Brands today are very active on social media. They conduct various campaigns to not only reach out to people but also get them involved. 

As a result, the internet is now filled with people having conversations about these brands. 

This information can potentially answer many questions, like how the customers perceive the brand, how to increase awareness, how to form better relationships and even questions like how to outperform the competition and how to grow.

These conversations reveal the current standing of the brand. 

Going a step further, they can reveal how to take the brand Social media monitoring is the means to this end.

What is social media monitoring?

It is the process of keeping track of everything being said about a brand on the internet. It collects data about people and posts anywhere on the web, including social media, blogs, and forums. This includes:

• Tracking direct and indirect mentions of the brand
• Identifying the sentiment, that is, understanding whether the mention is positive or negative
• Tracking mentions of competitors and industry

Social media monitoring requires a vast collection of data, which then has to be analyzed to derive insights and strategies. 

To enable this, there are various tools at the disposal of marketers.

14 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

Here are a few of the best social media monitoring tools that could help boost your marketing strategy.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free social media dashboard allowing users to monitor, publish, and schedule updates for multiple Twitter account simultaneously. Once the Twitter accounts are connected, TweetDeck starts monitoring all of them immediately. 

Their dashboard is adaptable and user-friendly. It displays the number of mentions and retweets per hour for each account. 

You can create different types of columns to sort the data, such as mentions from specific people, hashtags related to certain topics, etc., depending on the metric you want to track.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a social media listening tool that allows you to track any mention of your brand, competitors, and industry across all social media platforms. You can search by keyword, location, or social network. 

Social Mention also analyzes web content for sentiment, allowing you to understand how people feel about your brand. It is also a useful tool for online reputation management, as it monitors trends in public opinion and immediately notifies you.  

Also Read: 6 Types of Keywords to Track In Social Listening Tools

Konnect Insights

Konnect Insights is an omnichannel customer experience management solution for businesses of all sizes. 

It can be used to perform social listening, monitor your brand’s health, and keep a check on your competitors. 

It provides for extensive keyword research, which digs through real-time as well as historical data. 

There are numerous advanced tools available to arrange the data to obtain actionable insights. 

Konnect Insights enables brands to focus on customer relationship management and online reputation management by keeping in close touch with prospects and existing customers.

Read more to know 5 Types of Social Listening and How Konnect Insights Can Help

TweetReach

TweetReach is a social media monitoring tool that tracks the reach of your tweets. This means that it tracks keywords and hashtags and provides you with analytics on how many Twitter users have seen your tweet. 

It also allows you to track hashtags on other social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. 

TweetReach also has a business dashboard where you can see real-time data on your campaigns and account activities, as well as historical data on the performance of previous campaigns.

Followerwonk

Followerwonk is a social media analytics tool that provides insights mainly on Twitter. 

It allows searching Twitter bios and makes it possible to connect to anyone—customers, prospects, and even influencers. 

It helps you understand exactly who your followers are and how to engage with them. It can also be used to find the most powerful influencers in your industry. 

It shows changes in your followers and provides insights into possible reasons for the change. Using Followerwonk, you can easily compare your overall social graph with your competitors’.

SumAll

SumAll is a tool that connects data from multiple platforms—sales channels, social media, web analytics, email marketing, etc.—and displays it in one place. 

The cumulative data provides a detailed overview of your social media performance. This provides valuable insights for improving the individual as well as the collective performance of all platforms. 

It can also be used for effective sales forecasting since the data covers all channels holistically. This helps save resources and grow the business in the right direction.

How to Use Social Listening Insight – 20 Ways to Know!

Mentionmapp

Mentionmapp is one of the best social media management tools to gain real-time insights into the industry. 

You can monitor the most recent conversations about your brand and industry on over 100 social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. For any keyword or hashtag you search for, Mentionmapp collects its last 200 mentions. 

You can gain more access to the conversations by expanding and filtering your search. You can even conduct a detailed sentiment analysis. It is a handy tool for crisis management and staying on trend.

Lithium (formerly Klout)

Lithium mainly helps with online advertising campaigns. The tool tracks social metrics like impressions, reach, clicks, and shares to help you measure your influence and identify opportunities. 

With Lithium, you can identify the demographics that are most likely to respond and target them. 

Lithium keeps track of your impact on multiple social media platforms and gives insights into improving it. It allows the creation of an ideal customer base. It also guides what kind of regular posts to make to maintain customer relationships and improve their experience.

Boardreader

Boardreader is a free search engine that allows businesses to track their mentions on web-based bulletin boards, discussion forums, and blogs. 

These data sources are often overlooked but can be very useful for some businesses. 

There is a lot of useful information hidden in the comments section of online forums. Paired with sentiment analysis, it can unlock real, actionable insights.

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content analysis tool that helps you find the most shared content in your industry. You can search for specific keywords or hashtags, or you can use their built-in search bar to find the most shared content on any topic. 

BuzzSumo collects data to help you create compelling content. You can appropriately select a format, study the historical performance of similar content, get new ideas, understand which platforms to use, and optimize your influencer strategy. It is also helpful in crisis management.

Google Alerts

Google is undoubtedly the most frequently used search engine. It is tedious, yet important, to keep regular track of all Google searches made by your customers about your brand, competitors, and industry. 

Google Alerts is a free tool that does this for you and sends email alerts whenever a query is made. You can set up alerts for the specific keywords, topics, or websites you want to follow. 

Additionally, these alerts are customizable – you can choose their frequency, the number of results you want to see, their geographic location, etc.

Related Post: 10 Ways Social Listening helps improve SEO of Your Website

Native Analytics Tools

Native analytics tools are tools that are built into popular social media platforms. Facebook Insights, Instagram Insights, Twitter Analytics, etc. are easy to use, free, and, in some ways, more accurate than third-party tools. 

They are specifically designed by and for these platforms. They can be used to best understand how each platform works and how to maximize your impact on it.

BrandMentions

Brand mentions are a great tool to monitor your brand’s perception. 

With this tool, you can conduct social media listening for product reviews, competitor mentions, customer service issues, and much more. It tracks mentions on all social media platforms, including LinkedIn and YouTube. 

You can use it to gauge your customers’ engagement as well as their sentiments. Such analyses assist in keeping the brand on track.

Answer the Public

Answer the Public is an insight into the questions asked by customers on the internet. It creates an opportunity to directly respond to the questions or create content that answers them. 

It can be used to effectively increase brand awareness. Answer the Public also has a useful feature for competitor monitoring. 

When a search query is made, the feature displays the results of your and your competitor’s websites so that an easy comparison can be made immediately.

Conclusion

Each of these tools is designed for specific purposes and is equipped with many additional features that go beyond social listening. An effective monitoring strategy requires the use of a combination of multiple tools. They can assist your brand in reaching new heights by analyzing market sentiment and taking steps to improve it.