The beginning of a new year is as good a reason as any other to try something new: a different lifestyle, a new hobby, a brand new marketing strategy.
And, of course, a new tool, since it’s both exciting and rewarding to discover awesome software that helps you deal with work and, sometimes, with life as well.
This is a list of social media monitoring/listening tools you should check out next year.
Some of them have existed for a while, some are new and fresh on the market.
But all of them are worth trying out and using in your marketing tool set (if social monitoring is in your marketing strategy at all, as it should be). So let’s start:
Which social media monitoring tools should you check out this year?
1. Awario
Awario collects mentions of your keywords from a large range of sources (that keeps getting larger).
It monitors all major social media platforms, Reddit and other forums, news sites and blogs, and the Web.
It works in real-time: whenever your keyword is mentioned, it will immediately appear in your mention feed, and you’ll be able to check it at any point and reply to the mention straight from the dashboard. All reviews, complaints, questions and comments can be dealt with as quickly as you like.
Awario also does its fair deal of analysis. It analyses the growth of mentions, their Reach (how many people do mentions reach), its sentiment (a percentage of positive, negative, and neutral mentions), mentions’ locations, languages, and sources.
You can also generate reports on mentions’ statistics, compare analytics with your competitors, and see your industry influencers.
One of the features that makes Awario stand out is Awario Leads – a recent addition made specifically for finding hot leads online. It brings surprisingly good results and can properly transform the way you sell!
Price: Starts with $29/mo. You can also sign up for a free 14-day trial.
2. Mention
Mention is one of the oldest and tried out social media monitoring tools. The French company had the time to mature, discover what the users need, and make sure it delivers the best possible results.
Its main goal is real-time search: you get the results from the past 24 hours after setting up an alert. Historical data is only available on request.
Mention is a good choice for large companies: it monitors all main sources, lets you tag and organize mentions, build your own custom reports and export them in PDF and CSV.
There’s even an automated reports feature: they update you on what’s happening with your alerts on a regular basis. The tool also finds influencers in your industry, reveals their interests, locations, and follower count, and makes it easy to jump into influencer marketing.
Mention is integrated with Slack and Zapier which makes marketing workflow smooth and simple.
Price: Starts with $29/mo. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial.
3. Brand24
Brand24 is a solid social media monitoring tool for small and medium-sized businesses.
It has existed for a while on the Polish market, but focused on the English-speaking part of the world fairly recently. It monitors Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Reddit, YouTube, Instagram, the web and saves historical data for up to 12 months.
Similarly to Awario and Mention, Brand24 filters by countries and languages, provides mentions’ statistics, and Influencer reports. However, reports aren’t white-label and data export is only allowed in the Premium plan.
Brand24 allows multi-user access for up to 99 users, which is great for large social media marketing teams.
Moreover, they have Slack integration and a mobile app, making social media monitoring a process that anyone from the team can do at any point of their day.
Price: Starts with $49/mo. You can sign up for a free 14-day trial.
4. TweetDeck
TweetDeck isn’t quite on the same level as the tools mentioned before, as it only just monitors Twitter.
But that’s fair, since it’s a tool By Twitter for Twitter. The tool doesn’t stop at monitoring: you can also schedule posts for Twitter and look at Twitter analytics.
Basically, it’s a handy tool if Twitter is your preferred marketing channel and the one you want to keep an eye on. After all, it often makes sense: most social media crises happen there, and most brands interact with customers on exactly this social media platform.
Price: Free. Sign up with your Twitter account.
5. Keyhole
Keyhole is a tool that combines a real TweetDeck and a hypothetical TweetDeck for Instagram.
Keyhole does social listening for these two platforms and analyzes the mentions found. It also does automated posting on Twitter and Instagram. Besides these two platforms, Keyhole monitors blogs and news sites.
What Keyhole does especially well is reports. Clear, customizable, and embeddable reports include growth rates, engagement metrics, historical data, social media influencers, and sentiment analysis. You’ve got access to all kinds of presentation forms: clouds, graphs, charts, maps, and so on. It’s a delight for both users and clients.
Price: Starts with $199/mo. Sign up for a free 7-day trial.
6. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a tool made for marketing departments and social media marketing teams that you might find in big corporations. It does social listening across all platforms, blogs, forums, and the web.
It mostly stands out due to its social media analytics and reporting features. Brandwatch collects not only its own social listening data, but also other kinds of data from Hootsuite, Buzzsumo, and Google Analytics.
As a result, you get demographic and psychographic data about your audience, their location and languages, trending topics in your niche, robust sentiment analysis, and all other information you might need to do comprehensive market research.
You also get dashboards that can be exported into customizable PowerPoint presentations.
Price: Starts with $500/mo. There’s no free trial, but you can book a demo here.
7. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another social media monitoring tool that’s made mostly for agencies.
It monitors even niche social media platforms, such as Flickr, Pinterest, Foursquare, SoundCloud, Twitch, and so on, in addition, of course, to all the main ones, such as blogs, forums, news sites, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. It stands out for the ability to analyze images (e.g., find all photos with your logo).
Talkwalker is integrated with Google Analytics and analyses age, gender, occupation, location, languages; identifies main content themes and mentions’ sentiment.
Just as Brandwatch, Talkwalker is meant to work with great amounts of data rather than with specific mentions, and its main uses are market research and reputation management.
Price: Freemium, paid plans start with $700/mo. Start for free here.
Conclusion
So here you go: you’ve got a sample of the best social media monitoring tools for every kind of budget and every kind of social listening goals: from customer service to lead generation and extensive market research. Go ahead and start the year with a new tool that is best for you and your business!
Read next:
- How to scale your social media marketing to build traffic and leads
- Top social media trends for 2019
- What is social media listening (and how it can help your SEO)
- Experts agree: Social media is ineffective in local link building
The post 7 social media monitoring tools to check out in 2019 appeared first on Search Engine Watch.