What Are People Saying About You?
A quick guide to 7 affordable social media monitoring tools.

When you monitor what people are saying on social media you can:
- Find testimonials and stories to share.
- Find people who are looking for products like yours.
- Keep track of your competitors.
- Measure trends.
- Provide customer service.
- Identify influencers.
There are an increasing number of tools to help you do this. None of them can be relied upon to report on every instance your name or brand are mentioned (the internet is a big place!), but they are getting better.
There are a number of enterprise-level tools that are priced accordingly, e.g. Brandwatch, Lithium, Spredfast and Sprout Social (from $99/month).
However, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 brand to monitor social media and my top 2 recommendations for brands with smaller budgets are:
- Awario, and
- Mediatoolkit.
AgoraPulse
Price: $39/month for 3 profile and 1 user.

AgoraPulse* is a social media publishing tool that includes monitoring functionality. While it may not have the full list of features of some of the dedicated tools, the ability to publish, reply and monitor in the one platform is compelling.
Awario
Price: From $29/month for 3 alerts.

Awario* provides real-time alerts in any language. Negative keywords can exclude irrelevant results, and notifications can be sorted by impact and organised in folders. with the ability to sort the notifications based on the impact of each discussion. Also, all pricing plans include boolean search operators.
Brand24
Price: From $49/month for 5 keywords.
Brand24 provides sentiment analysis, influencer identification and scoring, hashtag search, topic grouping and Slack integration. It’s strength is its ability to help you identify and engage with the most important voices speaking about your brand.
Mediatoolkit
Price: Free for 3 queries per month, then 49€ for 5,000 mentions.
Mediatoolkit provides real-time alerts for mentions online and on social media including Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. All languages and countries are supported, as are boolean search operators.
Mention
Price: $29/month for 2 basic alerts with 3,000 mentions and one user.

Mention has been around for a while and has some useful features. You can reply to mentions from your Twitter, Instagram and Facebook accounts. You can access sentiment analysis (e.g. are people talking positively or negatively). You can also collaborate with others, and filter results by source, language and date.
However, Mention gets pricey quickly — $99/month for 5 alerts, 5,000 mentions and 3 users, and boolean operators can’t be used on either of these two pricing plans.
Talkwalker Alerts
Price: Free.
With both web and Twitter monitoring, Talkwalker Alerts is a step up from Google Alerts (which doesn’t monitor social media). However, while Twitter is supported the lack of monitoring across other social media channels is a serious limitation.
Zoho Social
Price: From $10/month for 1 brand, 7 channels and 2 users.
Zoho has added real-time media monitoring to its huge suite of business tools. With a definite Hootsuite-feel, Zoho Social provides tools for both publishing on and monitoring social media.
Have I missed something? Please share any other helpful tools for social media monitoring in the comments.
* As an affiliate of these products, I receive compensation if you sign up to a paid plan.
