In this current age, it is vital to know what people are saying about you on social media. This is as important for brands, as it is for influencers, and indeed ordinary people.
In the case of businesses, you want to know genuine organic mentions of your brand – both positive and negative. This is particularly important when somebody complains about your brand online. You can’t remedy a problem if you don’t know of its existence.
Often all it takes to make somebody happy is a reply, where you recognize his or her concern. The problem with social media is that people are now accustomed to near instantaneous reply. For you to react with speed, you first need to know when you have a brand mention.
A key part of social media management is keeping people happy. Influencers also need to play the same game. They rule their niche because people trust them and believe in their authenticity. If the sentiment changes and people begin to doubt an influencer’s sincerity, it is vital the influencer learns of this as quickly as possible.
Some of the tools we cover focus on social media listening, while others are more into social media monitoring. Although people often use the terms interchangeably, there is a subtle difference. Social monitoring is the first step in a social listening strategy. A firm monitors all mentions of its name online, particularly on social media. Once you have discovered social mentions, you can then go a stage further and analyze what the mentions mean. You look for patterns and trends and discover the influencers who already organically promote your product.
Brands and influencers can use a combination of the following tools, including Social Media Scheduling Tools, to help them discover all brand mentions and to monitor the sentiment on their social media accounts.
Social Media Monitoring Tools:
1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
Brandwatch offers a range of products that offer real-time insights about your industry, your brand, and your marketing, as well as reporting capabilities and system connections that scale with your initiatives.
Brandwatch is used by large companies such as Walmart, Unilever, Microsoft, IKEA, and L’Oréal.
It splits its product uses into:
- Brand management
- Content strategy
- Competitor analysis
- Customer experience
- Influencer marketing
- Crisis management
In terms of brand management, Brandwatch allows you to track your brand health. It helps you know when people are talking about your company. It can tell you when your brands, products, and logos are shared across millions of online sources.
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2. Sendible
If you’re a regular reader of Influencer Marketing Hub, the name Sendible would most likely be familiar to you by now. Founded in 2009, it’s one of the older and leading social media management tools.
Social listening is a core part of their software. You can use it to keep track of your chosen keywords from social media and the web via one dashboard helping you to save loads of time. After setting up which keywords you want to monitor, Sendible will start to collect mentions of your brand in its central dashboard. What’s more, each mention will be color-coded. This way, it becomes much easier to distinguish the good from the bad.
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3. Brand24
Brand24 was founded in Poland in 2011, quickly building a name for themselves. Within two years their software was being used by big-name companies, such as Intel, Panasonic, and AirFrance. They have continued to attract well-known customers, including Uber, H&M, and IKEA.
They offer four plans, ranging from Individual (at $79/month) to Enterprise (at $399/month). Each plan adds additional users, the number of keywords you can track, and the number of mentions per month. The speed of tracking also improves with each plan.
When you set up your Brand24 account, you create a Project. This is the social identity for whom you intend to monitor mentions and social activity. On higher plans, you can follow more than one Project.
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4. YouScan
YouScan is one of the more mature social media monitoring tools, founded in Kyiv in 2009. Over the last decade, it’s built a solid reputation and attracted clients like McDonald’s, PepsiCo, Nestle, and Google.
At its most basic, YouScan is a listening tool, able to scan social media and the rest of the web for brand mentions, and then analyse those mentions for its larger social impact. The real selling point of YouScan, however, is its image recognition capabilities, which allows users to get decidedly specific in their visual searches.
5. Hootsuite
Usually, when we think about Hootsuite, it is as a social media scheduling tool. Hootsuite makes it easy to schedule your posts across a range of platforms over a period, all from a single dashboard.
However, one of the useful features of Hootsuite is that you can add a wide range of streams to each social network data dashboard. As well as obvious columns, such as Home, Timeline, Lists, and Scheduled (depending on the social network) you can create streams based on filters.
This is particularly useful with Twitter, where you can set up a stream based on searches for particular keywords – your company name or custom hashtag, for instance.
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6. BuzzSumo
Although Buzzsumo is not primarily designed as a brand mention or social media monitoring tool, it does come with the ability to set up content alerts. It sends you content alerts on a daily basis whenever it encounters a reference to your brand on social networks. It allows you to set up alerts for your brand, competitors, keywords, authors, domains, and even backlinks. You can refine your alerts to cover just the title of an article, or to search the full text of articles. You can even set it to send an alert when somebody creates a new backlink to your site.
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7. Keyhole
Used by brands like Reuters, Mashable, and Billboard, Keyhole gives you more than a sneak peek into your brand’s performance. Not only does it enable you to track your brand and its offerings across all the most important social media platforms, but also millions of websites.
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8. Awario
According to their website, Awario monitors all corners of the web for brand mentions in real time. Plus, it can track mentions in any language, a key feature if you’re targeting and serving a global audience.
You can set up email notifications so that you can receive daily summary of brand mentions conveniently in your inbox. If there’s a significant number of mentions, you can sort it by reach. This way you’ll see the conversations that will likely have the biggest impact first helping you to prioritize your tasks for the day.
Read More9. Social Searcher
Social Searcher describes itself as a free social media search engine that you can use for real-time social media monitoring. You can use its search engine to monitor all public mentions of your brand on social platforms and the web. You can then keep tabs on the online discussions about your brand and its offerings via a user-friendly dashboard.
Alternatively, you can set up email notifications so that you can track new mentions via your inbox. One of the useful features of using email alerts is that you’ll get notified right away and you can also set it up so that multiple recipients receive the same notification.
Read More10. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics uses a social intelligence advisor (affectionately dubbed SIA) that acts as your personalized AI brand consultant and analyst. SIA uses intelligent algorithms to analyze brand mentions and then shares insights in a way that’s easy to understand. It can monitor brand mentions on all the key social media platforms, including TikTok and LinkedIn, as well as the web.
You can use it to get the most crucial mentions with regards to sentiment, engagement, and reach. Another key feature that deserves special mention is that it will help you to uncover trolls that are just out to ruin your name. What’s more, it will offer recommendations for how you can tackle this problem.
Read More11. Meltwater
Meltwater provides media monitoring, insights, and more for PR, social, and marketing teams.
You can monitor local media coverage in real-time from thousands of sources across print, broadcast, online, social and licensed content behind the paywall from the Copyright Agency. Meltwater also provides full-text premium content from a network of global publishers including the Associated Press, to social channels such as WeChat and Weibo.
Meltwater also provides social media management services, allowing you to manage your social channels in one place. You can efficiently manage workflow, easily schedule content, join conversations, respond to customers, and report on the social media insights that matter.
Read More12. Private: Mention
Mention is excellent for discovering when people have mentioned you online, as well as analysis of the sentiment expressed in these mentions.
The $49 / month Solo Plan is ideal for a single user wishing to monitor mentions of their brand. This plan allows two basic alerts and records up to 5,000 mentions per month.
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13. TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a free tool that looks very similar to paid social media scheduling tools, such as Hootsuite. As Twitter owns it, however, it only covers that social network.
It can be a much quicker way to check and manipulate your Twitter account than in Twitter itself.
You can set up multiple columns to show relevant combinations of tweets for multiple Twitter accounts. While most people choose to pick columns like Home, Notifications, or Messages, you have many more options. This includes setting up a column for @mentions – either on a specific account or across accounts.
Read More14. Socialmention.net
Socialmention.net has a very simple interface. It merely presents you with a search box (marked Trends) and a list box, with choices for All, Blogs, Microblogs, Bookmarks, Images, Videos, and Questions. You then click on a Search button to discover where your keyword term has appeared in recent times.
If you use your brand name as the key term, Socialmention.net helps you discover references to your brand.
Socialmention.net monitors more than 100 social media properties directly including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google etc. It is a free tool and offers an API for developers who want to interact with the Social Mention site programmatically.
Read More15. Boardreader
Although social media is where most of the online social interaction seems to be nowadays, older places, such as forums and messaging boards, still have an attraction. This means that if you want to measure brand mentions, you need to look at these kinds of online activity, too.
Boardreader is ideal for searching for a specific term, your brand for instance, across a range of forums and digital places.
Like Social Mention, Boardreader has an extremely simple interface. All it presents you with is a search box and a button to click on.
Read More16. Followerwonk
Followerwonk is a Twitter tool, designed to help you find, analyze, and optimize your social growth. It began life as a Moz product, but they sold it in 2017.
You can use it dig deeply into your Twitter analytics. You can search Twitter bios, connect with influencers or fans, and break them down by location, authority, number of followers etc. It gives each Twitter user a social rank, for instance, both Justin Bieber and Barack Obama have social authority scores of 96, now overtaken by Donald Trump with Social Authority of 100.
Read More17. Emplifi
Founded in 2008, Emplifi uses AI-powered solutions to help their clients (which include well-known global names like Vodafone, Sony, and Samsung) engage with their audience better and, ultimately, grow their customer base. They offer various audience insights, measurement features, and optimization tools to help marketers make more sense of their social efforts.
Read MoreSocial Network Search Engines and Analytics
Of course, the cheapest way to monitor your brand mentions in social media is to use each social network’s inbuilt native search or analytics tools. This can be more time-consuming than the other paid methods, however. They may be of value for individuals or small brands that are just starting the process.
Twitter, for instance, has a quite advanced search tool. You can search for keywords placed anywhere in a Twitter bio or in the tweets themselves. You can make your search even more powerful by using Boolean search tools, such as AND and OR, as well as putting terms in quotes when searching for a specific word sequence.
You can also search for hashtags, and @ terms.
