6 Social Media Monitoring Tools: Free & Paid
Analysis is a crucial part of social media management. It’s not enough to simply schedule Facebook posts, tweets and updates on a regular basis. While this will give you a regular stream of content, it provides very little feedback or evaluation.
By Ahmed Ahmed, Senior Account Manager at Clarity
Social media monitoring is important because it allows you to:
- Identify high-performing content
- Identify poorly performing content
- Learn about your fans and followers
- Discover trends in community behaviour
- Evaluate the growth (and growth rate) of your social channels
All of the above should feed into your thought process as you generate ideas for new content, changing the weekly ‘what-shall-we-post-this-time?’ into an informed, continuous improvement process. Social media monitoring also lets you see what conversations are taking place about your brand away from you ‘owned’ social channels.
BASIC SOCIAL MEDIA MONITORING TOOLS
These tools are free to use, and offer a baseline level of insight for social media managers. They focus on monitoring your own channels’ performance.
FACEBOOK INSIGHTS
Features
Found within the Facebook Page Manager. Provides statistics on: Likes, reach, visits, individual post performance and audience demographics.
Pros
Detailed age demographics, reveals sources of page likes and times when community most active. Also allows easy monitoring of competitor pages.
Cons
Difficult to determine numbers of likes, comments, shares day by day.
Cost
Free
TWITTER ANALYTICS
Features
Found within Twitter, via Settings>Twitter ads. Provides statistics on response to tweets (including clicks on links), follower growth
Pros
Follower interests provided, as well as other accounts they follow, ‘Websites’ tool allows tracking of all links to your site shared by Twitter users
Cons
Very basic demographics compared to Facebook Insights
Cost
Free
HOOTSUITE
Features
Link analytics (if you use the ow.ly shortener), basic reports on profile growth and engagement
Pros
Provides customisable reports for Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn
Cons
Figures sometimes lag behind real-time, anything beyond very basic stats overview requires spend
Cost
Free overview report, deeper level information requires upgrading to Hootsuite Pro (from $8.99/month) or Enterprise.
TWITONOMY
Features
Statistics on follower growth, mentions and retweets. Also allows hashtag analysis
Pros
Very detailed, easy to export statistics
Cons
Only analyses one social network: Twitter. Detailed information
Cost
Premium costs $19 per month.
ADVANCED
These advanced tools are paid for, and offer a deeper levels of insight, with access to historical data, and the ability to monitor conversations and identify influencers on given search topics.
BRANDWATCH
Features
Works via queries; searches that you set up for particular terms, which can be refined by excluding other similar but unrelated terms in order to maximise relevance. It provides data on the sources, scale and sentiment (positive or negative)of conversation around topics or brands.
Pros
Sentiment accuracy is high, system can be adjusted to ‘learn’ language patterns, good tool for online reputation management
Cons
Queries can be complex to grasp initially, and may return a high volume of irrelevant results that eat into you allowance (which is based on number of social media mentions monitored)
Cost
Basic package starts at £500/month, rising to £2000 per month for Enterprise packages
PULSAR
Features
Monitors and measures by topics, audience and content, allowing tracking of published assets as they spread organically,
Pros
Collects all publicly available data, attractive data visualisations, customisable detailed reports, more reliable influencer rankings based on expertise as well as size of following
Cons
Can take a while to collect data,
Cost
Entry price of £500/month for basic package.
