Would you like to see what people are saying about your business online? Do you want to learn which social listening tools can help you with this?
32% of people complaining about a business online expect a response in 30 minutes, while 42% expect a response within 60 minutes.
Businesses know this and therefore get back to people whenever they are notified because of a mention or a reply. This is known as social media monitoring.
This is very different from the more advanced social media listening. With social media listening you don’t just respond to mentions and replies, but to every single time your company or keywords relevant to it are published online.
This is necessary as several people will just type in the name of your company instead of mentioning/tagging you or replying to your updates. For example on Twitter 30.72% of tweets containing the company name don’t include the Twitter handle.
Using social media listening you will be able to track keywords and locate these updates. Therefore, you will be able to quickly control negative feedback better and convert more positive comments to leads. And it doesn’t stop there as you can use the data you collect to predict trends, automate more tasks, create and curate content your audience wants and even connect with influencers better.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
But social media listening isn’t something that can be easily accomplished with ordinary social media management tools, you need something more advanced for it.
Hence, I have listed some of the top social listening tools below …
#1. Brand24
Brand24 is a very effective social media listening tool that helps you quickly find out what people are saying about your brand on all social channels. You can track up to 25 keywords and up to 1 million mentions per month with Brand24. These keywords can range from anything like your company name and vertical terms to your competitors’ names and the words frequently used by customers in your industry. It even integrates with Slack.
You can also have up to 10 users so that you and your team can quickly respond to a comment on any platform. Brand24 also has a sentiment analytics feature which helps segment mentions as positive, negative and neutral. Furthermore, it also provides influencer scores of individuals so that you can identify social influencers and connect with them better.
They even have a search feature that lets you look for more topics, trends and discussions on all platforms. And of course, you get access to a custom analytics dashboard to see how your online presence is faring.
Pricing for Brand24 ranges from $49 to $399. You can pay an extra amount and get extra more users and keywords.
This is a great option for people who are interested in a social media monitoring and social media listening tools and is not looking to invest enterprise amounts of resources.
#2 Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another popular social listening tool.
Social listening features include the ability to create custom reports that help you track keywords, hashtags and other searches on social. The reports are displayed in colorful graphs too so that you can easily see how well your brand is performing against your competitors. It also makes it easy to predict future trends in social so you can create the relevant content.
It costs a lot more than Brand24 as pricing ranges from $99 to $1500. But it has extra features that help you do more than social media listening like everyday social media management and a social content calendar. They even have an all in one inbox where direct messages from all your social networks collect so that you can easily respond to any message in one place.
In Sprout Social you can add up to 10 users too so that you can get your entire team to use it.
This tool is best suited for bigger business that only want one tool that does everything social media marketing related.
#3. Mention
Mention is a powerful social media listening tool that lets you discover what people are saying about you both on the web and on social media in 42 languages. You can even monitor your competitors presence to see how they are performing by themselves and in comparison to you in each market sector.
It can also help you find top social influencers (with the highest scores) who mention your keywords online. You can attempt to connect to these influencers directly from the Mention dashboard. You can even connect your Buffer account to Mention to help you schedule posts.
Just like Brand24 and Sprout Social, Mention also pride themselves with having custom analytics and insight dashboards that help you analyze data and predict social trends better.
This tool is also on the cheaper side as pricing starts at $29. They also have a custom plan which lets you add unlimited users. Mention is great for businesses with large customer service or social media management teams as an additional tool, or for those on a tight budget.
#4. Keyhole
Keyhole lets you track keywords and hashtags on Instagram and Twitter. It tracks everything from text posts to pictures and videos. Like with the other tools you can use it to find influencers and to monitor your competitors. It also helps you segment engagement activity based on demographics.
Keyhole’s real-time dashboard shows how many people posted with your hashtag, along with the number of Retweets, Likes and Impressions your campaign is generating. It is on the expensive side when compared to most of the above tools. It has several pricing plans that start at $165. They go all the way up to a Custom plan. Also historical data costs extra.
Summing Up
These are all the top social listening tools. Go through all their websites and pick the ones that suit you best based on features and budget. All of them have a free trial option, therefore you can actually test them before settling on your favorite.
Which of the above social listening tools do you like most? Have you used any of them before? Please leave your comments below.
Image: Shutterstock