Social Media Monitoring Tools: Unveiling People’s Real Views

How do you track people’s opinions about your brand on various social media platforms? You need to monitor all discussions that mention you, but you also need to follow those that don’t tag you. After collecting the data, you must manually set up various reports to understand the social media conversations. It is time-consuming, and you may miss some vital discussions. This is where social media monitoring tools come into play.

You get to keep up with conversations around your brand and engage with your audience with these services. In today’s article, let’s learn more about these tools so that you can leverage them to grow your online presence.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of understanding your audience’s perception of your brand. It involves monitoring various social media platforms and analyzing people’s sentiments.

You understand your audience’s online behavior and preferences. You learn when they engage with your accounts across various platforms, and you can see where they are active.

Also, you discover why they reach out to your brand online. The goal is to gain deep insights about your audience, which you use to improve your social media marketing strategy. You’ll need social listening tools to track and collect this data.

What Is Social Media Scan?

Social media scan, also known as social media monitoring, involves tracking brand-related conversations across platforms and responding to them.

For example, you follow all the posts and comments that mention your account directly or indirectly. It also involves monitoring keywords and hashtags relevant to your brand.

The aim is to stay on top of these conversations to know what’s happening with your audience and niche. You can’t observe this in the distance and let the discussions play out. You must also respond to the mentions from your audience.

For example, you see a post from a customer about receiving a damaged product from your business. In this situation, you can be proactive and help the consumer. You provide a replacement product, turning a disappointed or unhappy individual into a happy customer.

This wouldn’t be possible if you don’t monitor social media platforms regularly. You won’t get a notification if the unhappy customer doesn’t tag you in their post. As a result, you won’t even know about this issue.

Another reason why these tools are popular is because they give the social share of voice. This metric tells you the percentage of discussions about your brand compared to your competition.

Essentially, it allows you to follow and make sense of various trends on social media platforms. You understand your brand’s reach on different networks. It lets you use your account for customer support and helps you learn about your customers.

Why Use Social Media Monitoring Tools? 6 Ways These Services Can Help You

Why use social media monitoring tools in the first place? Below are six ways these services will help you in the short and long run.

1. It Helps Manage Your Brand’s Online Reputation

People often use social media platforms to inform their followers about their experiences with various companies. For example, a person bought a product from your brand and noticed a few flaws.

This individual creates a post about their experience with your product. However, the customer doesn’t tag you in their tweet, so you don’t get any notification.

A social media monitoring tool can track product-related keywords, so you’ll know about this post. Instead of letting it blow up, you can quickly reach out to the customer and offer a resolution.

This maintains your reputation and boosts people’s trust in your brand, products, and services.

2. Recognize Brand Advocates and Influencers in Your Niche

Brand advocates are generally individuals who love your business or what you have to offer. They are the ones who recommend you to people they know.

These users actively engage with your content and regularly share your social media posts. You can identify these people by monitoring various social media platforms and focusing on building strong relationships with them.

Similarly, use these monitoring tools to identify influencers in your niche. With large followings on various platforms, these public figures can help increase your business’s reach. Their followers also value their opinions, which can work in your favor. You can collaborate with them to increase your brand’s credibility.

3. Keep Up With Trends and Stay Relevant

With various monitoring tools, you can easily identify developing conversations before they blow up. What is everyone in your industry talking about? Is there any emerging technology that can significantly impact people’s lives?

Jumping on what will trend before it does gives you a considerable advantage over everyone. For example, you’ll have enough time to personalize your posts to align with the latest trends. Having discussions that revolve around the hottest topics is one of the best ways to stay relevant.

4. Transform Social Networks Into Lead Generators

Social networks are a goldmine for finding leads, which you can convert into customers over time. There’s a lot you can learn from monitoring various conversations. For instance, you manage a winter wear brand’s account on X, formerly Twitter.

You track the keyword, winter wear, with a social media monitoring tool. There’s a post from a prospect asking their followers what brand of winter clothes they should buy. You can join this conversation, promote your cold-weather apparel, and even offer a one-time discount.

Similarly, you come across a post about someone planning a ski trip. If you play your cards right, you can get them to check out your gear. Participating in the right conversations can direct social media users toward your offerings.

5. Track What Your Competitors Do on Various Social Networks

It is essential to be aware of your competitor’s activities on various platforms. What content and marketing strategies do they use to engage with their followers? Who do they consider their target audience to be?

How do people talk about your competitors in their posts? Do they like your competition’s products and services? Monitoring user conversations about your business adversaries can give you ideas on what to do. You can learn how to improve your offerings so that your customers don’t have the same complaints as your competition.

It also gives you insight into positioning your brand and your products or services.

6. Improve Your Customer Support Services

Customers don’t like waiting to hear back from you, especially while facing issues. They may feel like you’re ignoring them, which can turn them away from your brand. Whenever a user contacts your account for customer support, you must be on top immediately.

However, imagine how challenging this will become if you handle multiple profiles simultaneously. Not only do you have to manage hundreds of messages, but you also have to track mentions with user complaints.

With a social network monitoring tool, you can filter out unnecessary notifications and focus only on what’s essential. You can also identify customers facing problems with your products and services and help them resolve their issues quickly.

5 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools You Can Use Today

Here’s a list of your brand’s five best social media monitoring tools.

1. Agorapulse

If you’re looking for a powerful tool for social media tracking, you should give Agorapulse a shot. There are a plethora of features to ensure you can manage your online presence on multiple platforms easily:

• It comes with the social return on investment (ROI) feature, which helps you understand which networks are worth your resources. With this utility, you don’t have to waste your time and resources on platforms with minimal business impact.
• Another area where this social media tool excels is customer support. Anytime you face an issue with this service, you’ll get help to fix it quickly. It’s easy to use, ensuring you don’t have to spend hours training to understand its dashboard.
• You can follow conversations on this platform to learn how your audience perceives your brand. This gives you the necessary data to uncover trends in your niche and prepare relevant content. You can do this by looking for industry-relevant keywords, phrases, and hashtags to see how conversations revolve around them.
• There’s also the instant translator, which converts messages and comments into a language you’re comfortable with.
• You get to learn how efficient your campaigns are on various social networks. For example, you can track what people think of your advertisements. With this information, you can make changes to improve your campaigns.

Whether starting a new business or running an agency, you’ll always find this tool useful. Agorapulse starts with a $49 plan, which gives you adequate features to see why social media managers love this tool.

2. Hootsuite

When the goal is to get an all-in-one social media management tool, you will never go wrong with Hootsuite:

• You can integrate it with other tools and get new features. If there is an app you’re already comfortable with, you won’t have to change your workflow, provided Hootsuite supports it.
• It lets you set up multiple search streams to understand what is happening on any social media platform. Streams are timelines of different social networks, which you can manage from your dashboard.
• At the time of writing this article, Hootsuite is acquiring Talkwalker, an AI-powered social media listening tool. Talkwalker has over 150 million data sources, which it uses to track conversations worldwide. As a result, you’ll always know when discussions about your business rise and hit their peak. It is also an official partner of X, formerly Twitter. Due to this reason, it can leverage information from X to give you actionable insights.
• It makes monitoring your social mentions easy, as you can use filters like users, keywords, locations, and hashtags. With this tool, you’ll always know when someone tags you on any social media network.
• With this tool, identifying your brand advocates and influencers becomes straightforward. You’ll know who to contact and connect with to help your profile grow.
• It comes with weekly reports, so you always know what happens on any platform. This makes collaboration with other people relatively straightforward.

You can join Hootsuite’s Professional plan for $99 monthly to monitor up to 10 profiles. All packages have a 30-day free trial, so you can see if this social media management platform works for you.

3. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is another powerful social media monitoring service that can give you a competitive edge on every platform. Here are some of the features you can use with this service:

• You can see who engages with your content in real-time. For example, you get a notification when someone replies to your post. It shows you how many followers they have and the number of accounts they follow. You can even reply, like, or share another user’s comment without leaving the Zoho Social dashboard.
• There’s the option to customize your dashboard as per your preferences. For example, you can apply filters only to show specific data on your screen. You get to track user profiles, hashtags, mentions, and more. You can give a lead a label if you acquire them from your efforts on various platforms. This way, your team knows who to contact.
• Managing all the direct messages (DMs) you receive is straightforward, as everything is in a single place. It doesn’t matter if you get messages from different platforms. 
• You’ll always be in the loop, as this tool sends notifications for various activities. For instance, if a user quote posts your tweet, you’ll know about it immediately.

The Standard package starts at $10 and is adequate for monitoring up to eight social media channels. You can try any plan for 15 days before committing to it.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives you everything you need to monitor multiple social networks:

• You can track your competitors and compare your accounts against their profiles. This will help identify gaps to gain an edge. It also shows you what people think of your competition so that you know where to improve.
• It allows you to set up custom alerts according to your preferences. This feature is handy for tracking unhappy customers and changing the narrative by taking appropriate action. 
• You get a detailed audience analysis to know how to engage with them. This tool gives you data like what devices they use, their geographic location, age, and more.
• It’s easy to track all the feedback you get on various platforms in a single place. This way, you can evaluate what people think of your brand and your improvement strategies.
• There’s a word cloud to give you an overview of your top mentions, hashtags, and keywords. You can use the information from this feature to understand your audience. Also, it can help with your social media strategy.
• Like other social media monitoring services, this tool unifies your direct messages and mentions. Every tag and message will appear on a dashboard, making it easy to maintain and manage your online presence.

The Standard subscription service starts at $199 and lets you manage five social media profiles. It comes with a 30-day free trial, which is a good way to get a feel for using Sprout Social.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is the final social media monitoring tool to make it to this list. It’s the perfect service for businesses of all sizes thanks to the following features:

• Whenever anyone mentions your account, you’ll always know about it in real time. Brand24 constantly monitors 25 million sources to ensure you always have accurate insights. Also, you can create reports to examine the mentions closely.
• It gives valuable insights into the level of brand awareness among your audience. You can monitor your reach with this tool. You can compare your metrics against competitors as part of your social media benchmarking process. Also, you don’t have to create reports, as Brand24 automates this process.
• You no longer have to make decisions without knowing what works for your audience. Brand24 gives you insights into what people like about your brand. With this information, you can make the right moves and ensure people perceive your business positively.
• This tool can measure the impact of hashtags when you include them in your posts. Are you reaching more people on various platforms due to the phrases you include? Is there an increase in engagement after using specific hashtags? You no longer have to figure this out in the dark.
• As of June 2024, this tool supports 108 languages, making it easier to understand mentions globally. You’ll always be in the loop as you can follow online conversations without language barriers.

Brand24’s Individual plan starts at $79 per month. With this package, you can monitor three keywords and 2000 monthly mentions and access various AI features. There’s also a 14-day free trial if you’re unsure which tool to use.

TweetDelete Prevents Your Posts From Changing People’s Perception of Your Brand

As your online presence grows and you step into new waters, you’ll need monitoring social media tools. Try the different tools in this guide to see which service gives you everything you need.

Your tweets, now posts on Twitter, play a significant role in what people think of your brand. You’ll get considerable backlash if you accidentally post something they don’t like or agree with. Building your credibility takes years, but it only takes a few minutes to destroy your reputation.

This can also happen if your Twitter profile contains older, unsavory posts. It’s not a matter of if but when people will discover these tweets.

You can take a proactive approach and delete such posts with TweetDelete. Why TweetDelete, though? It comes with the bulk-delete tweets feature, which isn’t available on Twitter. With this utility, there are no limits to how many tweets you can erase in one go.

You can go the automation route with the auto-delete task. This feature looks for posts with specific hashtags and phrases. It also uses date ranges to find the right tweets to erase. You can control this feature by providing relevant information.

Your likes on other people’s tweets can also get unnecessary attention. Rather than letting this happen to you, you must delete your likes, which this tool does easily. Everything this tool can do is due to its custom filter.

Social media monitoring tools and TweetDelete are the perfect combination. You get everything you need to manage your profile. Join TweetDelete today to ensure your posts never negatively affect your reputation!