I know the struggle of keeping up with the latest news and mentions. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of the best media monitoring tools and services, including paid and free options, to help streamline your monitoring process and keep you up-to-date on all your media coverage. These media monitoring tools helped me monitor my brand’s online reputation, analyze customer feedback, and stay ahead of my competitors. I’m sure you won’t miss out. Now, I would love to share the 20 best media monitoring tools you can choose from to monitor your brand and analyze customer feedback.
Key Points
- Various media monitoring tools are available, catering to brand management and audience engagement aspects.
- It’s important to distinguish between social media monitoring and listening to understand the wider conversations happening around a brand or industry.
- free and paid media monitoring tools are available, catering to businesses of all sizes and budgets.
- Data visualization and analytics are becoming increasingly crucial for media monitoring tools to offer deeper insights into audience sentiments and trends.
- The best media monitoring tools are adaptable and can integrate with other software and platforms to maintain a cohesive and effective online presence.
Understanding Media Monitoring Tools
One crucial thing I’ve learned is the distinction between simply monitoring and actually listening. It’s one thing to track mentions and engagements and another to understand the sentiment behind them and respond promptly and meaningfully. This approach has helped me manage my brand’s online reputation and build stronger, more personal connections with my audience.
But, what are social media monitoring tools? Social media monitoring involves tracking and responding to social engagements such as user mentions, comments, hashtags, and brand-related keywords. It is an active process that requires brands to monitor everything from positive feedback and reviews to negative feedback and complaints. The key difference between social monitoring and listening is that brands must promptly track and respond to social engagements.
Checklist of Social Media Monitoring Tools
Best Media Monitoring Tools
Here are the best media monitoring tools you should choose from :
#1. LampHills
Our Media Relations service is guided by a comprehensive knowledge of the constantly changing media industry and an extensive network of influential journalists, bloggers, and thought leaders across various platforms. We prioritize building strong, enduring relationships with our clients, based on trust, expertise, and a mutual dedication to producing top-notch, influential content.
Using thoughtfully selected media placements, focused outreach campaigns, and strategic collaborations, we guarantee that your brand’s narrative will effectively reach its intended audience precisely when it matters most. We specialize in creating impactful media materials such as pitches and thought leadership content. Our team of experts ensures that these materials are engaging and resonate with your target audience, establishing your brand as a trusted authority in your industry.
#2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social monitoring tool with an unlimited 30-day free trial. It is highly accessible and customizable, allowing you to monitor any social platform. With its customizable search streams, you can easily keep track of essential topics, track social media trends, and monitor mentions based on keywords, hashtags, locations, and specific users.
#3. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social media monitoring tool that offers more than 50 filters to track conversations across 150 million data sources, such as blogs, forums, videos, news sites, and social networks. You can analyze engagement, reach, comments, brand sentiment, essential influencers, conversation clusters, and more. This tool is handy for identifying peak activity times in conversations related to your brand, which can help you determine the best times to post on social media platforms.
#4. Nexalogy
Nexalogy is a social monitoring tool that provides excellent data visualizations. It includes interactive timelines, geolocation-based heat maps, and lexical cluster maps that display common topic patterns. Furthermore, it offers popular keywords and the most active accounts, which would take humans weeks to identify.
#5. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a professional social media monitoring application that tracks mentions, keywords, and sentiments in various languages.
#6. Reputology
Reputology is a valuable tool that enables you to monitor essential review sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook reviews, all from one dashboard. Negative reviews can significantly impact businesses that deal with customers directly if they are not handled properly and promptly. Reputology allows you to keep track of activities across multiple storefronts and locations and respond promptly using quick links.
#7. Tweepsmap
Tweepsmap is a combination analytics/social monitoring tool built to show Twitter power users how hashtags and topics travel so you can tune into what your audience is talking about.
#8. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro
Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro is a tool that allows you to monitor the site’s 138,000 active communities for the conversations you care about. With an average of 430 million monthly active users, Reddit is an often-overlooked social platform where conversation is often in-depth and honest.
#9. Meltwater
Meltwater is a platform that offers media monitoring and social media management services. It provides valuable insights and helps communicate with media contacts and influencers. Users have reported that Meltwater makes it easy to find new media contacts, allows them to schedule social media posts across various platforms, and provides excellent customer support.
#10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that enables SMEs to handle day-to-day content publishing. It offers media monitoring functionality, too. With the Smart Inbox at the heart of the monitoring dashboard, you can bring messages, mentions, and tags from core channels into one central hub instead of switching between networks to track notifications. You can prioritize interactions by setting up inbox filtering and tagging options and save time to focus on the most valuable opportunities online.
#11. Statusbrew
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, LinkedIn, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Google My Business (GMB), Google Play Store, and App Store. It 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.
#12. Falcon.io
Falcon.io is a media management package with a social monitoring and analytics dashboard and scheduling, publishing, and inbox functions. It’s an ideal tool for agencies to handle multiple brands concurrently or for SMEs that can afford enormous spending.
#13. YouScan
YouScan is an image-first social monitoring tool that captures written brand mentions and turns visual data, including logos, backgrounds, and people in posts on social media, blogs, news, and forums, into ‘visual insights.’
#14. Sendible
Sendible is a comprehensive media management tool offering scheduling, monitoring, and consumer insights on one platform. It is designed for marketers who want to handle several brands at once. It can be ideal for agencies but also suitable for SMEs that want a solid publishing, social monitoring, and reporting solution.
#15. Agorapulse’s
Agorapulse’s platform helps brands monitor their social mentions more effectively. With countless notifications and mentions for busy brands to sift through, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Agorapulse allows users to set parameters and focus on “what counts.”
#16. RivalIQ
RivalIQ’s platform focuses on competitive analysis that helps brands monitor their business rivals. Monitoring and benchmarking features allow brands to understand their share of voice and how they’re growing compared to their competitors. The platform offers real-time alerts; its most notable feature is its variety of alerts. For instance, the platform can instantly detect when competitors update their social media bio. Furthermore, recent enhancements enable the platform to identify when a competitor turns an organic post into an advertisement. These alerts can be beneficial for keeping track of competitors’ online activities and the tactics they use to promote their products or services.
#17. Mention
Mention is a monitoring tool that tracks relevant mentions and comments for brands and agencies. The platform monitors over one billion sources and offers plenty of filtering options to help brands “eliminate noise.” The platform’s alerts can keep brands in the loop and identify spikes in the mentioned volume. These instances can help brands identify a potential social media crisis or PR opportunity sooner rather than later.
#18. Keyhole
Keyhole’s monitoring abilities primarily focus on helping brands find influencers to work with. Automated keyword and hashtag searches uncover influencers posting about topics relevant to brands. The platform also uses hashtag analytics to highlight influential accounts, posts, and conversations around any subject.
#19. HubSpot
Consider using HubSpot as your social media monitoring tool if you already use it as your CRM. Most of the features of HubSpot are similar to those of the other tools on our list. The platform keeps track of interactions, engagements, and content performance. When combined with HubSpot’s sales CRM, the tool highlights the correlation between social interactions with sales and top-performing content. For instance, you can determine whether customers interacted with a particular piece of content or a member of your team via social. This feature is essential in understanding your social media ROI and the impact of your social team.
#20. Brand24
Brand24 provides a range of media monitoring features that can help you analyze the sentiment of your social mentions and receive instant notifications. The platform also can identify trending hashtags that are relevant to your brand. One of the platform’s standout features is its mention feed, which can identify any unusual spikes in activity. Additionally, the platform’s “summary” feed makes it effortless to monitor your brand’s PR efforts from one week to the next.
#21. Attributes
Attributes is a consumer intelligence tool that focuses on social media monitoring. The platform helps brands uncover “unmet needs” by digging deep into customer conversations and data. The platform highlights common complaints within any industry through sentiment analysis. This provides opportunities for competing brands to identify pain points and intervene. Attributes can also automatically classify mentions into complaints versus inquiries.
#22. Zoho Social
Zoho Social’s complimentary social media monitoring features are handy if Zoho is used as a CRM. The platform lets you build a custom listening dashboard from hashtags to specific platforms or media outlets. This gives you a comprehensive understanding of your PR and social presence.
#23. Awario
Awario’s monitoring features are similar to those of many of the platforms mentioned above. Awario Leads is a valuable enhancement to the platform’s standard monitoring and listening features. Awario can detect particular instances of individuals seeking recommendations for a specific industry. This again demonstrates how monitoring is a dynamic process that can assist you in acquiring more business.
Free Media Monitoring Tools
Although paid platforms offer a wide range of features, free social listening platforms are perfect for businesses that want to experiment with this feature before committing to a recurring subscription. Here are some media tools that can offer you free options:
#1. Mention
The free version of Mention covers the listening feature on various websites. This tool offered real-time monitoring of mentions across the web, including social media, blogs, forums, and news sites. It helped us stay on top of conversations about our brand and industry trends.
#2. Answer the Public
Answer the Public is a free social listening tool that effectively explores prospects’ or customers’ questions and problems. Rather than guessing what the audience might want to know, Answer the Public allows brands to create a strong social media presence by providing valuable, optimized social media content. The platform starts by entering a keyword relevant to the company’s line of business. Then, it reveals all the pertinent questions the Public asks on the internet (how, where, what, when), culminating in downloading a CSV report.
#3. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the most straightforward monitoring tools available. It alerts the user when their search term(s) has changed. We use Google Alerts to identify new content, industry trends, conversations about our brand, or information about our competitors. The platform sends automatic email notifications when a result matches the searched keyword.
#4. Hootsuite
The free plan on Hootsuite enables users to add up to three social profiles. Although the platform has several functions, Hootsuite can be used to search for specific keywords or hashtags and create a personalized stream with this search. This versatile tool also allowed us to monitor multiple social media channels simultaneously. We set up custom streams to track mentions of our brand, product keywords, and relevant industry terms.
What Does a Media Monitor Do?
Media monitoring reveals whether primary stakeholders are hearing and reacting to reports about your business and whether that news is positive or negative. Sentiment analysis discerns whether individual pieces of content and the overall attitude of reporting are favorable.
What Are the PR Monitoring Tools?
Public Relations (PR) tools are essential for managing an organization’s image and maintaining its relationship with the public, stakeholders, and media. These tools can vary widely in function and purpose, but they include:
#1. Media Monitoring Services
These tools help you track what is being said about your organization across various media outlets, including social media, enabling you to respond to coverage in real-time. Examples include Meltwater and Cision.
#2. Press Release Distribution Services
These platforms allow you to distribute your press releases to a vast network of journalists, bloggers, and media outlets, increasing the chances of your news getting picked up. Services like PR Newswire and Business Wire are popular.
#3. Social Media Management Tools
With these tools, you can manage your presence across multiple social media platforms, schedule posts, and analyze your engagement metrics. Hootsuite and Buffer are commonly used.
#4. Email Marketing Platforms
These services enable you to send newsletters, press releases, and other communications to your email list, tracking open rates and engagements. Mailchimp and Constant Contact are examples.
#5. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Systems
CRM tools help manage your interactions with current and potential customers. They can be crucial for managing media contacts and journalist relationships. Salesforce and HubSpot CRM are widely used.
#6. Analytics and Measurement Tools
Tools like Google Analytics allow you to track your content’s performance and understand your PR campaigns’ impact on website traffic and engagement.
#7. Content Creation and Management Platforms
These tools assist in creating, managing, and distributing content across various channels, ensuring consistent messaging. WordPress and Canva are helpful for web and graphic content.
#8. Influencer Marketing Platforms
These platforms help you identify and connect with influencers who can amplify your message to a broader audience. BuzzSumo and Traackr are examples.
#9. SEO Tools
Search Engine Optimization tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can help improve your website’s visibility and ranking, making your content more accessible to your target audience.
#10. Sentiment Analysis Tools
These tools analyze the sentiment behind social media mentions, comments, and reviews, providing insights into public perception. Brandwatch and Sentiment Analyzer offer such capabilities.
Each tool serves a specific purpose in the broader context of PR activities, from media monitoring and analytics to content distribution and influencer engagement.
How Do I Create a Social Media Monitoring Tool?
To build a social media monitoring tool, you should go through a five-step process that includes defining your purpose, researching the market, choosing features for your MVP, collecting user feedback, and improving your product.
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References
Chinenye Gaberiel
Chinenye Gabriel is a certified public administrator with years of experience in PR Firms. She is also an SEO content writer and has honed her skills in crafting practical and insightful business, social media, and tech content. She provides services to organizations, including Business Yield Consult. Proficient in data analysis, leveraging analytical skills to derive insights and enhance content strategy.
