So now you know the basics of social media listening, how do you go about executing it? Social media has provided people the ability to voice their opinion on companies, brands, people – in short, anything and anyone. What people say can be good or bad, but that alone doesn’t determine your social media success. The way your company listens to and engages with these posts is what dictates how those opinions influence your online presence and brand sentiment.
The key to making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say about you, analyzing the data and, finally, reaching social media business intelligence by using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your marketing strategy. We have picked out some Social Media Monitoring Tools that take your social listening up a notch.
1. Hootsuite
The Lowdown: Hootsuite’s publishing features can automatically discover, schedule, and post content for you, freeing up more time to engage with customers. You can also create keyword search streams to track mentions, respond to customers and nurture leads so you can monitor every conversation across your social networks; you are always in-the-know.
Why you should use it? Hootsuite lets you manage over 100 social networks, share task with Team members and analyse performance using one login, in one dashboard. This is thus an integrated platform where we can not only find and share content which interests your audience and will also keep your social presence active when you are not.
2. Social Mention
The Lowdown: A social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the universe into a single stream of information, Social Mention allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real-time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties directly including: Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc.
Why you should use it? Social Mention currently provides a point-in-time social media search and analysis service, daily social media alerts, and API. Not only is it free, Social Mention monitors over one hundred social media sites and analyses data in more depth and measures influence with 4 categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion and Reach so you have an integrated 4-point matrix on your hands.
3. Tweetdeck
The Lowdown: A social media dashboard application for the management of Twitter accounts, Tweetdeck interfaces with the Twitter API to allow users to send and receive tweets and view profiles. You can create a custom Twitter experience by organizing and building custom timelines and keeping track of lists, searches and activities. Tweetdeck is geared up to work with multiple accounts so you can monitor all of your accounts, including direct messages and notifications, all from the same TweetDeck interface.
Why you should use it? Part of the beauty of TweetDeck lies in how much information you can have on screen at the same time. The list of column types you can add is impressive: you can view your timeline, your notifications, your mentions, the activity around your account, your favourites, any of your lists, search results, direct messages, tweets from a single user, trending hashtags and more.
4. Oktopost
The Lowdown: While most social monitoring tools are tailored to B2C management and focus on engagement and brand awareness, Oktopost takes a different approach; it simplifies B2B social media management, helps you manage content and measure the true business value of your social media marketing.
Why you should use it? So like every other social media monitoring tool, you can schedule your content distribution in advance and manage all your social marketing and measure the results for each campaign. Oktopost has another added advantage: it allows you to leverage seamless integrations with third-party platforms such as Marketo, and automatically syncs valuable analytical and lead data so it delivers the true business value of social media, generating new sales and integrating marketing and sales in today’s social-centric marketplace.
5. Brandwatch
The Lowdown: This tool has its own Crawler which continuously crawls all social media platforms for relevant mentions and even cleans up duplicate entries and spam mentions up to the most relevant set of data for the client. Each mention is also analyzed for sentiment detection and for recurring phrase identification. The title and main content of the page is also extracted and displayed within the system.
Why you should use it? The most attractive benefit is the ease of setting up queries. Search queries can be set up using simple Boolean Search operators and different searched can be combined to form a single query. The query also permits using inclusion and exclusion terms to bring out the most relevant mentions, thus narrowing your data for you.
6. SumAll
The Lowdown: This is an analytics dashboard that doesn’t provide analytics on its own but instead aggregates data from multiple other places (including Google Analytics, Paypal, Stripe, MailChimp, Twitter and Facebook) so you can see all your data in one spot. You can use SumAll to set goals, combine metrics, and use the mobile app to view your data, among other things.
Why you should use it? SumAll Is not just the first analytics tool to give users transactional, social and web traffic on a single dashboard; users can see their full social history updated in real time. Site visits, page views and events are important but SumAll connects data from credit card transaction analytics providers such as Authorize.net, across multiple devices and visually sums it up. So you can take five different web analytics services and collapse them into a single sales line on a chart.
7. BuzzSumo
The Lowdown: A search tool that tracks content on all social networking sites and ranks them based on the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest, BuzzSumo monitors content by topic or user and uses an advanced search engine to deliver accurate results. You can even analyze qualities of the most shared content such as the format, style, and tone; Do people tend to share articles that are casual with lots of visuals or is it more serious, and educational?
Why you should use it? With BuzzSumo, you can evaluate the quality of the articles with the most shares. And you can see the list of people who shared the article on their social media. This is very useful as you can reach out to these influencers and ask if they will share articles of the same content, thus increasing the probability of them sharing your article. And you can also find out what these influencers share, thus gaining valuable insights into their distribution behaviour.
It is helpful to monitor your brand online so you can engage when appropriate and respond when necessary. And this is exactly how Hershey’s did it. Rather than promoting events that are happening elsewhere, Hershey’s found success with a S’mores photo contest held entirely on Facebook. Posting once or twice every day, with the philosophy that “more content generates more engagement”, fans’ questions are answered if the company’s “decision tree” determines that they should receive a response. So there’s a system in place to respond to questions, but it doesn’t guarantee that each post will receive a reply.
Like Hershey’s, you can use social media to engage your fans, but you don’t always have the upper hand on how the conversation will go. But this is definitely something you can attempt to regulate. These tools are time savers that make monitoring easy. Many of these tools are notification systems that allow you to act when you see alerts. And most of all, these platforms have a real-time search component.
So if you’re monitoring a brand of any size, a combination of these tools will help you stay on top of conversations and become part of your social strategy.
Posted by Stephanie Robert, Advocate, PR, CorpMedia
Corporate Media Services 