15 Top Tools To Monitor Your Social Media Presence More Effectively
Social media has changed the world.It’s a great way to keep in touch with friends, create new relationships, build communities and promote your blog/brand.
But when you’re using social specifically for marketing purposes; monitoring mentions, tracking your progress and gauging the impact that social is having on your blog or business are all important tasks that can be incredibly time consuming.
The truth is that these tasks don’t have to be no where near as time consuming or difficult.
Fortunately there are plenty of tools available to save you time and help you get far better results through effective social media monitoring.
In this post I’m going to show you some of the best tools. They range from free to paid and from basic to enterprise level tools so there’s something for everyone here.
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Powerful tools to monitor your online presence more effectively
Below I’ve included tools that are purpose built for social listening and monitoring along with other social media tools that have reporting and monitoring built in.Google Analytics
It isn’t enough to simply monitor the growth of your social presence or how many clicks your social messages are receiving.
You need to know which social networks are referring you traffic and out of that traffic, what is converting?
Whatever your conversion goals may be, you need to have conversion goals otherwise you won’t have a clue what’s working for you.
Aside from the general traffic and social activity, Google Analytics is particularly helpful because of:
- Support for UTM parameters – this means you can use Google’s URL builder to add special tracking parameters which will allow you to collect more specific data.
- Goal tracking – you can add your conversion goals (specifically landing page URL’s) and track how well each page converts. This will allow you to see which traffic sources convert best.
Price: Free.
Cyfe
One of the main pain points involved in social media monitoring is the fact that there are so many tools that track different things in ways – keeping on top of them all can be a challenge.
This is where Cyfe comes in.
Cyfe allows you to create your own custom dashboard to track whatever you want.
There are pre-built widgets for social networks like Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Google+ and more.
Cyfe doesn’t just do social media, there are email marketing platforms, marketing platforms, SEO tools and plenty of others ways you can use this.
Once you add a widget within Cyfe, it will start tracking data from that point – you’ll have everything in one place.
Price: Free for 5 widgets, you get unlimited everything for $19/month.
Oktopost
Oktopost is a great all-round social media tool that I’ve been testing out recently – I particularly like how your activity can be broken down into campaigns.
This makes it so much easier to monitor the progress of a campaign, rather than relying on bird’s eye view metrics or statistics for individual social messages.
Your social shares are also laid out across a very smart calendar so you can see what messages are going out for which campaign – all at a glance.
There are numerous other features but the reporting section is very well thought out. It’s super easy to see how well your campaigns are performing at a glance and which networks are driving results.
You can also see how many posts, clicks and conversions you’ve had for a particular period of time.
Note: the image above shows 0 conversions because the lead capture feature wasn’t enabled on my trial account.
Price: Starts from $9/month, upgrading ads additional features and increases social profile limits.
Mention
Mention has been designed specifically for monitoring the web for mentions.
You get access to plenty of statistics and you can easily export all of your data in various formats.
Monitoring is done in real time so you can pick up mentions across social networks, news sites, blogs and more.
If you work with a team, Mention gets even better because task management functionality is built in.
Price: Starts from free for 250 mentions each month.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another great all round social media platform.
Whether you want to schedule social updates, respond to your followers, source content or co-ordinate a team of people – Sprout Social can help you.
The reporting and analytics features are impressive.
You can pull in statistics from Twitter, Facebook and easily use them to monitor, engagement, influence and growth.
If you’re working with a team, you can use the team report to see how effective your team is – you can see messages published and their task process.
Price: Starts from $59/month.
NOD3x
If you want to do more in depth analysis of social media data – you will love NOD3x.
Its entry level plans are more focused on Youtube and Google+ which is actually a good thing because there aren’t too many tools you can use to gather data from these platforms.
There are plenty of great features that NOD3x will give you access too, but there are several that are particularly helpful for social media monitoring:
- Brand monitoring and social listening
- Sentiment analysis
- Page insights (includes both profiles and brand pages)
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an enterprise level tool so is priced considerably higher than other tools on this list but it’s extremely powerful.
This tool will help you monitor conversations from all over the web, not just social networking sites.
You first start off by programming the tool with targeted queries (it supports Boolean search operators) and wait for the data to come back.
You get a lot of data at your fingertips with Brandwatch and to make it easier to manage there are numerous ways to visualise that data. You can also setup custom dashboards to see exactly what is going on.
One great way to use Brandwatch is to measure your “voice” against your competitors – this allows you to compare your online presence to your competitors and see exactly why they’re getting so many mentions.
Price: Prices start at £500/month.
Twitter Analytics
Twitter now makes it extremely easy to monitor your progress with their analytics platform.
You can track the progress of your tweets, follower growth and use of Twitter Cards.
I particularly like the tweet activity view which will show you; impressions, engagement, link clicks, retweets and more.
Pinterest have a similar analytics tool which will help you monitor your progress more effectively.
Price: Free.
Tweet Binder
If you want to get more data out of Twitter, Tweet Binder is incredible.
I was first introduced to it by Olga from SEMrush after I participated in one of their Twitter chats.
A quick search for the hashtag #SEMrushchat produced this smart looking report:
The report also lets you dive into who has contributed and can show you specific tweets.
You can also use Tweet Binder to give you reports on specific Twitter profiles.
Price: Starts from free but data is only saved for 5 days.
Topsy
Topsy is a great little tool for checking up on social mentions.
It works best with Twitter as the platform has access to every tweet since Twitter first went live.
You can search for @username’s, keywords and domain names – you’ll then get a list of social mentions which you can dive into to find out who was sharing. You can also identify influencers although I’m not 100% on how they decide who is influential.
Topsy also has an analytics tool which you can use to track the mentions of specific @username’s, keywords and domains across a handy graph.
Price: Starts from free.
Share Tally
This tool is so simple but so helpful at the same time.
Sometimes you may want to quickly find out where and how many times a URL has been shared.
Type a URL into Share Tally and you’ll instantly see how many shares it’s received over a lot of different social networks.
As well as the main social networking sites like Facebook, Google+ and Twitter etc, you’ll also find social bookmarking sites like BizSugar and Inbound.org.
Price: Free.
BuzzSumo
I’m a big fan of BuzzSumo.
I use it for a variety of tasks including content analysis, influencer research and gathering content ideas.
Let’s say that you want to identify what content is getting shared heavily within your niche.
Open up BuzzSumo, type in a topic (also supports domains and other search operators) and hit search. You’ll then see all of the most shared content and you’ll be able to find out who is sharing that content too.
Pro users will get access to content analysis functionality which will enable you to dig deeper and see average shares by network, average shares by content type, total shares by date published and more.
Price: Starts from free, pro accounts start at $99/month.
SumAll
SumAll is still in beta but it puts some very helpful data at your fingertips.
You can quickly integrate social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ as well as other platforms such as Vimeo, Google Analytics, Youtube, Tumblr, Moz, MailChimp and more.
Each platform will be added to your dashboard and you can then quickly see important info about your connected platforms.
You’ll also get daily or weekly email digests so you can see how things are going on the go.
Price: Starts from free.
Buffer
Buffer is best known for being an incredible scheduling tool and a brand that cares (their support is awesome).
They do have some very helpful analytical features.
Admittedly, the best features are available on their business plan, but regular accounts will give you a helpful overview of how successful your social messages have been in terms of clicks and reach.
Price: Starts from free, connect more accounts and unlock RSS feeds for $10/month.
HootSuite
HootSuite has been my go-to social management tool for a very long time.
And while I don’t usually use it for anything other than that, it actually has some helpful reporting features that you may find useful.
Free plans get access to basic analytics but you can still get some helpful data from it.
Reports include:
- Twitter profile overview
- Facebook page overview
- Click summaries
Paid reports include the following (and more):
- Linkedin page insights
- Facebook insights
- Twitter Engagement (detailed/summary)
- Google Analytics
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