Social media can be a good resource for promoting a business. But if you’re just plugging your brand, you’re missing the point. Listening to others is an effective way to learn about your customers and to measure your impact.
Here is a list of tools for social media monitoring. Listen to multiple networks from a single dashboard, receive alerts when you’re mentioned, or even keep tabs on a competitor. Track your social media stats, and discover what you need to grow your followers. All of these tools are relatively inexpensive, half of the tools offer free plans.
Tools for Social Media Monitoring
Buzzsumo. Buzzsumo gives you insight into the content that’s working and the influencers amplifying it. Discover content that mentions your keyword, or when an author or competitor publishes new content. Track your competitors’ content performance and do detailed comparisons. Monitor share activity across major social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest. Price: Plans start at $99 per month.
Social Mention. Social Mention is a social media search platform. Track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product, or any topic in real time. Social Mention monitors 100+ social media properties, including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Digg, and Google. Price: Free.
Mention. Monitor sources in 42 languages to make sure you’re not missing anything on social networks, news sites, blogs or any web page. Connect social accounts to your alerts and react without leaving the application. Get alerted in real time via push notifications. Receive daily or weekly email digest. Price: Plans start at $29 per month.
HowSociable. HowSociable provides a simple way to measure and monitor your brand’s impact on the social web. Its magnitude score provides an indication of the activity around a brand during a given week. The site analyzes activity on up to 36 popular websites. Price: Plans start at $9 for 3 months.
Addict-o-matic. Addict-o-matic is a search tool to monitor buzz about your site. Pull results via RSS from news and search sites, including Google, Yahoo, Technorati, Ask, YouTube, Truveo, Flickr, Blinkx, Ice Rocket, Digg, Topix, Newsvine, and Tweetscan. Price: Free.
Topsy. Topsy is a real-time search engine powered by the social web. Topsy indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations millions of people are having every day about each specific term, topic, page or domain queried. Price: Free.
SumAll. SumAll was created to give companies of all size access to all of their data in one simple dashboard. Track your social media stats from over 30 accounts for free. Premium account provides SumAll reports to show the fruits of your labor and insights to help you understand and improve social media performance. Price: Tracking is free. Premium services start at $59 per month.
Sprout Social. Sprout Social helps you monitor and manage your social interactions. The Smart Inbox brings all your messages from all your profiles into a single, filterable stream. Discover what people are saying about you, your business, your products, or any topic in real time. Track campaigns, monitor competitors and keywords, and more. Price: Plans start at $59 per month.
WhosTalkin. WhosTalkin.com is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding topics. Data is taken from over 60 popular social media gateways. Price: Free.
Pluggio. Pluggio is a Twitter and Facebook manager. Pluggio automatically tracks and generates graphs for several account metrics, so you can easily see your performance and audience growth. Optional integration with Bit.ly also allows you to see click stats for links you share, so you can see the impact your posts are having. Price: Basic plan is free. Premium plans start at $12.95 per month.
SharedCount. SharedCount is a service that looks up the number of times a given URL has been shared on major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, and StumbleUpon. Track URL shares, likes, tweets, and more. Price: Free plan includes up to 10,000 daily queries. Premium plans start at $40 per month.
Social Searcher. Social Searcher allows real-time search in social networks and provides analytics. Search without logging in for information on Twitter, Google+ and Facebook. Save searches and set up alerts. Premium social monitoring features include saving mentions history, API integration, advanced analytics, and immediate email notifications. Price: Basic is free. Premium plans start at 3.49 € per month.
Edgerank Checker. Edgerank Checker is a tool to analyze and score your Facebook page. Get actionable steps to increase engagement. Examine when fans are online to optimize timing strategies. Back test specific days, such as holidays, to see when fans check Facebook. Price: Basic is free. Pro plan is $90 per month for three pages.
Followerwonk. Followerwonk is a Moz app to dig deeper into Twitter analytics. Followerwonk tracks changes to your social graph and presents interactive charts to explore changes to followers and follows. Breakout your followers by location, bio, who they follow, and more. Contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends. Price: Moz starts at $99 per month.
NutshellMail. NutshellMail gathers the latest activity from your social networking accounts and emails you a summary. Keep track of Facebook likes, posts, comments, and insights. See mentions, new followers, quitters, search results, and tweets from your favorite lists in your Twitter summary. Keep track of ratings, reviews, and check-ins. Price: Free.
Trackur. Trackur monitors mainstream media and social media such as blogs, Twitter, Facebook, forums, images, and video. Track mentions in real time. Find out who’s talking about you, as well as how influential they are. Price: Plans start at $97 per month.
TweetReach. TweetReach helps measure the Twitter activity that’s important to you – accounts, topics, hashtags, and competitors. Track tweets about campaigns in real time, and watch as the conversations unfold. Price: Plans start at $99 per month.
SocialOomph. SocialOomph is a tool to monitor and boost social media activity with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS feeds, blogs, Plurk, and App.net. Track keywords, view mentions and retweets, mimic the following of others, manage and schedule multiple accounts, and more. Price: Basic is free. Professional is $35.94 per month.
Postific. Postific is a tool to track your engagement and analyze the results for posts and social networks in one place. Set up your alerts and get instant notifications if people are talking about your business. Manage social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, and more. Extract engaged users and organize them into your contact management tool. Price: Plans start at $7.99 per month.
Oktopost. Oktopost is a social media marketing tool to manage content and measure which networks, profiles, and posts are most effective. Manage all of your social marketing, and measure the results for each campaign. View clicks, conversions, and engagement for every post, message, and group. Leverage integrations with third-party platforms such as Salesforce.com and Marketo, and automatically sync analytical and lead data. Price: Plans start at $55 per month.
Hootsuite. Hootsuite is probably the most widely known platform to manage social media. Its tool uberVU gives real-time data from over 100 million sources in 50+ languages across 25+ social networks and other platforms. Get detailed demographics and filter by location, language, gender, time, and sentiment. Identify and respond in real time to any unusual spikes in volume, sentiment, or other measure. Price: Free plan allows for 3 social networks with 1 user; Pro plan starts at $9.99 per month for up to 100 social networks and up to 9 users.
Google Alerts. Google Alerts sends you email notifications any time Google finds new results on keywords that interests you. Monitor the web for new content. Price: Free.
SocialBro. SocialBro lets you manage, explore, and analyze your Twitter accounts. Analyze real-time and historical Twitter content to discover the most relevant data quickly and easily. Mine for data based on complex queries, using combinations of hashtags, mentions, and keywords. Zoom in on important demographics that affect your marketing strategy. Price: Free for 5,000 social contracts. Premium is $13.95 per month.