As a social media manager, have you asked yourself how to know if your customers (and potential customers) are talking about your brand on social media? Monitoring and controlling brand-related interactions on various platforms in the social media age is essential. You know, it’s all about maintaining a solid social media presence. However, many businesses rely on disconnected social media monitoring platforms, which can lead to crucial information slipping through the cracks and an incorrect understanding of the audience’s feelings toward the company.
That’s where unified and comprehensive platforms for social media monitoring come in. They yield real-time insights, allowing your team to analyze trends and respond in the best way possible. It’s all about fostering deep connections with your audience and protecting your brand’s reputation.
If you are looking for the best social media monitoring platforms to improve your engagement, keep reading, as I will explore the best platforms that can help you get the best.
Key Points
- Social media monitoring platforms are tools designed to track, analyze, and respond to social media engagements across various channels.
- Social media monitoring platforms are important for several reasons, including brand reputation management, maximizing the ROI of your social media campaigns, and customer engagement.
- For those prioritizing data privacy on social media, platforms like Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, and MeWe stand out for their commitment to user security.
What Are Social Media Monitoring Platforms?
Social media monitoring platforms are tools designed to track, analyze, and respond to social media engagements across various channels. These engagements include @mentions, comments, #hashtags, and keywords related to your brand.
Despite the name, “monitoring” is not a passive activity. Brands should track everything from shout-outs and reviews to questions and complaints. More importantly, brands must react to all of the above. This is the distinction between social monitoring and listening. (To know the distinction between social media monitoring and listening, keep reading)
What’s the Difference Between Social Monitoring and Listening?
You’ll hear people talking about social media listening tools when they mean social media monitoring platforms, and vice versa, but technically, they are different things. The key distinction lies in how close you are to the action: think zoomed-in vs. zoomed-out.
Social media monitoring means managing your social media platform feeds daily and reacting accordingly. This could involve responding to a tweet, liking a comment on Instagram, or starting a discussion on Facebook. It also consists in answering questions, giving praise, and taking complaints.
Social listening provides you with a broader perspective. You can identify trends by organizing your likes, comments, and posts into graphs and categories. When considering industry developments, you may base your decisions on your knowledge of what your clients or rivals are doing.
Most importantly, by using social listening tools to monitor the digital world around you, you can note trends, find new opportunities, and pre-empt a social crisis before it happens. Why successful companies’ marketers and PR professionals take social media monitoring seriously.
Why Are Social Media Monitoring Platforms Important?
Social media monitoring platforms are essential for several reasons, offering many benefits that can significantly impact a business’s strategy, reputation, and overall success. Here are the key reasons why these platforms are essential:
#1. Reputation Management
Social media is a great place to manage your reputation.
In fact, according to the State of Social Media Report, 9 out of 10 business leaders agree that social media insights help them proactively manage crises and create effective PR strategies.
For example, you can catch negative comments or reviews about your business early on and prevent issues from escalating.
Plus, with regular customer sentiment analysis, you’re always up-to-date on how customers feel about your brand. If there are any unexpected drops, you can return to the drawing board and take swift action to get your brand’s social media reputation back on track.
Social media monitoring also helps you deliver exceptional customer service. Research shows that 69% of customers expect brands to respond within 24 hours on social media. You can promptly address queries, comments, and messages to improve public perception of your brand.
#2. Maximize the ROI of Your Social Media Campaigns
Social media monitoring platforms help you gather valuable data for future campaigns.
For example, by understanding what resonates with your audience, you can craft more engaging posts that boost brand visibility and sales—directly impacting your social media ROI.
You can also use this data to run more targeted ads and choose the right influencers to work with. This ensures your content reaches people genuinely interested in your products or services, giving you more bang for your buck.
#3. Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a crucial feature of social media monitoring platforms, allowing businesses to interact with their audience actively. These platforms help track mentions, comments, and messages, enabling timely and personalized responses to customer inquiries, feedback, and complaints. By engaging with customers, businesses can build stronger relationships, foster loyalty, and enhance customer satisfaction.
Additionally, active engagement helps create a sense of community around the brand, encouraging positive word-of-mouth and user-generated content. Through consistent and meaningful interactions, social media monitoring platforms support businesses in maintaining a vibrant and engaged customer base, ultimately driving brand loyalty and growth.
Best Social Media Monitoring Platforms to Improve Your Engagement
Do you want to track your performance across marketing channels and improve engagement faster than ever?
Here are the best social media monitoring platforms you need to track your social media presence:
#1. Social Champ
Social Champ is an extensive social media management tool that makes it easier for you to monitor and engage with your comments and DM’s on your social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even Google Business Profile.
The social inbox of Social Champ comprises comments, DM’s, and likes in one place. This allows users to conveniently manage and respond to these comments without jumping to different social accounts.
In addition to this, Social Champ conducts comprehensive analytics of your social media platforms and generates detailed reports. These reports offer valuable insights on various aspects, including reach, total audience, the best time to post, engagement, and top-performing posts.
- Free plan: supporting up to 3 social accounts
- Starting price: $29/month
#2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse helps social media managers manage social mentions. It also offers features that simplify monitoring and listening to relevant conversations. Agorapulse lets you organize conversations and competitor activities and track hostile competitor mentions.
While the platform is quite robust, it lacks certain features. For example, you can’t filter out specific countries or languages or remove content that uses specific keywords. You can’t access historical data in teammate chats or edit text in cross-posted captions.
Key features:
- Customizable monitoring feeds to filter specific phrases and platforms
- Organize and label customer conversations and competitor activity
Price: There is a free 30-day trial, and then plans start at $49 per user/month (billed annually with an additional cost per additional profile) and go up to $119 per user/month.
This is best for Brands seeking to streamline their social media monitoring and listening strategies, especially those dealing with high volumes of notifications and mentions.
#3. NapoleonCat
NapoleonCat is a handy social media management platform that makes it easy to follow brand conversations across different social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google Business Profile.
You’ll find comments, messages, profile mentions, and reviews within the unified inbox. Thanks to the consultation feature, you can reply to these conversations and discuss burning issues with your teammates. The inbox updates in real-time.
If you’d like to monitor your competitors’ social media presence, NapoleonCat is a perfect choice. You can add your competitors’ Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter profiles and analyze their best-performing content alongside the engagement they generate.
- Free trial: 14-day free trial
- Starting price: $32/month (for 3 profiles, 1 user)
#4. HubSpot
If you already use HubSpot as your CRM, consider how the platform can double as your social media monitoring platform.
HubSpot’s features are similar to most of the platforms on our list. The platform tracks interactions, engagements, and content performance.
Coupled with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between top-performing content and social interactions with sales. For example, you can see if customers interacted with a specific piece of content or a team member via social. This goes hand in hand with understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.
#5. Hootsuite
Hootsuite’s monitoring solution lives on an easy-to-use dashboard in its social media management platform.
It is best known for scheduling and Streams — a centralized feed of all your brand’s mentions, comments, and tags across X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. This makes it easy to filter, reply to, or ‘like’ conversations and assign items to colleagues who are best placed to respond.
Hootsuite’s Inbox is similar to Streams in that it collates all your social inboxes into one feed, so you can monitor and respond to messages without jumping between channels or chasing email alerts.
As a paid add-on, you can also set up saved replies to reuse and edit for frequently asked questions.
It’s an option for brands with medium online activity. Hootsuite also offers a more advanced social media monitoring platform, Hootsuite Insights, where you can drill down into audience trends and segments in real-time, benchmark brand health against competitors, and track conversations across blogs, forums, and message boards.
#6. Brand24
Brand24 is a social media monitoring platform with features that help brands discover online mentions, track competitors, and evaluate ongoing marketing campaigns.
It collects data from web pages and platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. It also crawls the web to find relevant mentions on blogs, review sites, newsletters, and more.
Additionally, Brand24 will perform a detailed analysis based on your suggestions. It delivers reports that provide information regarding sentiment, search volume, reach, engagement, trending topics, and top social media profiles that talk about your business.
- Free trial: 14-day free trial
- Starting price: $79/month
#7. Statusbrew
If you’ve ever found yourself managing multiple conversations across various social and review channels, Statusbrew is a platform you shouldn’t overlook.
Statusbrew allows omnichannel monitoring through its Unified Inbox, a centralized hub that simplifies managing social interactions across various networks. You can respond to your customers and collaborate with your team without switching between different platforms. The platform integrates with major social networks, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Google My Business (GMB), Google Play Store and App Store.
Statusbrew offers a range of analytics tools that provide insights into customer behavior, comprehensive overviews of different channels, and trend analysis. The platform presents all the collected data in a readily accessible format through its sharable reporting dashboards.
#8. Synthesio
Synthesio is a strong contender for enterprise or global brands searching for a reporting tool. Multiple interactive dashboards can be Used for audience monitoring, advanced data reporting, and obtaining critical business insights.
Once you’ve set the interface up or used a template, the leading social media monitoring dashboard is built around a Listen feed and an Analyse display. It offers filters for breaking down data by period, region, and language.
In addition, Synthesio covers a whole gamut of media sources alongside news, blogs, and forums, for which you can build Boolean search queries around keywords, brand names, or centered on specific platforms.
Tip: Synthesio highlights vital metrics to help you prove your wins, including a heavy emphasis on KPIs. With a section dedicated solely to ROI, you can show how your share of voice, reach, or customer sentiment gains justify your marketing efforts.
#9. Sprout Social
Next on our list of best brand monitoring platforms is Sprout Social.
Sprout Social is for you if you want an all-in-one solution for your social media management with social listening capabilities. This social media tool helps you monitor, create, edit, and schedule content for all your social media accounts: Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok, and WhatsApp.
Moreover, it has a social inbox, allowing you to manage all your social media messages from one dashboard, improving customer service performance.
Sprout Social provides insightful analytics across all supported social media platforms, helping you constantly improve your marketing and branding strategies.
The social listening features include:
- Audience analysis
- Customer feedback
- Consumer research
- Influencer recognition
- Sentiment research
- Campaign analysis
- Competitor comparison
- Trend identification
Free trial: 30-day free trial
Starting price: $249/month
#10. Cyfe
Cyfe is an analytics platform that lets you create custom dashboards to monitor key social media metrics from one centralized location.
Track followers, engagement, reach, top posts, and more on Facebook, X (Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn. Cyfe helps observe trends and patterns across your social media KPIs.
Using Cyfe’s dashboard also makes reporting a breeze. You can easily present all your social media metrics to team members, clients, or managers. Plus, most metrics are presented as data visualizations, like colorful charts. This helps you understand the data and your brand’s overall performance.
Which Social Media Platform Has the Best Privacy?
For those prioritizing data privacy on social media, platforms like Signal, Mastodon, Diaspora, and MeWe stand out for their commitment to user security. Messaging apps like Session, Wire, and Threema offer end-to-end encryption, ensuring private conversations.
How to Choose the Right Social Monitoring Platform
I have created a comprehensive checklist guide to help you choose the right social media platform for your business. Check it out!
Is Social Media Monitoring and Listening Only for Large Businesses?
No, social media monitoring and listening tools benefit businesses of all sizes. While larger businesses may have more extensive monitoring needs and resources, small businesses can benefit from understanding customer sentiment, identifying trends, and engaging with their audience effectively.
Equipping your small customer service team with a social media tracker can help them deliver better support in less time. These tools are available at various prices, making them accessible to businesses with different budgets.
Bottom Line
With a rise in digital communication and brands furiously competing to garner consumer attention on the internet, social media monitoring has become an essential facet of modern research, marketing, and PR.
However, it’s a pointless exercise without the proper social media monitoring platforms to help you distill information and gain helpful functionality relative to the size of your business and the scope of your work. Try it out today!
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