The Top 10 Social Media Listening Tools for Budget Marketers
Juggling an online presence to a single channel is a job in itself, which is why more businesses and brands are constantly seeking a single place to manage it all. There is a constant need for analyzing and listening across platforms—whether it’s to measure the success of marketing efforts, test your audience or simply stay in the loop on relevant discussions.
Thankfully, you don’t have to spend your entire budget on consolidating this data in one place. Plenty of options now exist for individuals, small teams and big companies, catering to a wide variety of goals and monthly spending limits. Here are some of the best tools out there that you can use for seamless social media management.
Brand24 tracks relevant keywords used throughout your community, focusing on what people are saying about you—and how they’re saying it. Brand24’s “Sentiment Analysis” feature uses an algorithm to detect negative, neutral and positive tones around your areas of focus. By displaying interactions and mentions, Brand24 gives you the advantage of listening to your audience’s likes and dislikes, identifying what’s working as well as unmet needs that you can fulfill to keep your crowd engaged.
nTuitive takes the unnecessary manual steps out of your workflow and automates the whole process for you. nTuitive can even save you time with customized auto-engagement features that will reply to comments, retweet and like content published by other influencers and audience members. If your team has collaborators, clients or trainees who you want to involve in your process without giving free range to manage your content, nTuitive’s collaborative features also enable project owners to set permissions and limit the number of cooks in your content kitchen.
Twitter enthusiasts know that a high Klout score can have a big impact on your social status. Klout knows that without authentic engagement, a high number of followers is simply a vanity metric. That’s why they also factor in the performance of content into their score system. Along with seeing your own Klout score, this tool allows you to measure other individuals and brands where their presence really counts. This is especially helpful for those who must identify the social influence of competitors, influencers and potential partners in new markets.
You wouldn’t want to be known for only talking about yourself, and neither do brands when it comes to social media. If you’re looking to add more curation into your content strategy, Buzzsumo helps you search for topical content that is quickly going viral or is shared by other influencers. It can be tough to know where to look for shareable, non-competing content that flatters your brand’s presence. BuzzSumo helps you find and share what matters to your audience, identifying the content creators who are churning out gold and the most frequently shared URLs within your community.
Have you ever looked at Twitter’s topline metrics but weren’t clear on the real reasons behind your numbers? Keeping track of these details can be tough if you’re sifting through notifications. Especially handy for unique campaign names and hashtags, TweetReach identifies the big names mentioning you and retweeting you, with detailed “snapshot” reports showing how your activity contributes to your metrics.
SocialMention’s keyword search sorts through overflowing content from sources like Reddit, putting these topics into context and showing how they’re discussed across the web. At no cost, you can search by specific types of content (blog posts, video, etc.) and view SocialMention’s sentiment analysis along with the measure of a keyword’s strength, frequency and length of discussions happening in real time. Along with the keywords you search for, you can view relevant associated words and what’s trending in the moment.
HootSuite is not new to the social media world, but over the years it has expanded into a full-service destination for teams of all sizes and users of all levels. It is an ideal tool for anyone who wishes that their whole team spoke the language of social media. HootSuite makes this possible by including educational features into monthly plans and helps to take some of the training off your hands. And as sweepstakes and contests are increasingly recognized as a fail-proof way to gain traction on social, HootSuite also offers this as a feature in its plans, with efficient help you through the whole process.
The Twitterverse is massive—and moves insanely fast. Twitonomy wrangles the real data you need by exporting tweets, mentions, retweets and more to an Excel spreadsheet or PDF so you can search specifics without endless scrolling. Twitonomy also helps with the daunting and lengthy task of sorting through accounts you follow, letting you know who isn’t following you back and giving you insight into your list of followers. If you’re more visual and can’t stand spreadsheets, their dashboards are easy to read with geographic insights on a map and charts consolidating key metrics.
Mention funnels all chatter about specific topics, competitors and media into one destination. You can also use this tool to monitor content published across websites, acting as a built-in “Google Alerts” that can supplement your social listening. Their interface makes it incredibly easy to prioritize content and view all sources in an inbox-style setting, where you can mark notifications as “read” and flag mentions you don’t want to miss.
Nuvi offers a futuristic experience with compelling visual reports of your channels and audiences. “Whitelabel” reports are one of Nuvi’s key features, pulling out your most appealing metrics so you can craft your best story for new client leads or stakeholders. International brands will also love Nuvi for taking “sentiment analysis” a step further as it translates the tone of audiences in 15 languages.