5 Essential Social Media Monitoring Tools for Beginners

Do you know what people are saying about you and your business online? Are you using the right social media monitoring tools?

As social media grows strong, so too does the complexity of being able to effectively monitor and manage what people are saying about you and what you are saying back. As a result an entire industry in social media monitoring software has emerged alongside the huge social media marketing industry.

There are a huge number of social monitoring tools out there so knowing which ones to use can be daunting, especially for a new business that is just beginning to get involved in this type of marketing. The best way forward is to jump straight in and start trying a few out.

Here we give you a quick overview of some of the most useful and popular tools for social media monitoring and management…

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the ultimate social media Swiss army knife, allowing you to schedule posts, track brand mentions and manage multiple social networks all in one easy-to-use interface. Hootsuite allows you to give team members access to you or your client’s social media accounts via the Hootsuite dashboard, instead of having to give them the passwords to the accounts themselves. One of the extremely useful upshots of this is that if a team member leaves the company, you can revoke access to all of the accounts at once by simply removing them from the Hootsuite team. Because they only have access to account management via Hootsuite, this protects you from the potential for account theft.

Features:

– Manage multiple accounts in one window

– Find new content to publish easily

– Schedule tweets and messages

– Track brand mentions

– Analyse social media traffic

Pricing:

Free for individual use with up to three social media profiles. Pro accounts start at £7.99 ($8.99) a month and allow 50 profiles plus the addition of team members. Enterprise accounts are offered for large organisations.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a social monitoring tool with a laser-focus on Twitter. This tool lets you find related Twitter accounts, track followers, compare users and search within your social graph. Twitter’s own built-in search tools are incredibly limited, and Followerwonk aims to correct this, making it easier to find the right people to engage with. If you have been struggling with Twitter because you find that the signal to noise ratio on the network is so poor, then Followerwonk could revolutionize how you use the service.

Features:

– Search Twitter profiles on data, bio, location, name & URL

– Compare Twitter accounts

– Get graphs of account activity

– Manage multiple Twitter accounts in one service

– Track followers to see gains and losses in your audience

– Sort followers by different criteria

Pricing:

There is a basic limited version of the service offered free of charge. To access the full features you must be a Moz subscriber. The standard Moz account is $99 per month, and the next tier up is $149 per month. The primary difference between tiers is the number of campaigns that users can run per account.

Mention

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Mention is a real-time social media monitoring tool that monitors a huge number of news and social sources, including forums and blogs in more than 40 different languages, ensuring that you never miss a news story or a mention of your brand.

Features:

– Real-time updates when content is posted

– Connect multiple social media accounts

– Allow multiple people to manage your profiles with the team feature

– Get detailed statistics and reports

– Buffer integration

– Unlimited history

Pricing:

Mention has a Basic free plan which allows one user and one alert and tracks up to 250 mentions a month. Premium accounts start at €29 a month for 3 alerts and 3,000 mentions, up to €299 a month for 10 alerts and 50,000 mentions a month. Pricing details for enterprise accounts are available upon request.

Topsy

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Topsy is a social search and analytics tool that allows you to keep track of links, tweets, photos, videos and more, and get an at-a-glance overview of the key influencers in your niche. Topsy has been indexing Tweets since 2006, so you can be confident that you will get a comprehensive overview of your niche – whatever keyword it is that you are interested in.

Features:

– Search the social web by links, tweets, photos, videos or influencers

– Find the biggest influencers on social media with the Top 6K Rankings

– Detailed analytics, including influence statistics, social trends and comparisons

Pricing:

Topsy is a free service but pro accounts with enhanced analytics do exist.

Buffer

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Buffer is a social media sharing and scheduling tool that helps you to manage multiple accounts at the same time, schedule content, collaborate with team members and access statistics regarding how your posts are performing. Buffer’s best feature is its scheduling tool, which allows you to pre-post content to go out at specific times of the day.

Features:

– Queue posts and schedule posting time

– Team collaboration

– Manage up to ten accounts at once

– Detailed analytics

– Chrome extension

– Rich analytics (small business plan or above)

Pricing:

Small business accounts start at $50 a month and support up to 25 accounts and 5 team members with access to rich analytics. Large business accounts are $250/month and support 150 accounts and 25 team members. There is a 50% discount offered for non-profit organizations.

For individuals there is a free plan and the $10 awesome plan which lets you connect more accounts. The detailed analytics features are absent for these 2 plans.

Conclusion

Modern social media marketing requires the overview of a lot of data at one time and with the proliferation of social media platforms to manage, the best way to do this is to employ a social media monitoring tool. The above are just a handful of some of the best available today but there are countless other social media tools out there so be sure to shop around.

Whilst you don’t want to go overboard in terms of the numbers of tools you’re using at one time, the more you can know about your brand and the way that people are engaging with it, the better equipped you will be to provide people with the content that they are most interested in. Engaging the help of three or four social monitoring and management tools like those described above can make this job a whole lot easier. Try a few different tools in parallel with each other until you find the one that works best for your brand.

Which social media monitoring tools do you use? Which ones are perfect for beginners and advanced users? Please leave your comments below.

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