12 Social Media listening tools

Social Media is used by brands for various purposes like:

      ·         Brand Building

      ·         CRM

      ·         ORM (Online Reputation Management)

      ·         Lead Generation

      ·         Sales

      ·         Traffic Generation

      ·         Internal Communication

      ·         Fun Raising

The major activity in social media that marketers need to do is listen to what, when, where are consumers talking about their respective brands. Data on web is scattered all around, thus to make our life's more easy we have some free, premium & paid Social Media listening tools.

Tools to Monitor & Measure on Social Media:

1. Google Alerts: 

It’s a free tool; you can get email notifications any time that Google finds new results on a topic you’re interested in. Eg:- get updates about a product you like, find out when people post content about your brand on the web, or keep up with news stories.

2. Google Analytics: 

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that generates detailed statistics about a website's traffic and traffic sources and measures conversions and sales.

3. Facebook Insights:

Facebook Insights is a pretty powerful tool for those wanting to track user interaction on their Facebook Fan Page. Facebook Insights helps the page admin to track the number of active users, engagement, brand reach, virality & better understand page performance.

4 Klout: 

Influence is the ability to drive action. When you share something on social media or in real life and people respond, that’s influence. The more influential you are, the higher your Klout Score. It offers several ways to bring influencers & brands together.

5 PeerIndex: 

Very similar to Klout, it helps brands to identify the key influencers & content that really matter to them.

6 Tweetreach: 

TweetReach is a simple free tool to measure how far a hashtag reached on Twitter. It provides set of metrics to help you understand an idea's reach on Twitter, top contributors, top RTs etc

7 Bitly: 

Bitly is not only a URL shortening service but also lets you track the statistic of any bitly URL

8 Social Mention: 

Social Mention is a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, tweets from across the web into a single stream of Information. It’s one interface to know if your brand reputation across the social channels is negative or positive.

10. SproutSocial: 

It’s a paid social media management system, with functionality for teams to focus on engagement, publishing & analytics. Sprout makes it easy for the entire team to respond to customers on social and to know we’ve gotten back to each and every one. Provides great managing reports.

10. Alterian SM2:

Alterian SM2 is a business intelligence solution designed to provide visibility into social media and let brands tap into their customers' thoughts and opinions.

11. Radian6:

Very popular & desired social media tool. Powerful tool which will change the way you use digital marketing. Radian6 is a platform that enables organizations to monitor and engage in conversations across the social web. When you configure a search, the Radian6 platform retrieves results from more than 150 million sites and sources.

12. Sysomos: 

Sysomos helps you monitor, analyze, gather insights and ultimately, make the decisions that allow you to create better products and services for your customers

All the above tools lets you hear customers feedback, issues, suggestions...All that I can say with my experience is - You build customer loyalty and connection not by answering fast, but by engaging with respect and transparency.

So let’s not social media be all about no of Facebook likes, Twitter followers, Youtube views, Unique page views...let it be a platform where customers feel heard & connected to brands.