I Tested the 5 Best Free Social Media Monitoring Tools — Here’s How They Stack Up
By bwhalley@hubspot.com (Brian Whalley)
In business, reputation is everything. It can decide whether someone gives you their attention or, even more significantly, their sale.
However, with more than 5 billion people worldwide using social media to produce a constant flow of information, interaction, and opinions across dozens of platforms, reputations are harder than ever to maintain. That’s why free social listening tools are so important.
In this article, we’ll talk through why social media monitoring matters to marketers and test out five of the most popular social media listening tools out there.
Table of Contents
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring, sometimes referred to as social media “listening,” is the practice of examining what social media users say about a specific topic.
For marketers, this topic is usually a brand, competitor, product, service, or even campaign.
With so many different platforms today, social media monitoring can take many forms. It could mean tracking specific:
- Keywords (could be your industry, product type, the problem you solve)
- Hashtags
- Users (think influencers, your loyal customers, or “power users”)
- Names (i.e., competitors, products, or even people), or
- Mentions/tags of a user
It can also take place directly on the platforms themselves or in third-party tools, which we’ll discuss shortly. For instance, back in my agency heyday, I used to have about 25 streams I would track in HubSpot with client competitors and handles.
Depending on your brand and goal, social media listening can also offer all kinds of different insights to shape your strategy.
It can help you navigate public relations crises, develop new products, evaluate your customer satisfaction, and even discover new markets or marketing trends.
What trends are we seeing when it comes to social media in general? Our 2024 Social Trends Report shares exclusive findings on how people engage across social personally and professionally. Get it free now.
For example, let’s say you’re a software company and see people talk about how bad your customer service is on social media.
That lets you know you need to make improvements, which could mean introducing a live chat on your website or sharing more troubleshooting or educational content on your social media content calendar, among other things.
Or what if you’re a clothing brand that sees an influencer, and your audience loves talking about their favorite trends? Knowing this may help you identify similar styles in your catalog to highlight and promote or even inspire a new design.
The impact is pretty wide, but it all starts from the same place — keeping tabs on the market around you with social media listening. So, don’t slack on making …read more
Source:: HubSpot Blog
