In today's digital age, keeping tabs on your brand's online presence is crucial. Social media monitoring tools, also known as social listening tools, play a pivotal role in tracking conversations, mentions, and trends across various social media platforms. Whether you want to connect with customers, provide support, measure reach, or understand trends, these tools can streamline the process. In this comprehensive guide, we'll explore the 15 best social media monitoring tools tailored for Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
◼ 15 best social media monitoring tools
1. Hootsuite: Effectively Track Topics that Matter
Description: Hootsuite's monitoring tool, part of its social media management suite, allows users to set up unlimited streams based on mentions, keywords, hashtags, or locations. Integration with 100+ apps enhances functionality. The dashboard provides an organized overview of brand mentions, conversations, and analytics. You can customize streams and dashboards based on specific goals like customer service, lead generation, or brand monitoring. Hootsuite also offers extras like uptime monitoring, link shortening, and post annotations. Its team collaboration features enable multiple users to access streams and engage with mentions.
➤ Pricing: 30-day free trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
➤ Ideal for: comprehensive brand monitoring, team collaboration, integrating third-party apps.
2. Sprout Social: Intelligent, Real-time Monitoring with Sprout
Description: Sprout Social offers monitoring and engagement tools within its social media management software. The Smart Inbox consolidates mentions and messages, while the discovery feature helps find specific keywords. Advanced filters and saved searches allow tracking brand mentions, hashtags, competitors, or influencers. Sprout Social also provides recommendations on ideal posting times and top-performing content. You can collaborate with team members on engagement strategies using shared inboxes. An intuitive mobile app facilitates monitoring on-the-go.
➤ Pricing: 30-day free trial; paid plans start at $249 per month.
➤ Ideal for: consolidated inbox, mobile access, collaboration features.
3. Agora Pulse: Discover What People are Saying About Your Business
Description: Agora Pulse is an all-in-one social media management tool with features like scheduling, monitoring, engagement, and analytics. The inbox collects social media mentions, and the listening feature aids in engaging with relevant feedback. You can track brand sentiment by setting up custom streams for positive, negative, and neutral mentions. Competitor monitoring helps benchmark performance and identify new opportunities. Hashtag tracking provides insights into trending topics and viral content. Other useful features include influencer identification, automated reporting, and post annotations.
➤ Pricing: 30-day free trial; paid plans start at $59 per user per month.
➤ Ideal for: sentiment tracking, competitor analysis, influencer identification.
4. Zoho Social: Get Real-time Updates from Your Audience
Description: Zoho Social's dashboard facilitates post publishing, scheduling, social activity monitoring, and performance analysis. Real-time updates on brand interactions enhance event monitoring capabilities. The conversations module lets you filter mentions by sentiment and tags like questions, complaints or leads. You can create private tags for internal communication between team members. Zoho Social also offers competitive benchmarking based on engagement metrics. Its integration with Zoho CRM allows capturing of leads and creation of support tickets from social media interactions.
➤ Pricing: 15-day free trial; paid plans start at $15 per month.
➤ Ideal for: CRM integration, internal collaboration, competitive analysis.
5. Brand24: Smart Social Media Monitoring for Businesses of All Sizes
Description: Brand24 is a powerful yet affordable tool that goes beyond major social media platforms to monitor blogs, forums, and other sites. It provides in-depth analysis of reach, interactions, and sentiment. You can track brand, product, keyword and hashtag mentions across the web and social media. Custom rules help filter mentions by tags, sentiment and languages. The influencers module identifies key people driving conversations about your brand. Competitor monitoring and content gap analysis provide strategic recommendations. Other features include data exports, customizable reports and annotations.
➤ Pricing: 14-day free trial; paid plans start at $79 per month.
➤ Ideal for: broad reach beyond social media, influencer identification, content gap analysis.
6. Mention: Media Monitoring Made Simple
Description: Mention not only monitors social media but also tracks brand mentions across the web, including platforms like Yelp, Booking.com, and Amazon. Customized plans offer detailed insights and reports. You can set up real-time email and SMS alerts for important brand mentions. The sentiment analysis feature classifies mentions as positive, negative or neutral. Mention's Google Chrome extension lets you monitor brand mentions on any webpage. Team collaboration features like shared projects and custom user roles facilitate better workload distribution. Other highlights include data exports, Google Analytics integration and Zapier automation.
➤ Pricing: 14-day free trial; paid plans start at $49 per month.
➤ Ideal for: broad reach, real-time alerts, Chrome extension.
7. Keyhole: Hashtag Tracking for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
Description: Keyhole goes beyond individual brand mentions, providing trends, insights, and analysis of hashtags, keywords, or accounts. You can track reach, engagement, sentiment, content, and influencers for multiple hashtags in a visual, interactive dashboard. Custom reporting and scheduled exports provide data-driven recommendations. Keyhole offers useful extras like uptime monitoring, account management and post annotations. It also facilitates easy comparison between different hashtags and campaigns. While Keyhole focuses specifically on hashtag tracking, its in-depth analytics fill an important niche.
➤ Pricing: 7-day free trial; paid plans start at $99 per month.
➤ Ideal for: hashtag analytics, campaign benchmarking, and scheduled reporting.
8. Iconosquare: Instagram Analytics and Management Platform
Description: Iconosquare, a popular Instagram analytics platform, offers custom feeds for monitoring specific content on Instagram. You can track hashtags, locations, accounts, captions and comments. Advanced filters let you analyze top posts, influencers, followers, and un-followers. Posting templates, content planning, and link-in-bio features facilitate Instagram management. Iconosquare provides audience segmentation by gender, age groups, top locations, and languages. Its competitor benchmarking compares your performance with industry peers. Other useful features include data exports, scheduled reports, and Story analytics.
➤ Pricing: 14-day free trial; paid plans start at €59 per month.
➤ Ideal for: Instagram-specific analytics, audience segmentation, and Stories analytics.
9. Tailwind: Social Media Monitoring for Pinterest
Tailwind is tailored for Pinterest, offering scheduling, analytics, and content monitoring features. It enables users to track their content and competitors while providing insights into emerging trends. You can discover viral Pins in your niche by monitoring engagement metrics for relevant topics. Curating popular Pins onto boards is a nifty feature to boost repins. Tailwind provides audience analysis based on gender, location, and device usage. The platform also recommends the best times to Pin and offers intelligent suggestions to grow your Pinterest presence. Integration with tools like Canva facilitates optimized Pin design.
➤ Pricing: Free forever plan available; paid plans start at $19.99 per month.
➤ Ideal for: Pinterest-specific analytics, curating viral content, and intelligent suggestions.
10. Sendible: Seize Opportunities via Social Listening
Description: Sendible, designed for agencies managing multiple clients, combines scheduling and collaboration with brand, competitor, and industry term tracking. Its real-time stream offers an organized feed of social media mentions. You can address comments and questions swiftly to provide good customer service. Smart inbox and email notifications ensure important conversations are not missed. Sendible provides sentiment tracking to gauge positive, negative or neutral mentions. Customized reports offer campaign-specific and cross-channel analytics. Other useful features include lead generation tools, content libraries and multi-user logins.
➤ Pricing: 14-day free trial; paid plans start at $29 per month.
➤ Ideal for: agency clients, email notifications, sentiment tracking.
11. Meltwater: Track Brand Sentiment and Emerging Trends
Description: Meltwater's monitoring and listening tool allows real-time tracking of brand mentions, industry trends, and competitor activities. Customized dashboards provide insights into sentiment and engagement metrics. You can generate reports focused on media types, languages, locations, and influencers driving relevant conversations. The platform analyzes the tone and reach of press coverage for PR measurement. Competitive benchmarking identifies the share of voice compared to rival brands. Meltwater offers useful extras like alerts, follow-up workflows, and permissions-based account access. Its social CRM feature captures leads and enables quick responses to social media queries.
➤ Pricing: Book a demo for custom pricing.
➤ Ideal for: PR analytics, competitive benchmarking, and CRM integration.
12. HubSpot: Connect with the People You Care About
Description: HubSpot, a comprehensive marketing automation software, integrates social media with CRM and other marketing components. It facilitates better monitoring of leads and customers on social media. You can track interactions happening via social platforms right from your CRM dashboard. HubSpot also allows leveraging of consumer data for targeted ad campaigns. Its built-in analytics provide campaign-specific reports on UTM parameters like clicks, CTR, and conversions. Other key features include email templates, a landing page builder, a meetings scheduler, and more.
➤ Pricing: Starts at $890 per month.
➤ Ideal for: marketing automation, campaign analytics, and CRM integration.
13. Reputation: Real-time Social Intelligence
Description: Reputation gathers real-time social media data, presenting it through insightful visualizations to aid quick decision-making. You can easily monitor online reviews on Google, Facebook, Yelp, and other sites. It facilitates responses to complaints, feature requests, or compliments from one dashboard. Analysis of reviews by rating, content, and sentiment provides strategic recommendations. Competitor benchmarking allows tracking your NPS score versus industry averages. Other features include surveys, alerts, reports, ad management, and more. Reputation integrates with popular platforms like Shopify, Wix, and Instagram.
➤ Pricing: Book a demo for a free trial and custom pricing.
➤ Ideal for: online reviews consolidation, NPS benchmarks, and surveys.
14. Brandwatch: Manage Your Brand
Description: Brandwatch is a robust marketing platform offering social listening, customer engagement, content marketing, and audience management. Social listening features help monitor brand mentions and engage with influencers. Real-time dashboards allow filtering mentions by source, date, sentiment, and author traits. You can analyze conversations based on topics, keywords, handles, or hashtags. Competitor tracking and content analysis provide strategic insights to guide marketing campaigns. Brand tracking surveys gauge awareness, consideration, and preference metrics. Other features include crisis monitoring, automated reporting, data integrations, and more.
➤ Pricing: Book a demo for custom pricing.
➤ Ideal for: crisis monitoring, surveys, content analysis.
15. Talkwalker: Put Social Data Intelligence to Work Instantly
Description: Talkwalker, a powerful media monitoring tool, goes beyond social media to include websites, print, TV, and radio broadcasts. Image recognition technology enhances the identification of brand mentions. Its custom dashboards allow easy filtering of mentions by sentiment, location, demographics, and languages. Topic clusters based on keywords provide insight into emerging trends. Talkwalker facilitates deep analysis of reach, share of voice, and engagement metrics. Useful highlights include real-time alerts, crisis monitoring, influencer discovery, and reporting. Fully customizable platforms cater to the needs of both small business teams and large enterprises.
➤ Pricing: Book a demo for custom pricing.
➤ Ideal for: mass media monitoring, image recognition, and custom platforms.
◼ Key Benefits of Social Media Monitoring Tools
While the above platforms have some distinct capabilities, they offer several common benefits:
- Brand monitoring: Track mentions of your brand, products or services across the web and social media. Identify pain points, new opportunities, and timely trends.
- Influencer identification: Discover credible voices driving conversations relevant for your brand. Strategize win-win partnerships with nano and macro influencers.
- Competitor analysis: Track competitor performance on engagement, reach, and overall presence. Benchmark your metrics and devise plans to stand out.
- Crisis monitoring: Get real-time alerts on urgent issues like bad press or reputation threats. Respond swiftly to mitigate impact and turnaround negative sentiment.
- Audience analysis: Segment target users by location, demographics, interests, and more. Craft messaging and campaigns tailored to persona needs.
- Lead generation: Identify and respond to sales prospects contacting you via social media platforms.
- Campaign measurement: Evaluate performance based on outreach, engagement rates, conversions, and ROI. Tweak strategies to maximize impact.
◼ Key Features to Consider
With an array of tools and plans available, selecting the option best aligned with your social media goals is vital. Here are some key features to factor while decision making:
- Platform scope: Do you want to focus exclusively on social media or also track mentions across review sites, forums, blogs and traditional media?
- Real-time monitoring: Alerts and instant analysis facilitate swift response to urgent issues or sales opportunities. Prioritize tools offering real-time streams.
- Sentiment tracking: Go beyond volume metrics to classify mentions as positive, negative or neutral. Sentiment reveals impact on brand perception and areas for improvement.
- Custom streams: Ability to track brand, product, hashtag, keywords or handles in a single organized feed based on relevance.
- Competitor benchmarking: Evaluate your social media metrics in relation to rivals and industry standards. Identify your strengths as well as gaps.
- Audience segmentation: Discover who is interacting with your brand across parameters like location, age, interests and more. Craft targeted content.
- Influencer analysis: Which authors, publications and personalities are driving relevant conversations? Tap on them to expand reach and engagement.
- Campaign measurement: Tools with UTM parameters, goal tracking and custom tagging allow drill-down evaluation of campaign impact.
- Collaboration features: Options for workload distribution, private tags and assigned inboxes among team members.
- CRM / marketing automation integration: Unified interface to monitor leads and customers across web and social channels.
- Reporting and exports: Scheduling, exporting, notification and visualization tools for data-driven decisions and presentations.
◼ Budgeting for Success
When selecting a social media monitoring tool, consider both short-term goals and long-term vision for harnessing consumer insights. Plan budgets not merely for software fees but also talent and effort needed to analyze conversations and engage consistently.
For most SMBs, monthly software budgets ranging from $50 to $250 per user would be reasonable. However, for comprehensive monitoring and prompt engagement at scale, larger teams and budgets are advisable. Think holistically rather than fixating only on license fees.
◼ Getting Started: Tips for Success
- Start with basics: Identify primary goals - brand monitoring, CRM integration, campaign analytics or a mix - and choose accompanying features. Resist overload.
- Determine scope: Will you monitor only social media or also tap into blogs, news and review sites? Consider bandwidth for engagement before setting broad scope.
- Be proactive: Schedule monitoring workflows as you would for posting rather than checking streams sporadically.
- Collaborate: Divide workload for monitoring and response across team members based on platforms and priorities.
- Set alerts judiciously: Too many alerts are distracting while too few cause you to miss important conversations. Test and tweak notifications.
- Close response loop: Monitoring without consistent engagement and crisis management defeats the purpose. Allocate bandwidth.
- Analyze and optimize: Review streaming feeds, dashboards, and reports. Fine-tune search terms, filters and workflows regularly.
Read also: What Is Social Media Analysis?
Conclusion
Selecting the right social media monitoring tool depends on your specific business needs. Whether you're focusing on individual mentions, hashtag tracking, or comprehensive analytics, the tools listed above cater to a range of SMB requirements. By incorporating these tools into your social media strategy, you can proactively engage with your audience, measure performance, and stay ahead of trends. Try a few trials, assess the features that align with your goals, and take your SMB's social media presence to new heights.
With consumers increasingly living their lives online, social media listening offers invaluable consumer insights to guide your brand growth. The ability for real-time monitoring, swift response, crisis aversion, and campaign optimization gives SMBs a competitive advantage over those still relying on guesswork. Invest in the appropriate software, resources and effort today to reap long-term dividends.