A great way to build your brand awareness is when people talk about your brand across various social media posts.
Sometimes people might like some of your blog posts or some really nice product on your website and share them on their social media platforms, talking about your brand.
It is great when someone talks about your brand and increases your brand awareness among other users on that social media platform.
It is easy to find out when someone mentions your brand on social media, that is because you get a notification when your brand gets tagged.
But what do you do when someone shares your post or mentions about your brand without tagging your brand? How will you find out then?
It is really not possible to visit every social media platform and check for any mentions of your brand.
But don’t worry, this problem of yours can be solved using social media tools. This kind of tool helps you to find out the most relevant and useful conversations for you on social media.
These tools are called social media listening or social media monitoring tools.
There are some social media listening tools which let you keep a check on various social media profiles across various social media platforms that exist, all from a single place.
Some tools are there that even let you keep an eye on the various ongoing social media Trends and the highest ranking keywords.
In this article, we are going to discuss all the social media listening tools that are beneficial for medium-sized and small businesses.
But before we have a look into the various tools that exist, let us first understand what exactly social media listening tools are.
What are Social Media Listening Tools?
Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is the process through which brands can listen out social media conversations that are important to them.
Lots of businesses across the internet adopt social media listening for various reasons like,
- To have a better connection with their customers
- To provide better customer support
- To have an idea of how widespread their social media are or
- Simply to understand the various ongoing social media trends across all the social media platforms.
To do this process of social media listening, brand and businesses use the various social media monitoring tools and become aware of their social media brand mentions, track highest ranking keywords and even hashtags and the URLs that they find interesting.
Now that we have understood what is social media listening, let us get to the point of the article. Here are the best social media listening tools for small and medium-sized businesses:
Social Listening Tools for Small and Medium Companies:
1. SentiOne:
This is one of the newer social media monitoring tools on the block. Currently, more than 2000 brands in almost 3 dozen countries use this tool for their businesses.
The SentiOne tool comes with 3 different tiers of service so that brands can choose which one is the best suited for their business.
The first and the most basic tier of service that exists lets you use social media to monitor keywords, various users and their brand mentions and all recent updates in real time.
It also allows you to track data dating back for up to 6 months.
But if you want to have a track of historical data of over one year, or if you want to have access for more than one account or follow more than one specific market, you will have to choose from the other plans that exist.
Some of the most important features of this tool are:
- It collects data from various social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, opinion website and blogs and news aggregators.
- It lets you monitor the reach of your messages on any particular given day.
- It generates results for you in more than 24 languages
- Whatever social media campaigns you or other brands have launched, you can monitor and track them on various levels, like, categories, competition, communication, and consumers.
- This tool lets you use advanced filters for consumer management and workflow management.
Today, the best marketing minds on the internet have high regards for this tool and speak quite highly of it.
2. Hootsuite:
Hootsuite markets itself as a central platform which you can use to manage all your social media accounts.
Most people use this tool to schedule content sharing on social media platforms and to optimize the content on various platforms. But a lot of people do not know that it is a very effective social media listening platform.
Hootsuite can let you perform a lot of amazing functions that make it easy for you to monitor social media in an effective and efficient way.
You have the option of monitoring various social media networks using location and keywords. It also lets you set up as many numbers of social media streams as you want.
Before you start using a social media listening tool and dig into it, you will first have to determine what you actually want to listen for.
The keywords and topics that you are monitoring for currently, will all evolve with time as you will keep learning by social media listening to what language people are using when they are talking about your business.
That will give you great insight to plan for the campaigns or strategies for your business in the future.
3. Sprout Social:
With over 19000 brands that depend on sprout social to complete their social media listening, you know that you can trust this tool to get all the data that you need from video social media platforms.
Sprout Social is a very popular social media listening tool, that is equipped with some amazing features like:
- It lets you track specific keywords that are related to your industry. The simplest way in which you can follow social media conversation that is going on about your brand is to use your brand name.
- With Sprout Social, you can generate a visual report about the performance of every keyword that you are focusing on.
- It lets you subscribe to Real-Time alert for various hashtags.
- It also lets users integrate and break down the inbound message tagging for all your social media campaigns.
4. Twitter Counter: – Ceased operations
Twitter Counter, as the name suggests, is the tool that lets you track your Twitter statistics.
Using the Twitter Counter tool, you are able to track millions of users and their statistics on Twitter.
This tool also has widgets that you can add to various blogs, websites and social media profiles, which will show you the number of followers of that particular account and the most recent visitors on that profile.
It also lets you see all the brand mentions you got, retweets and also the historical data. This tool also lets you add multiple accounts on the platform so that it is easier for you to keep a track throughout the entire platform of Twitter from one place.
It also lets you create customized reports and graphs and download those reports in PDF form.
5. TweetReach:
This is the best social media monitoring tool that lets you see the reach of all your tweets. It serves as a great social media listening tool.
On this tool, you are enabled to measure and monitor the huge impact that social media discussions can have for your business.
Not just that, this tool lets you know about the most influential followers you have.
With the right kind of influence that some of your followers might have, you get an idea about the right kind of audience that you have to target. When you target that audience after getting a better insight through this tool, it will give you better results.
6. Google Analytics:
One of the most popular social media listening tools that exist on the internet today is Google Analytics.
It is used by millions of companies across the world, regardless of their sizes.
It is a very comprehensive tool that lets you monitor and measures the results of your advertising campaigns, as well as activities on your website, all the applications that you have and also monitors how your brand is performing across various social media platforms.
Google Analytics is not purely a social media listening tool, it is much more than that. It can provide information to business owners which are extremely valuable for them to understand how their activities across various social media platforms can influence the overall performance of the website.
Google Analytics gives you in-depth metrics and traffic demographics, like, the number of page views on your website and the number of websites sessions that you got because of your social media activities.
It also gives you other very important and valuable information like, the number of people who have successfully converted on your site. Be it by filling a form or by buying your products from the time they came across your brand on a social media platform.
The best part about Google Analytics is that it is completely free of cost unless a brand crosses 5 million Impressions in a month, which is a difficult target to achieve for medium-sized and small business.
In short, Google Analytics is a boon for all kinds of digital businesses out there.
7. Buzzlogix: – Closed
As per the name suggests, this tool lets you listen to the buzz that is there about your brand or about your products and services in real time so that you know what exactly people are talking about when it comes to your brand.
Not just that, this tool also lets you listen to what people on the Internet are saying about your competitors and rivals. It also lets you manage and monitor all the social media handles that exist for your product or service.
A great feature of this tool is that whenever there is a mention of your brand or of your product, you can reply to that mention directly from the dashboard of this tool.
So, this tool makes it easy for you to communicate with your audience, which is a very important factor in building awareness for your brand and also for your credibility in your industry.
It also provides valuable real-time information about various social media campaigns. You can get started with a tool when you sign up for the free version.
8. Buzzsumo:
Buzzsumo is not just a social media listening tool, it also serves as a search engine of its own that lets you check what kind of content performs best for a given topic or a keyword.
With this information, you can have deep insight into the content that you share from your website, the different types of trending posts and how your posts are performing as compared to that of your competitors.
Buzzsumo offers its users historical data of 1 to 12 months and also real-time updates.
Buzzsumo does what a lot of other tools cannot. It shows you and helps you to find influencers on a particular kind of topic, and also lets you review the kind of content those influencers are publishing, so that you can have a better idea of where you are lacking in your content.
Buzzsumo offers a free trial period to all its users, after which they can choose to shift to the paid version which has some great features that I just mentioned.
Also, if you are a business owner, you know how important it is to have the right audience demographics.
It lets you understand how you are performing on social media and also helps you measure your return on investment. Buzzsumo lets you have access to all of those metrics.
Wrapping Up:
Well, there are plenty of social media listening tools that are available on the internet. While all of them are unique and have their own great features, it is you who has to decide which tool suits you the best.