You must be aware of what consumers are saying about your business online if you hope to be successful with your social media strategy. Additionally, you must be aware of what is being said about your goods or services, rival companies, your sector, your newsletter, your customer support, your new logo, and pretty much everything else related to your company.

Why? For social media marketers, business intelligence is available for free! Knowing what people think of you allows you to advertise your brand in a way that will increase engagement and conversions.

A social media monitoring tool is the most effective approach to acquire this information. This post will discuss some of the top social media monitoring tools available today, explain how to set up social media monitoring, and offer some excellent advice for maximising the value of the information you’re collecting.

What is social media monitoring?

Tracking keywords, hashtags, and mentions about your company, merchandise, or sector on various social media sites is known as social media monitoring. You may use it to get ideas for new blog entries and marketing initiatives as well as to measure KPIs like brand sentiment and satisfaction. The data you obtain from social media monitoring can assist you in making decisions about topics like:

• Relevant keywords and hashtags, such as the Instagram and Pinterest keywords that may broaden your audience.
• Trends, what is being discussed at the moment? What new concepts or memes are trending, and which social networks are introducing fresh features?
• Social ROI, is your financial investment in sponsored posts and paid social marketing paying off?
• Social share of voice, or the proportion of the discourse that is focused on your brand as opposed to that of your rivals
• Social sentiment analysis, what’s the mood of the conversation?

Brands may utilise social media monitoring to determine when and how best to lead customers toward the checkout. You shouldn’t, for instance, shove your product in someone’s face the moment they enter your office. To determine if your product is the best option for them or not, you would first listen to them.

The situation is the same on social media. You must pay attention to what users are saying if you want to be relevant.

Recall that social media listening and monitoring are two distinct activities. Following monitoring, social listening entails acting on the indicators you examined throughout the monitoring phase.

Top tools for brand social media monitoring

Social media monitoring for businesses involves more than just entering your brand name into the search bars on Facebook and Instagram. It’s a little more complicated, therefore to make your task simpler, you’ll need a brand monitoring tool (or two!).

Below are 7 of our hand-picked favourite social media monitoring tools:

1. Hootsuite

Platforms supported: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.

Hootsuite is a robust social media analytics and management platform with monitoring features. You can create personalised search streams with Hootsuite for every social media network you want. You may then view the pertinent hashtags, themes, trends, and mentions of your company, its products, rivals, and market.

Hootsuite’s free plan allows you to set up streams, but if you want in-depth statistics, you may sample the professional plan for free for 30 days. Visit Hootsuite Insights to learn more about social listening in depth. You may observe a live stream of millions of social media discussions with this programme.

Any term may be searched for, and other filters including geography, demography, and date can be used. Additionally, you’ll be able to recognise thought leaders, comprehend how your audience feels about your business, and receive notifications the moment your mentions start to expand in a suspicious way.

2. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a free social media monitoring tool that keeps tabs on sentiment, brand mentions, and keywords across several geographies and tongues. Mentionlytics is accessible on all significant blogs, forums, and social media sites.

3. Reputology

With the help of the free programme Reputology, you can keep an eye on popular review websites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews from a single dashboard. With Reputology, you can keep track of your customer evaluations, respond to favourable ones, and deal with unfavourable ones before they get out of hand. Additionally, you may react with fast links while keeping track of consumer behaviour across several locations and stores.

4. Nexalogy

You can keep tabs on talks on the majority of the main social media sites and the entire web with the free application Nexalogy.The excellent data visualisations offered by Nexalogy set it apart from the plethora of social media monitoring programmes available online.

Nexalogy offers lexical cluster maps, geolocation-based heat maps, and interactive timelines that display frequent patterns and trends. The most popular keywords and active accounts are also displayed by this tool.

5. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro

As you might have predicted, this premium application solely keeps an eye on Reddit conversations. And that’s fantastic because Reddit is a treasure trove of frank, in-depth discussions. There are around 430 million active users on this underutilised site each month.

Additionally, you can keep an eye on what these individuals are saying about your company, your rivals, and your sector using Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro. You may configure this program to watch as many Reddit groups as you like to learn what your audience thinks of you.

6. Tweepsmap

Twitter has a specific social media monitoring tool, just like Reddit. Its name is Tweepsmap. To help you understand what your audience is talking about, this free application combines analytics and social monitoring features to display Twitter users which topics and hashtags are trending.

7. Talkwalker

You may monitor discussions across 150 million data sources, including blogs, videos, forums, review sites, news websites, and social media platforms, with the help of the premium service Talkwalker. You can simply keep an eye on your reach, comments, engagements, and brand sentiment using Talkwalker.

Get started with social media monitoring with these steps

1. Select the ideal social media monitoring tool for your requirements.

Go back to the list above if you haven’t chosen a social media monitoring tool yet.

2. Create a list of pertinent keywords

Consider the phrases people use to describe your brand as you begin to come up with potential keywords. If you own a cocktail establishment, your distinctive minty mojito may get more attention than your CEO. However, if you run an innovative AI firm, your greatest investor may let others know about you. So, here’s where to start to obtain these keywords:

• Your brand name as both handle and mention (like this: @BurgerViralKL and #BurgerViralKL)
• Product name(s) (like this: #NasiKerabuMama and #AmyFashion)
• Catchphrases or slogans
• Names of influencers, thought leaders, spokespeople, etc.
• Branded hashtags (like #JustDoIt and #FingerLickinGood)

This procedure should be repeated for each of your top rivals. When you’re finished, turn your attention to your industry, sector, or specialisation.

• Industry keywords or hashtags (like #cryptography #socialmediamonitoring)
• Location keywords or hashtags (like #KualaLumpurMalaysia and #GunungKinabalu)
• Platform-specific keyword or hashtags (like #chefasli or #facebookcoaches)
• Community/group keywords or hashtags (like #kumpulanpenulis)

3. Set up your brand monitoring tool’s keywords

According to the tool you select, it will spare you from constantly putting a term into the search field if you use a tool that allows for several simultaneous and saved searches.

4. Consistently check your streams

You must often check your streams to ensure that you receive information on time while your monitoring tool searches through millions of online discussions to discover the ones that are most pertinent to you.

5. Review and adjust your keywords as necessary.

Social monitoring isn’t something that can be “done once and done forever,” just like anything else in marketing. Review your search terms after setting up your streams and keeping an eye on talks for a few weeks to make sure they’re actually capturing all the information you need and at the same time filtering out the ones which you don’t.

Try to narrow your search parameters if you’re seeing an unusually high number of results, especially ones that are unrelated. Make your keyword selection a little bit larger if you’re not getting enough results.

Social media monitoring tips just for you

1. Track data in several languages

If you reside in Malaysia, you are most likely accustomed to working in the English or Bahasa Melayu language. However, you should build up streams utilising both English and Mandarin words/phrases if your company recently launched a branch in Taiwan.

Alternatively, if your new customer works in a language other than your own, try working with their team to learn how to spell words. You could profit from employing a language-specific social monitoring tool like Crowd Analyzer depending on the size of your target audience.

2. Find brand ambassadors and influencers to collaborate with

As you follow online interactions, pay attention to the individuals who bring up or interact with your company frequently. You may want to incorporate them in your influencer marketing approach if they consistently encourage or support you and have a sizable fan base. You can identify who your largest supporters are with the use of a reliable social media monitoring tool.

3. While monitoring, simplify your keyword and hashtag approach.

Social monitoring can be useful if you’ve ever struggled to decide which keyword to use for your YouTube video or which hashtag to include in your Instagram Story. As an illustration, Hootsuite Insights provides a word cloud that may help you come up with ideas for hashtags or keywords to utilise in your social media postings.

You may direct visitors to your content by understanding the terms your audience uses to discuss your company and/or industry.

4. Set warnings for odd behaviour

Your social media staff should be the first to notice if your brand sentiment suddenly changes after you send out your most recent email or a rival introduced a new product. Any time may be a catastrophe in the internet world. Even the finest (and biggest) brands occasionally experience this, and it frequently escalates very fast.

If your mention volume unexpectedly increases or if social sentiment suddenly plummets, social media monitoring can instantly notify you. The appropriate tool will alert you to this and provide you with current information to aid in problem-solving decisions.

5. Describe your outcomes

Inform your team of what you observe as you keep an eye on these talks. Social media managers have a priceless perspective on the online reputation of their company. Create social media monitoring reports on occasion to share your brand emotion with your team and supervisors.

Two factors make this significant:

• It demonstrates that your work justifies the marketing budget that your business has allocated.
• It makes sure that the individuals in your organisation who are in charge of making important choices are aware of your insights into your current and future clients.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Regardless of the sector your business operates in, pick a technology that effortlessly integrates social media monitoring with personalised analytics.