If you want to create and execute a flawless social media strategy, you need to be using social listening tools. Regular social media monitoring tools won't do.
With regular social media monitoring, you only track social media tags/mentions of your brands i.e. when you get a notification because someone tagged your social media account online. But what about the times when people just write your company's name online without tagging?
On Twitter alone, 30.72% of tweets that contain company names do not include the handle, and 53% of people complaining on Twitter want a response in under an hour. How do you plan to get back to the people who don't mention your Twitter handle direct?
The only way to do this is by using a specialized social listening tool that informs you whenever your company name is mentioned online. Along with helping you execute quick customer service, social media listening offers a slew of other benefits, like predicting patterns, better understanding your audience, measuring the negative and positive impact you're making online and much more.
If you are interested in taking advantage of all these benefits and improving your social efforts, here's a list of top social listening tools that are worth a look.
Brand24
Brand24 is a popular social listening tool. Using Brand24, you can view what people are posting about your company on social media in real-time - this includes both tag mentions and mentions sans tags. The influence scores of the people posting these updates is also displayed, making it easy for you to identify top social media users. This information can help you build relationships with influencers and turn them into brand evangelists.
You can respond to these comments directly through the Brand24 dashboard. This ensures you provide swift customer support. It's also easy to get your entire team involved as all their plans let you add additional users.
Brand24 has sentiment analytics, which shows you whether the comments are positive, negative or neutral in nature. This can be useful to not only offer better customer support, but to also analyze how well your social media campaigns are doing. Make sure you take advantage of their alerts feature that keeps you updated on real-time activity via email.
The data can be presented in the form of graphs too, to make it easier to analyze. You can also download it in PDF form.
Brand24 also has a search features that lets you track any topic you want. You can use it to monitor your competitors and trends within your niche.
Pricing:
Free Trial Available: Yes
Starting plan: $49 per month
Biggest plan: $399 per month
Awario
Awario is a very effective social listening tool that lets you track real time updates on websites like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, YouTube and many more.
Awario crawls over 13 billion webpages daily. Their platform has a reach feature that indicates the number of people taking about and exposed to a conversation - this can help you prioritize which conversations to respond to first, which you can do directly from the Awario dashboard. If a positive conversation is picking up pace, you can accelerate its exposure, while burgeoning negative conversations can be nipped in the bud.
You can also use Awario to track keywords in any language - hence, it can help you manage a global presence in one place.
Awario also has powerful analytics that help you easily analyze reach, influence level of users by social network, and more.
Pricing:
Free Trial Available: Yes
Starting plan: $19 per month
Biggest plan: Custom Plan
Mention
Mention is another great social listening tool. They too offer real-time listening to help you keep track of what people are saying online. Results appear from various sources like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, blogs and many more, and in over 42 languages.
Mention provides detailed analytics to help you measure and analyze your results. This includes checking the sentiment impact, i.e. whether you're making positive, negative or neutral impressions on social media.
The data is presented in the form of easy to understand graphs.
You can also gather the same insights about your competitors to check what's working for them and what isn't. This can be used to improve your own social media marketing campaigns.
Mention even makes it easy to find and connect with influencers.
It also comes with a built-in CRM feature that lets you and your entire team easily communicate back with social media users. You can also connect your Buffer account if you want to schedule updates for later.
Pricing:
Free Trial Available: Yes
Starting plan: $29 per month
Biggest plan: Custom Plan
These are the three top social listening tools that I've found, and all of them have very useful features and do a great job. Pick the one that suits your needs and budget best.
As mentioned, all three offer a free trial, so you can test them out before you choose.
Which social listening tools do you use to better understand and communicate with your audience? How do you get the most out of them? Please leave your comments below.