If you want to succeed with your social media strategy, you need to be aware of what people are saying about your brand online. You also need to know what they’re saying about your products or services, your competitors, your industry, your newsletter, your customer service, your new logo… basically everything about your brand.

Why? It’s free business intelligence for social media marketers! When you know what people think of you, you can make informed decisions on how to promote your brand to get more engagement and conversions.

The best way to gather this data is through a social media monitoring tool.

In this article, we’ll cover some of the best social media monitoring tools in the market, go over how to set up social monitoring, and give you some great tips for making the most of the data you’re tracking.

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking keywords, hashtags, and mentions about your brand, product, or industry across different social media platforms. It can help you measure metrics like brand sentiment and satisfaction, and collect inspiration for new posts and marketing campaigns.

The information you get from social media monitoring can help you determine things like:

• Relevant keywords and hashtags, e.g. which Instagram hashtags or Pinterest keywords might help increase your reach.
• Trends, i.e. what are people talking about? What new ideas or memes are blowing up, which social networks are offering new tools and services?
• Social ROI — is your monetary investment in paid social ads and sponsored posts paying off?
• Social share of voice, i.e. how much of the conversation is about your brand, as opposed to your competitors.
• Social sentiment analysis — what’s the mood of the conversation?

Social monitoring also helps brands know the right time and way to guide users down the sales funnel. For example, you shouldn’t push your product in someone’s face the second they walk into your office. You’d listen to them first to figure out if your product is the right solution for them or not.

It’s the same thing on social media. If you want to be relevant, you need to pay attention to what users are saying.

Note: Social media monitoring is different from social media listening. Social listening comes after monitoring, and it involves taking action on the metrics you analyzed during the monitoring process.

Check out our article on how to do social media listening right. (It comes with a list of social listening tool recommendations!)

You can also check out this video to see how the team down at Hootsuite handles social media monitoring (and listening).

7 brand social media monitoring tools

For brands, social media monitoring is more than typing your brand name into Instagram and Facebook’s search bar. It’s a bit more nuanced, and you’ll need a brand monitoring tool (or two!) to make your work easier.

Here are 7 of our favorite social media monitoring tools:

1. Hootsuite

Platforms supported: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, forums, etc.

Hootsuite is a full-featured social media management and analytics tool that offers monitoring capabilities.

With Hootsuite, you can set up custom search streams for any social platform you choose. This way, you can see the relevant topics, hashtags, trends, and mentions of your brand, product, competitors, and industry.

You can set up streams on Hootsuite’s free plan, but if you want detailed analytics, try Hootsuite’s professional plan for free for 30 days.

If you want to delve deep into social listening, check out Hootsuite Insights. This tool gives you an overview of millions of social media conversations in real-time.

You can search for any keyword and filter by date, location, demographics, and more. You’ll also be able to identify thought leaders, understand how your audience views your brand, and get alerts the second your mentions increase suspiciously.

Hootsuite Insights can tell you so much about your audience and what they think about you. This tool is only available to enterprise users, but if you really want to listen to your audience, Insights is your go-to tool. Request a demo

2. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a free social media monitoring tool that tracks keywords, brand mentions, and sentiment across different locations and multiple languages.

You can use Mentionlytics on all major social platforms, blogs, and forums.

3. Reputology

Reputology is a free tool that lets you monitor major review websites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews from one dashboard.

With Reputology, you can track your customer reviews, reply to positive ones and address negative ones before they blow out of proportion. You can also track customer activity across multiple locations and storefronts, and respond with quick links.

4. Nexalogy

Nexalogy is a free tool that helps you monitor conversations across most major social media platforms and the broader web.

What sets Nexalogy apart from the tons of social media monitoring apps on the internet is its top-notch data visualizations. Nexalogy has interactive timelines, lexical cluster maps, and geolocation-based heat maps that show common patterns and trends.

This tool also shows you popular keywords and the most active accounts.

5. Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro

As you might’ve guessed, this paid tool only monitors conversations on Reddit. And that’s great because Reddit is a goldmine of honest, in-depth conversations.

This underrated platform has about 430 million monthly active users. And Reddit Keyword Monitor Pro allows you to monitor what these users are saying about your brand, your competitors, and your industry.

You can set up this tool to monitor as many communities within Reddit to get insights on what your audience thinks about you.

6. Tweepsmap

Just like Reddit, Twitter has its own dedicated social media monitoring tool. It’s called Tweepsmap.

This free tool combines analytics and social monitoring capabilities to show Twitter users which topics and hashtags are popular, so that you can know what your audience is talking about.

7. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a paid tool that helps you monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, videos, forums, review sites, news sites, and social platforms.

With Talkwalker, you can easily monitor your reach, comments, engagements, and brand sentiment.

How to get started with social media monitoring in 5 steps

1. Choose the best social media monitoring tool for your needs

If you haven’t picked a social media monitoring tool yet, scroll back up to the list above.

2. Brainstorm relevant keywords

The first step in brainstorming your keywords is to think about the words people use when they talk about your brand.

If you’re a cocktail bar, people might talk more about your signature minty mojito than they talk about your CEO. But if you’re a disruptive AI startup, people might find out about you through your biggest investor.

So to get these keywords, here’s where to start:

• Your brand name as both handle and mention (like this: @StormBeauty and #StormBeauty)
• Product name(s) (like this: #IceMintyMojito and #DamiSandals)
• Slogans or catchphrases
• Names of CEOs, thought leaders, spokespeople, etc.
• Branded hashtags (like #JustDoIt and #OreoHorrorStories)

You should also repeat this process for all your main competitors.

When you’re done, shift your focus to your niche, vertical or industry.

• Industry keywords or hashtags (like #socialmediamarketing #blockchaintechnology)
• Location keywords or hashtags (like #DisneylandNewYork and #EiffelInParis)
• Platform-specific keyword or hashtags (like #artistsofinstagram or #facebookcoaches)
• Community/group keywords or hashtags (like #writersguild)

3. Set up your keywords in your brand monitoring tool

This depends on the tool you choose. We will advise you to choose a tool that offers many simultaneous and saved searches, as it will prevent you from typing a keyword into the search bar all the time.

Here’s a quick video showing you how to use Hootsuite’s stream feature, so you know how it works:

4. Check your streams regularly

As your monitoring tool sweeps through millions of online conversations to find the ones most relevant to you, you need to check your streams regularly to make sure you get information on time.

5. Revisit your keywords and tweak them accordingly

Like all things marketing-related, social monitoring isn’t a “done once, done forever” type of thing. After you’ve set up your streams and monitored conversations for a few weeks, revisit your search keywords to ensure that they’re really catching all the information you need (and filtering the ones you don’t need).

If you’re getting an unusually large amount of results, especially irrelevant ones, try to tighten your search parameters. If you’re not seeing enough results, then make your keywords a bit broader.

5 social media monitoring tips

1. Monitor data in multiple languages

If you live in North America, you’re probably used to working in one language—English.

But if your business just opened up a branch in Quebec, you should set up streams using English and French words/phrases. Or if your new client works in a language you don’t speak, work with their team to find out how to spell words in their language.

Depending on the size of your target audience, you might benefit from using a language-specific social monitoring tool like Crowd Analyzer (which is great for monitoring data in Arabic).

However, many social media monitoring tools (like Hootsuite, for example) allow you to partner with team members so you can ask for help when you need it. For instance, language translations from your Welsh or Russian colleagues.

2. Identify brand advocates and influencers to partner with

As you monitor online conversations, pay attention to the people who repeatedly mention or interact with your brand. If they constantly uplift or cheer for you, and they have a decent follower base, you might want to include them in your influencer marketing strategy.

A good social media monitoring tool can help you figure out who your biggest cheerleaders are.

3. Streamline your keyword and hashtag strategy while monitoring

If you’ve ever been at a loss as to what keyword to target for your YouTube video or what hashtag to add to your Instagram Story, social monitoring can help you.

For example, Hootsuite Insights has a word cloud that will give you ideas about keywords or hashtags to use in your social media posts as part of your hashtag strategy.

When you know the words your audience uses to talk about your brand and/or industry, you’ll be able to help people find your content.

4. Set alerts for unusual activity

If your brand sentiment comes crashing down right after your latest newsletter was distributed or your competitor launched a new product, your social media team should be the first to know about it.

An online crisis can happen at any time. It happens to the best (and biggest) of brands, and oftentimes, it blows out of proportion very quickly. Social media monitoring can immediately alert you when your mention volume skyrockets suddenly, or if social sentiment takes a nose-dive.

The right tool will warn you about this, and also give you real-time insights to help you decide how you’ll solve the problem.

5. Share your results

As you monitor these conversations, let your team know what you’re seeing.

Social media managers have an invaluable view of their business’s online reputation. Occasionally, create a social media monitoring report to let your superiors and team members know your brand sentiment.

This is important for two reasons:

• It proves that your work is worth the marketing budget your company has set aside.
• It ensures that the people responsible for making key decisions in your company are getting your insights about your potential and existing customers.

So no matter the industry your company is in, choose a tool that seamlessly combines social media monitoring with custom analytics.

Use Hootsuite to easily identify and monitor social media conversations that are relevant to your business. Save time and improve your performance.

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