You could do basic social monitoring manually—checking each social network individually for mentions, keywords, hashtags, and so on. There are plenty of social media monitoring tools to help you keep track of more data and identify the most important information. Search streams in the Hootsuite dashboard let you monitor conversations relevant to your business, your industry, and your products. You can monitor multiple mention streams at once to track the social media conversations most important to you. Google Alerts lets you monitor the entire web for mentions of your company, your competitors, or other relevant topics. But you should also think beyond your brand to monitor conversations that might give you a better picture of your overall industry, or present opportunities to collect new data for to apply to your social listening strategy. You’ll start to see people actively seeking information on products like yours. Use Hootsuite to easily find and monitor conversations that are relevant to your business on social media—and then start engaging.
Social media is a powerful research tool for companies who want to know what people think of them. (Hint: All companies should want to know what people think of them.)
But with more than three billion people using social networks, keeping track of what they say can seem like an overwhelming task. It can be hard to cut through all the noise to find the conversations that matter most to you.
That’s where social media monitoring tools come in. They can help you track and manage online conversations relevant to your brand, so the information comes to you, rather than you having to seek it out.
But before we get into the tools, let’s look at exactly what social media monitoring is.
Bonus: Download a free guide to discover how to get more sales and conversions with social media monitoring on Hootsuite—no tricks or boring tips.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the act of monitoring social media for information relevant to your business. For example, you might want to know about:
- Brand mentions (with or without direct tagging)
- Relevant hashtags (branded and unbranded)
- Mentions of your competitors
- General trends that apply to your industry
Social media monitoring helps you track key social metrics like brand awareness and social share of voice. You can also use this information to test social campaigns and track ROI.
Once you start collecting all of this valuable data, you can use it to look for trends and insights. When you start making in-depth analyses and taking action based on your findings, you’ve moved on from the simple task of social media monitoring into the more complex work of social listening.
What’s the difference between the two? Basically, social media monitoring is about the past, and social listening is about the future.
Social media monitoring is all about gathering information—collecting all the data and details you can. You capture what people are posting about you. You measure what you have already achieved, and create a record of what is happening in your industry’s social space.
The social listening part is more active and strategic. It involves analyzing the data for actionable insights—everything from engaging a happy customer to shifting your overall brand positioning strategy. Social listening uses the data you gather to make your social marketing better.
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In this post, we’ll show you how to get set up for social monitoring, and highlight 16 of the best tools to help keep things automated. Once you’re ready to start thinking about the bigger picture, check out our post on how to use social listening.
16 social media monitoring tools
You could do basic social monitoring manually—checking each social network individually for mentions, keywords, hashtags, and so on. But that would take up your entire day. Plus, you’d have to create some kind of reporting dashboard to collect and share all your research.
Fortunately, there’s no need to go about it like that. There are plenty of social media monitoring tools to help you keep track of more data and identify the most important information. Here are 15 of our favorites.
Search streams in the Hootsuite dashboard let you monitor conversations relevant to your business, your industry, and your products. You can monitor what people are saying based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and even specific users.
Once you’ve set up your streams for social monitoring, you can share them with your team, so everyone can access the same information. If you discover a post that requires a response, you can assign it to the appropriate team member.
Hootsuite Insights expands your social media monitoring capabilities beyond social networks themselves to include 100 million data sources like news sites, forums, and blogs.
It also provides useful analytics information, like brand sentiment, gender distribution, and top social platforms. This gives you a bird’s-eye view of the conversation about your brand online, so you can identify trends you should dig into as part of your social listening strategy.
You can use Hootsuite Insights to set alerts, so you know immediately if there’s a major change in any of the metrics you’re monitoring.
Using Brandwatch, you can monitor mentions across the social web, including blogs, forums, social networks, news sites, video sites, and review sites.
In this video, Hootsuite’s social engagement specialist, Nick Martin, explains exactly how he uses Brandwatch for social media monitoring, including measuring social share of voice.
Talkwalker uses more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources.
You can easily analyze engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment.
With its 330 million average monthly active users and 14 billion average views per month, Reddit is a social site you can’t ignore.
Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro allows you to to monitor the site that bills itself as “the front page of the internet” for relevant keywords and phrases. You’ll learn who is talking about your brand, business, or competitors in the site’s 138,000 active communities.
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