What is a social media monitoring tool?
Social media monitoring tools are applications that help marketers track data and behavior on social media (and online apps) for entire organizations.
Top Rated Social Media Monitoring Products
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Social Media Monitoring Tools TrustMap
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Social Media Monitoring Tools 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.
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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.
Social Media Monitoring Products
(1-25 of 100) Sorted by Most Reviews
ThoughtBuzz is a cloud based full stack social business platform that integrates social listening, social media marketing, social intelligence and social CRM. According to the vendor this solution is designed to help users drive a quick ROI with features such as one-click publish,…
ListenLogic’s Risk & Reputation Monitoring delivers alerts of corporate threats that emerge across the open social universe, including protests, lawsuits, boycotts and reputation risks. ListenLogic is now offered and supported by Anexinet since the 2016 acquisition.
SocialClout is a social media monitoring tool. Some key features include: Keyword Search, Engagement Workflow, and Automated Sentiment Analysis.
Bottlenose is a real-time trend detection platform that helps clients capture critical events happening around their brand(s), competitors, industries, and audience and effectively act upon them in real-time to optimize marketing campaigns, mitigate potential threats,enhance consumer…
Social Data Intelligence SM2
Starting Price $400
Social Data Intelligence is based on technology acquired with SM2, following its acquisition of Alterian in 2011. Alterian, in turn, had acquired the product from Techrigy in 2009. After SDL acquired Alterian, they divested Social Data Intelligence and SM2 in 2017. Social Data…
IBM Social Media Analytics is software that is designed to discover customer sentiment from online sources. The vendor says the solution can help businesses harness social data and take decisive across the enterprise. It helps users with: Capturing consumer data from social…
Notified is designed to give users all the PR tools needed to drive earned media results―with just one login. Now part of Intrado since being acquired by West Corporation in 2019. The service provides real-time media monitoring across online news, print, podcast, broadcast and social…
Send Social Media is a solution for managing, monitoring, tracking and measuring marketing efforts. Users can post to over 30+ social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Pinterest, YouTube, SlideShare and more! Users can also manage their entire email marketing…
Amobee Brand Intelligence is a social listening tool that aims to help marketers gain a deeper understanding of consumer trends and sentiments through analysis of current and historical content consumption and sentiment from many channels across the web.
Interactions Digital Roots collects conversations from across the web and not only captures keyword and sentiment analysis but also includes customer intent. The vendor says that this allows the platform to identify and route conversations in a precise and highly customizable way.…
Frequently Asked Questions
How does social media monitoring work?
Social media monitoring tools track data across social media platforms and websites, including not just mainstream apps like Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook, but all websites.
Most tools work by constantly crawling sites and indexing them for specific strings of information, either in real-time or defined intervals. Users can work directly with a social media monitoring software provider, or with a third-party data provider to accomplish this.
Once sites are indexed, they are queried and analyzed for review by social media monitoring administrators. This information is extremely useful for marketers to influence decision-making processes and measure the success of initiatives.
Why is social media monitoring important?
Social media monitoring tools can be a key component of overall social media strategies at an organization. They can help streamline and centralize brand mentions and search parameters. This helps save time on locating conversations around millions of webpages and with prioritizing messaging.
Social monitoring is an important part of every brand reputation and social marketing strategy. It can result in quicker response times to customers/clients, avoided PR crises, and recognition of customer advocates.