Social media monitoring is essential for your brand to succeed online. Analyzing the conversations around your brand, campaign, and competitors can help you achieve your social media goals more efficiently. Effective social media monitoring also gives you a better understanding of what your customer wants, how to improve client service and relations, and track what your competitors are doing.

But you cannot monitor social media using the analytics tools available on the various platforms themselves.

Glean.info
Previously known as CyberAlert, Glean.info was founded around two decades ago by public relations veteran William J. Comcowich. Its social media monitoring tools collect audience data from various sources on the Internet. Glean.info is trusted by many brands as it delivers effective results and prevents fake sources from using the brand’s name. It monitors new posts on 2,000 fake news sites and alerts you as soon as your brand gets mentioned. Brands also get integrated access to social media insights. However, Glean.info’s plans are somewhat pricey at around $299 onward per month, which might be too much for small businesses to afford.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free social media monitoring tool that gives you basic information about where your brand or product is mentioned. It scans through the website you choose to check your brand or product and gives you the result in an easy-to-understand manner. You can receive alerts in a variety of languages from sources like blogs, news sites, and forums. But if you want advanced tracking and monitoring solutions that help you track patterns and optimize your strategy, Google Alerts is not the answer.

Sprinklr
With advanced social media monitoring tools and intelligent insights, Sprinklr is the choice of countless brands across the world. Social listening is one of its premier features, while the Modern Research tool gives you in-depth knowledge of global conversations on various topics that are important for your brand. Sprinklr also allows you to study your competitors’ performance, which helps identify potential gaps in your strategy. Paid-ads performance is the only area that Sprinklr can work on. Currently, you need to manually add paid-ads performance since it doesn’t get automatically pulled and inserted into the reports.

NetBase
NetBase has been one of the most trusted social media monitoring tools since it was launched in 2004. With its natural language processing engine, NetBase understand the 199 types of human languages. Its LIVE Pulse solution gives real-time insight into trending topics and top terms/hashtags, facilitates goal setting and tracking, and integrates paid metrics. In a nutshell, NetBase keeps you updated with what your customers are like, what they prefer, and what their passions are. This knowledge arms you to build better campaigns that are in line with your customers’ goals. That said, NetBase’s plans are pricey, so they might not work for every brand.

Talkwalker
Talkwalker uses intelligent features to drive social success. It monitors brand sentiment and gives you a comprehensive view of owned and earned social media content. The Conversation Clusters feature is especially useful, providing data through AI for finding hidden links between trending conversations, discovering drivers of conversation, and giving you a core understanding of the customer. Talkwalker also detects emerging themes, identifies market gaps, and serves more relevant content and offers to your customers.

Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a popular name in the field of social media monitoring and management. It allows you to post on multiple channels through a single platform and monitors relevant conversations on social media. You can track key topics and brand mentions, measure your competitors’ performance, as well as spot patterns and trends on social media. Hootsuite also differentiates conversions from paid and owned media.