Social media might be a place to build relationships with your audience. But if you’re left in the dark about what’s going on with them, how do you expect to strengthen those relationships?

The answer to that question is social media monitoring, an activity that can be key in helping you make the most of your relationships with your audience.

With social media management tools like Sociality.io, you’ll be able to stay on top of everything that happens to your brand on social media and how it affects your social media strategy.

In this post, I’ll show you what you can get from social media monitoring. And then, give a list of top social media monitoring tools that you can use to get started.

Let’s begin.

What is social media monitoring?

In simple terms, social media monitoring means keeping an eye out for conversations and activities relating to your brand. 

It means having a 360-degree view of your brand’s reputation and performance on social media. 

Why should you invest time and resources in this?

For starters, social media monitoring allows you to get better with customer support.

If you have a centralized place to track all of your mentions on the web, it becomes easier to respond to everyone. Social media monitoring tools like sociality.io give you one inbox to engage with all your comments and mentions. This way, you can communicate with your audience in real-time without switching between multiple social media platforms.

Also, social media monitoring helps you gauge the public sentiment around your brand. 

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you just released a campaign. You want to know what people think about it before it gets out of hand.

If it’s terrible, you go into crisis-prevention mode. And if it’s good, you learn what you did to make it so. A social media monitoring tool comes in handy in this case.

You can track every interaction with that campaign on several social media platforms and gauge your audience’s reaction to it. You’ll know if their sentiments are generally neutral, positive, or negative.

That’s not all. There are numerous other ways you can use social media monitoring to your advantage. Some of the use cases include:

• You can use it as a source of insight before starting anything, like launching a marketing campaign.
• You can use it to keep an eye on your competitors’ activities.
• You can use it to discover conversation themes within your audience.
• And, of course, it comes in handy during crisis management.

Top 10 social media monitoring tools in 2021

These are the best tools you could use to get a holistic view of your social media relationships. These tools are:

• Sociality.io
• Hootsuite
• Sprout Social
• Brand 24
• Keyhole
• AgoraPulse
• Brand Mention
• Zoho Special
• Buzzsumo
• Mention

I’ll review each tool below.

Sociality.io

Sociality.io is an all-in-one social media management platform. What this means to you is that social media monitoring comes with the entire package. Other functions include publishing, scheduling, and reporting.

Sociality.io Listen Module is the first place you want to go when monitoring your social media accounts. Here, you’ll be able to track all your mentions and analyze the sentiments behind them.

You’ll also be able to choose what attribution you want to track. Let’s say you want to know how many complaints have been made about your brand in the last 3 months. All you need to do is to pick complaints from the list of attribution options. And click APPLY to get your result.

The moves your competitors make are also relevant to your brand. So it makes sense to track them too. Sociality.io has an entire section that helps you achieve this.

You’ll be able to track your competitors’ follower growth, their engagement, best-performing posts, and many more.

All these results can be documented in easily understood reports.

Hootsuite

Like Sociality.io, Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media management platform that comes with social media monitoring features.

With its Search Stream feature, you’ll be able to monitor any platform for activities like conversations, mentions, keywords, and hashtags. You’ll then be able to respond to all of these activities from a single place instead of hopping between different social media platforms.

When searching for brand activities online, Hootsuite allows you to customize your search based on criteria like keywords, hashtags, locations, and so on. This way, you can double down on what you need to know.

Hootsuite’s pricing plan begins at $19 per month.

Sprout Social

You’ll find out that there are plenty of all-in-one social media management tools out there. Sprout Social is another one of those.

It is a listening tool that allows you to track conversations and keywords around relevant topics. This way, you’re never blindsided by your brand’s public sentiment or health.

There’s another thing. Based on post-impact, you can use Sprout Social to discover influencers in your niche. With a little attention, you can turn these influencers into your brand advocates.

Sprout Social starts at $89 per user per month.

Brand24

This is one of the most reputable social media monitoring tools you can find. Unlike the other tools we’ve seen so far, Brand24 is primarily a social media monitoring tool.

Firstly, you’ll get a mention feed where you can monitor what people say about your brand in real-time. Here, you’ll be able to follow up on positive comments and try to convert your customer into a brand advocate. Or respond to negative feedback before it gets out of hand.

Another thing it gives you is the ability to track fluctuations in brand mentions. This can come in handy if you want to avoid a social media crisis.

Lastly, Brand24 has a metric called the influencer score. This score gives insight into which members of your audience have the most significant impact on social media. That’s a very useful way to find and recruit influencers for your brand.

Brand24 starts at $49 per month.

Keyhole

Keyhole is another social media tool that can be used for monitoring your social media metrics and overall performance.

While Keyhole does not provide you with individual mentions of your brand, it allows you to track your campaign impacts, influencer partnerships, and customer conversations.

You’ll be able to listen across multiple social media networks and get access to your brand’s sentiment analysis. And if you need all these results for a presentation, Keyhole allows you to generate beautiful reports for that purpose.

You’ll have to talk to Keyhole’s team to create a pricing plan that works for you.

AgoraPulse

This is another all-in-one social media management platform.

AgoraPulse has a feature that allows you to label items such as important posts, customer feedback, or competitors’ activities and organize them in one place. This is so that you can easily retrieve and act on them.

Also, when searching the web for what people say about you, AgoraPulse has search parameters that allow you to focus on what matters – and drown out the noise. You can use boolean operators to customize your search so that you get what you want.

AgoraPulse offers a free plan. But premium plans start from $79 per month.

Brand Mentions

This is primarily a social media monitoring tool.

According to the company, the tool searches every corner of the internet to find all relevant mentions of anything. This means that you can use it to track everything that’s been said about your brand and product on every channel.

With this tool, you’ll get a real-time alert of who mentioned you and what was said.

Brand Mentions is also useful for competitor research. Just plug in your competitor’s name, and you’ll be able to spy on their strategy.

Brand Mentions starts at $99 per month.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social has a social listening dashboard for tracking posts relevant to your brand. With this, you can measure the buzz around your brand with the mentions and keywords search columns.

The tool also has you covered if you want the real-time engagement history of any member of your audience. This means that you can quickly view anyone’s profile and learn how often that person has engaged with your brand.

Like other platforms we’ve reviewed so far, Zoho Special also provides you with a single space to handle all direct messages and comments.

You can get started with Zoho Special for $10 per month for businesses. It starts at $200 per month if you run an agency.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo’s primary function is as a content analysis tool, but it can also work as a social media monitoring tool.

Like Brand Mention, it allows you to search the web for any content that contains your search term. You can set up alerts that’ll make sure you don’t lose sight of your competitors, brand mentions, or industry updates.

That’s not all. Buzzsumo also allows you to view the engagement behind those content on different social media platforms. 

Buzzsumo has a free plan that gives you 10 free searches per month. The paid plans start at $99 per month.

Mention

Mention enables brands and agencies to monitor what’s been said about them across the web. Mention doesn’t just scour social media for information. It also extracts mentions from platforms like TripAdvisor, Amazon, Yelp, and so on.

With Mention, you’ll also receive a daily recap of key information of the day. And an email notification when there is a spike in mentions. This tool has a free plan. But its paid plans start at $29 per month.

Conclusion

Social media monitoring is one tactic you should use to improve the relationships you have with your audience. And the tools mentioned above have the features to help you achieve that.

However, if you want a tool that helps you handle the different aspects of social media management and not just monitoring, you should consider sociality.io.

Trusted by over 2000 marketers, Sociality.io is a comprehensive social media platform that takes the stress out of managing multiple social media accounts.

And our customers think so too.

According to Zeynep Serra Avan – content editor at AnnounceKit:

Thanks to Sociality.io, I have more time and energy to focus on how [I can present content to the right companies] creatively and in a more sustainable way.

You can get started with Sociality.io for free too. No credit card required.