Social Media Monitoring Tools

Social Media Monitoring Overview

What are Social Media Monitoring Tools?

Social media monitoring tools listen for brand-relevant conversations across social media. These include brand or competitor mentions, select keywords, and other signals. The results are presented via an alert system, RSS feed, or dashboard. Social media listening tools track customer sentiment and support reputation management initiatives.

Also known as social media listening, social media monitoring is a capability of most broader Social Media Management Suites. SMM suites span listening, publishing, engagement, and analytics. However, many specialist social media monitoring tools are used in tandem with SMM Suites. These specialty monitoring tools may track activity across one site (e.g Instagram), or support multi-measure analytics and tracking not possible using only one tool or suite.

Social Media Monitoring Features & Capabilities

Social media monitoring tools present the following capabilities of customer sentiment analysis and advanced search.

• Keyword-based concept tracking

• Competitor tracking & comparison

• Domain monitoring & alerting

• Backlink alerts

• Author tracking and alerting

• Sentiment analysis (e.g. natural language analysis)

• Multi-language processing

• Image detection & analysis

• Boolean operators for search and query

• Search filter

• Segmentation (demographics, geolocation, channel, sentiment, etc)

• Real-time alerts

• Customizable alert triggers

• Alert delivery via email, RSS, etc

• Customizable reporting, report archiving, historicals

• Data visualization & dashboard, social command center

Integrations

Social media monitoring tools may cover a wide range of popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and Pinterest. Additionally, listening tools may cover blogs (or particular bloggers), discussion boards, or other sites. Channel coverage is an important criteria to evaluate when choosing a social media monitoring tool. Social media monitoring tools are often included as part of SMMS. If they are standalone they may integrate with SMMS, as well as an Analytics tool, or CRM.

Pricing Information

Popular social media marketing tools are cloud services delivered on a subscription basis. Generally, lower tiers support single individuals or small teams with fewer alerts than advanced tiers. Lower tier plans generally track less mentions across fewer monitored sites than higher cost tiers.

Some SMM suite vendors present narrower, monitor focused feature sets at a low cost and expand to cover all Social Media Marketing functionality at higher tiers. Finally, a few vendors provide access to their own or 3rd party intelligence data via API at a cost, to improve analytics validity.