The way to make social media truly work for you is by monitoring audience behavior and seeing what they have to say about you, your products and services, and even your competitors.
When you have the proper data in front of you, you can analyze the information to make informed decisions about how you promote on social media in order to achieve maximum engagement - which, in turn, can increase sales.
The key to gathering the data you need is using a great social media monitoring tool, or tools. These programs monitor everything about user behavior - you can track keywords, hashtags, URLs, and much more.
The following are 12 of the best social media monitoring tools worthy of your consideration.
1. Keyhole
Keyhole helps you monitor your Twitter and Instagram accounts - you can look at keywords, hashtags, URLs, and usernames. You can both see data in real-time and historical information, while you can also view heat maps that show you activity levels in certain parts of the world.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a very popular, freemium, social media monitoring software that can track activity across a number of social networks and platforms - those networks and platforms include LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, and WordPress. You can also manage social media accounts by scheduling posts across multiple platforms. If more than one person is handling a social media account, you can also delegate tasks.
3. Twitter Counter
Twitter Counter is a tool used to track your Twitter stats. You can track millions of Twitter users and stats, and there are also buttons and widgets that can be added to websites, blogs, and social media profiles to show the number of followers and the most recent Twitter visitors. You can also see retweets, mentions, and historical data, you can add multiple accounts so you can keep track of them all in one place and you can create custom reports and graphs, and download .pdf reports.
4. Digimind
Digimind measures sentiment, enabling you to see if the perception of a keyword is negative, neutral, or positive. You can also see how the public perceives your brand versus the competition.
5. TweetReach
If you want to see how many people your tweets reach, TweetReach is a great monitoring tool. You can measure the impact that social media discussions have, and you can also learn about your most influential followers, which points you toward the right people. Target those people, and you're most likely to see better results.
6. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools because it gives you the analytics you need to increase social media engagement. You can also publish posts from the Sprout Social Dashboard and collaborate with your team.
7. Klout
Klout is slightly controversial - there are people that don't like it and there are others who swear by it. Klout's influence scoring system has a reputation for being inaccurate, but it can be used to fine-tune posts in order to achieve optimum engagement. Overall, Klout is a worthy Twitter tool for measuring influence through engagement. It gives you information on how people feel about your brand and what influences them.
8. Buzzlogix
Buzzlogix is all about 'catching the buzz' about your products and services so you know what the public is saying in real time. You can also see what people are saying about your competitors and manage all of your social media channels all in one product. If you or a certain keyword is mentioned, you can reply directly from the dashboard, making it a great tool for managing your interaction with the community. The social media analytics and reports are also helpful. You can get started by signing up for the free version.
9. Simply Measured
Simply Measured keeps track of a number of metrics. You can gather data on and analyze earned, owned, and paid activity. This is a paid platform, but you can use the free version to create free reports for Facebook, Instagram, Google+, and Twitter. You can receive insights on competitor fan pages, your Facebook content, Instagram engagement, customer service metrics, and trends.
10. Zoho Social
Zoho social enables you to schedule unlimited posts across your social networks, which makes it a useful social media network manager. You can measure performance and track conversations from one dashboard.
11. Falcon.io
Falcon io gives businesses the ability to keep a consistent brand presence across all social media platforms through team collaboration. It has everything needed for social marketing, and it's simple to use.
12. Buffer
Buffer enables you to schedule content - pack Buffer full of the content you want to be posted throughout the day and it'll automatically send them through to your chosen social media profiles. Buffer enables you to manage Facebook fan Pages and groups, LinkedIn profiles and company pages, Twitter profiles, Pinterest accounts, and Google+. Once content is posted, you can use Buffer's analytics tools to determine what is working and what isn't.
These are some of the best social media monitoring tools to consider, and all of them will help improve your process and give you more information about your audience trends and behaviors.