Social Media Listening & Monitoring + Free Tools of 2019
by David Page, Digital Marketing Consultant at Elfsight — developer of customizable & coding-free website widgets
In digital marketing, it’s equally important to keep track of what’s going on in your niche and monitor what your visitors and customers are saying about your brand. These approaches are known as social media monitoring and social media listening. Together they constitute an integral part of your marketing and communication strategy allowing you to meet the needs of your target audience.
Social media monitoring and social media listening are often used interchangeably but they are not the same. So what’s the difference?
Social Media Monitoring vs Listening
Before I started writing this piece, I read a couple of articles on this topic and the more I read, the more confused I got. The opinions on these two approaches are very diverse, even opposite at times. What’s called monitoring in one blog is called listening in the other. In this post, I share and develop the point of view of Patrick Cuttica, Product Marketing Manager at Sprout Social (see his article on CMO by Adobe) on these two marketing techniques.
Social Media Monitoring refers to tracking your brand or product name, business-relevant keywords, your competitors and acting respectively. Actions include responses to customers’ questions, solving their problems, responding to positive mentions — all these blocks build your brand positioning. Most often it’s the responsibility of social media managers and customer care agents.
“Only 11% of social messages sent to brands ever get a response” — Patrick Cuttica
On the other hand, Social Media Listening reveals the “online mood” of your target audience and their attitude towards your brand and your competitors that is also known as Social Media Sentiment. Analyzing the data acquired through social media monitoring, you can create more insightful content for your customers, launch more targetted marketing campaigns, improve PR strategies and customer service, create new products that your target audience demand.
“Monitoring takes a look at individual messages coming in across your channels, while listening assesses the meaning behind this data in the aggregate.” — Patrick Cuttica
Using social media monitoring and listening, you receive the following benefits:
- Consumer insights — reevaluate your approaches and strategies using customer mentions and conversations
- Proactive customer service — react to customer experience n social media platforms like Quora, Twitter, Reddit, niche LinkedIn groups
- Lead generation — your proactive social media strategy will bring more attention to your business, increasing relevant referral traffic to your website
- Competitive analysis — learn more about your industry, its news and trends as well as your competitors newest strategies. Gain an advantage through social media listening
- Find and connect with influencers — distinguish and connect with people that have the most influence in your niche
As the amount of data is large, you need third-party software to do the task. There are plenty of free and premium solutions on the market. Let’s have a peep at free software.
Free Social Media Monitoring & Listening Tools
TweetDeck
TweetDeck offers a more convenient Twitter experience by letting you view multiple timelines in one easy interface. It includes a host of advanced features to help get the most of Twitter: Manage multiple Twitter accounts, schedule Tweets for posting in the future, build Tweet collections, and more. If you use TweetDeck in a corporate or team environment, you can set up a team account.
Social Mention
Social Mention is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the Web into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track and measure what people are saying about you, your company, a new product in 100+ social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, Google, etc.
Social Mention measures influence with 4 categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach. It also displays top keywords, hashtags, and sites.
Crowdfire
Crowdfire is a freemium tool that lets you clean and grow your Twitter and Instagram accounts. The app quickly allows users to find unfollowers, followers, inactive users, fans, and people who will follow back for enhanced online presence. Use Crowdfire to run competitor analysis, delve into social analytics, reply to your social mentions and more.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is another freemium social media management tools, featuring post scheduling, analytics reports, custom URL, RSS integration and more, With Hootsuite, you can manage your social media channels and track your brand mentions. Connect and monitor multiple social media profiles including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and Instagram.
The free plan allows 3 social profiles and 30 scheduled messages.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a search service that allows people and businesses to monitor what’s said about them on the Internet. Common keyword alerts are:
- your company or brand name
- your personal name
- your domain name
- competitor’s company name
- geographic specific requests
Conclusion
Social media monitoring and listening are essential approaches to digital marketing. You should be aware of what your customers think about you and your competitors, and where your market is moving — you need to adjust to its needs and be a step ahead of your competitors.
