Social monitoring should become an ideal part of your social media listening strategy. Social listening can be defined as the process of tracking social networks for your brand mentions, products, competition, and other things that you deem applicable to your company. Primarily, you utilise social media monitoring tools to get and collect information on what your audience is posting about your business. The brand listening aspect is more dynamic and tactical. It entails the analysis of the data that comes from social monitoring for liable intuitions – everything from your changing general brand marketing strategy to engaging satisfied clients.
Companies utilise social media monitoring tools for various reasons. First, social monitoring offers you a chance to get strong insights into your industry influencers, competitors, and clients.
It allows you to target specific topics and keywords rather than investigating only the issues of interest in general. You can utilise these insights to boost your brand reputation and online presence. You require to add social media monitoring to various social media platforms and keep track of fresh opportunities if you want to enjoy all the benefits that come from brand listening. However, getting these insights and choosing the right social monitoring tool takes time.
To simplify issues, we have analysed the best social media monitoring tools that you can use for your Singapore business and compiled a list of the best tools to get you rolling.
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Hootsuite
Hootsuite is one of the best social monitoring tools that are free and ideal for a wide array of businesses. It covers most of the popular social networks in Singapore such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, and Foursquare.
One of the highlights that give it a higher cutting edge is the many social media marketing functions that it offers. You can generate weekly reports to understand how social media users are responding to your ads. It also comes with a team management facility that you can use to send private messages and assign tasks to members of your social media marketing team.
You can also use Hootsuite to keep track of specific search terms that are relevant to your niche and brand in real-time. This feature will come in handy when monitoring mentions of specific products, target keywords, and brands.
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TweetReach
TweetReach is an ideal media monitoring tool if you are interested in now the number of people who see and interact with your tweets. This tool is designed to measure the impact and implications of social media discussions. For example, you can use it to identify your most influential followers and segments of potential customers you should target when doing online promotions through Twitter.
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If This Then That (IFTTT)
IFTTT is not specifically tailored to function as a social media monitoring tool, but you can use it for that purpose. It has a feature that you can leverage to connect different services that you offer so that if something happens to one, a response is triggered in another. For example, you can set it to send you an automated email or SMS whenever your brand is mentioned.
Concisely, this tool can help you keep an eye on social media activity thanks to its range of integrated mobile apps and customisability.
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Brandwatch Analytics
Brandwatch Analytics is listed as one of the best social media monitoring tools by hundreds of sites and digital marketers. The wide array of applications and features give it an upper hand. You can use it to monitor your channels, hashtags, as well as specific keywords and phrases that you want to rank for online.
The customizable query builder makes it easy to track specific and broad topics without breaking a sweat. The data presented in the report is fetched from not only Twitter but also Reddit and other authority forums and blogs. Another aspect that gives this social monitoring tool an upper hand is that it allows users to come up with custom views, dashboards, and analytical components.
For example, you can set it to present data based on target audience emotions, sentiment, and demographics.
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Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo has proven itself to be more than just a social media monitoring tool. Hundreds if not thousands of online marketers in Singapore use it to carry out deep content research. You can use it to monitor and analyze Facebook pages as well as to know the metrics of each post you publish on your website.
That is, it will help you to know the number of likes and shares a particular article has garnered over time. It also goes the extra mile to reveal the best day of the week to post, the preferred length of the posts, and which type of content works best. Monthly statistics will help you to know if your content marketing strategy is working and the areas that need to be tweaked.
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Twazzup
If you just starting to do social media marketing in Singapore, Twazzup is an ideal choice especially if you are fond of Twitter. This social media monitoring tool is user-friendly and intuitive – all you need to do is enter the name you want to track in the search tab. It will give you real-time updates that include the top 10 keywords related to your query, most retweeted links and photos, and the most active influencers.
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Boardreader
More often than not, we forget about messaging boards and forums when doing social media monitoring. Boardreader is designed to fill this gap by giving you the ability to search for specific words and phrases that are related to your brand or industry on a wide array of forums. By using it, you will get insights into what people are discussing on all the monitored platforms.
You can also generate charts to identify trends and compare terms to know which ones you should use more in your content pieces. Another aspect that makes one of the best social media monitoring tools is its ability to help users locate conversations about their brand with high precision.
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HowSociable
When doing social media marketing in Singapore, it is imperative to keep track of what your competitors are doing in this space. HowSociable is a social media monitoring tool that is tailored to help you gauge a competitor’s presence on social media.
You can test it by registering for the free account that allows one to track 12 social media networks including WordPress and Tumblr. The premium accounts track 24 more sites and generate reports that are more comprehensive.
One of the aspects that give it different from the other social media monitoring tools is that it assigns a score to each social networking site. This score makes it easy to know which platform is ideal for the brand thereby cushion you from spending more time and money on platforms that do not deliver substantial results.
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TweetDeck
If you are conversant with Twitter, adding TweetDeck to your list of social media monitoring tools is recommended. You can use it to schedule tweets, monitor interactions with the target audience, track hashtags, and manage multiple accounts. The developers have also gone the extra mile to create an application that you can use to get reports on the website, chrome browser, and Mac.
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Mention
Mention is another powerful social media monitoring tool that sources data from millions of sources online in more than 40 different languages. Its wide coverage helps brands to know the number of times their names are mentioned on social network platforms, blogs, news sites, forums, and virtually any other platform online.
The tool also has a feature that allows one social media marketer to monitor their team’s actions, assign tasks, and share alerts seamlessly. Exporting mentions and generating reports can assist you to get a snapshot of your brand mentions by language or source over a given period of time. Leverage the 14-day free trial to know if it works for your business.
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Twitonomy
Twitonomy social media monitoring tool offers a wide range of metrics for free. There are also premium features that you can pay for. To use it, all you need to do is sign up using your Twitter account details. You can also Twitonomy to monitor your competitors by adding their Twitter handles to your account.
It will also give you information about your Twitter followings, followers, list, engagement statistics, most popular Tweets, and much more. For example, you can track conversations on Twitter based on users, lists, and hashtags. The data is presented in a graph and the data is easy to interpret.
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Followerwonk
Followerwonk focuses solely on Twitter and since Singapore has more than half a million active users on this platform, rest assured you will get plenty of data that will help improve your social media marketing strategy. It is perfect for planning outreaching campaigns as it allows digital marketers to connect with fans and influencers. You can further categorize the influencers based on geographic location, a number of followers they have, authority, or any other metric that you want.
Another interesting feature that Followerwonk offers is the ability to compare and contrast your social graph to industry leaders, competitors, and friends. The comparison will give you a clearer perspective of your performance on Twitter.
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SumAll
SumAll is designed to help small and medium businesses in Singapore leverage social media marketing. You can use it to understand the correlation between multiple social channels. Well, the user interface is not the easiest to navigate compared to the other social media monitoring tools we have covered in this article, but the many metrics available will come in handy when creating your next social media campaign.
Daily email updates will give you a clear overview of your performance compared to the previous week. The stats will help you respond to urgent issues in a timely manner.
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Social Mention
Social Mention is a simple but powerful search engine that you can use to find mentions of your brand or any other term that is related to what you do. You can specify the platforms you want it to search to avoid wasting time analyzing data from platforms that you do not use.
The data includes top keywords, top users, sentiment details, and frequency of brand mentions. All this data can be exported in a spreadsheet.
The above 14 social media monitoring tools will help you get maximum utility from social media marketing campaigns. Compare the features, cost, and ease of use to identify one that suits your business needs best.
However, there are other additional factors that you should consider when selecting a social media monitoring tool.
Let us dive in and look at them briefly.
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Brand Objectives and Requirements
Like other digital marketing campaigns, you need to set objectives for every social media campaign you run. It can be boost brand awareness, increase sales, engagement, leads, or even boost organic traffic from the pages.
Having a clear understanding of the brand’s objectives and requirements will help you select the right monitoring tool. It helps to write down the goals and the intended plan or strategies for achieving them.
Remember that no two social media monitoring tools are the same or suitable for two different scenarios. Each is designed to offer specific solutions to businesses, so take time to compare the tool capabilities with the objectives and requirements of your social media marketing campaign.
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Post Scheduling
As a social media marketer or online business owner using social media platforms to grow your business, it is imperative to streamline your processes to save time and get the best results. One sure way of achieving this goal is by investing in a social media monitoring tool with a post-scheduling feature.
Automated post scheduling means that you won’t have to change your schedule to post a new picture or link or any other visual on social media at specific times. The tool will do all the hard work for you – it will post them on the specified social media platforms at the set time.
Automated posting will increase productivity, maintain consistent brand image and voice across all the social media platforms. More importantly, it will increase engagement as the audience will always anticipate a new post from you at a particular time of the day.
Check out this article we recently wrote on how to do social media marketing the right way.
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Don’t Forget Customer Experience
Unlike in the past, businesses have a plethora of tools that they use for collecting customer data. With social media platforms become digital marketing powerhouses, you need a robust monitoring tool that complements the quality of customer service you offer.
Such a tool gives you accurate data about brand mentions, comments, and even complaints. By analyzing the data, you can identify troubling patterns and address the core causes of the problem promptly.
In addition, the data will help optimize your workflow and not only social media marketing but also other secondary marketing strategies such as email marketing. Few people log in to social media to chat with their favorite brand’s support team. Instead, they spend time socializing with friends and looking at pictures posted by other people they follow.
Based on that fact, even though the overarching objectives and goals may change over time, one underlying theme that you should retain is to provide a positive, engaging, memorable, and delightful customer experience. One of your objectives should be authentic and make your interaction with the target customers as enjoyable and memorable as possible.
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Benchmarking Return on Investment
Monitoring ROI will help you to know if your social media marketing campaigns are functional or not. Without social media analytics, there is no way to tell whether a particular ad campaign was successful.
ROI is one of the key performance indicators that you should never ignore when doing social media marketing. It will enable you to optimize the campaigns accordingly instead of making adjustments based on assumptions, guesswork, and results achieved by the competitors. More importantly, you can present the reports to stakeholders, business partners, and even financial institutions when applying for loans.
As you scout for an ideal social media monitoring tool for your brand, choosing one with a reporting feature is recommended. Know the specific metrics that it tracks to know if it suits the kind of campaigns you often run.
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Analytics
The above tip briefly discussed the importance of having a tool that has a dedicated analytics page. We feel it’s important to cover this topic on its own to help you make the right decision. Go for a tool that enables you to monitor the company’s performance, post success, engagement strength, growth rate, ad click-through rate, and other essential metrics.
The tool should be robust and provide insightful data on how the target audience interacts with your content in real-time. The secret to identifying the best tool is by considering your goals and objectives.
As mentioned earlier, no two monitoring tools are the same. Different social media monitoring tools serve varying purposes. The KPIs (key performance indicators) to pay more attention to will depend on the goals you want to achieve from the campaign. The most common KPIs are conversions, engagement, reach, customer loyalty, and sales.
For example, a company that wants to expand its clientele base on social media should focus on KPIs such as impressions, number of followers, and website traffic from the social media pages. If your goal is to boost engagement, pay attention to the number of shares, likes, mentions, comments, and clicks that your posts accrue.
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Data Reporting
Reporting is equally important, just like analytics. Invest in a social media monitoring tool that has special reporting features. Such a tool will give you a visual representation of the different variables, such as a graph showing the increase in the number of followers before and after running the campaign.
The best tools have an automated system that generates visual reports, achieving higher accuracy than manually collected and analyzed data. Concisely, reporting is the pillar of social media analytics. It’s impossible to optimize a social media campaign or any other related strategy if you don’t have accurate data on the current strategy performance.
It should be able to measure the performance of each post independently. Visuals break down complex topics or messages better than blocks of text. Rest assured that the marketing team will better grasp the graphs than if the report was presented in text format.
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Integration Capability
Having multiple tools for monitoring social media activity is counterproductive. You will end up juggling between them, thereby making decisions hastily and without the proper insight into the data. We recommend having one tool for all your social media channels to enhance efficiency.
In a nutshell, the centralization of data significantly improves the productivity of the teams and the performance of the business in all facets. You will create powerful integrations that will streamline your processes and give you a higher cutting edge in the market.
It’s also important to note that third-party integrations can improve the team’s workflow by fostering collaboration and transparency. So, in your quest for a robust social media monitoring tool, make sure that the one you pick can be integrated on multiple platforms or channels.
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Alerts
Choose a social media monitoring tool that auto-generates alerts that resonate with your brand’s goals and objectives. The best tool crawls the social media platform looking for engagements and keywords that can help optimize your content and campaigns.
However, you will need to set the triggers to get the alerts. The triggers can be anything from brand mentions to complaints, comments, and inquiries. It all depends on the nature of the campaign and the goals.
Such a tool will give you a clear picture of the social media marketing strategy performance and competitive analysis to give you a higher cutting edge.
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Smart Management Tools
For your online business to thrive in the current competitive business landscape, you need a couple of smart tools. These tools will help you monitor your social media activity continuously and generate accurate reports in real-time. You should never have to wait for hours to get a report, especially when preparing for a meeting or presentation.
Hence, settle for a social media monitoring tool that is smart and intuitive enough to automate common manual processes. It should also have a centralized interface that presents all the social streams on one screen. Such a tool will enhance your time management as well as productivity.
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Check Customer Reviews
Customer reviews are a reflection of the performance of a particular monitoring tool. Needless to say, many negative reviews are a sign that the tool doesn’t deliver the expected results. Go the extra mile to check how the company responds to the negative reviews to know if they are professional and determined to help your brand win via social media marketing.
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Pricing
Compare and contrast the price tag on different tools to find that that suits your budget. The price factor should be considered alongside other factors such as the efficiency and accuracy of the reports generated.
You are better off spending hundreds of dollars on a social media monitoring tool that is efficient and reliable than a cheap and unreliable tool with limited features. The latter will hurt your business by providing inaccurate data. You may also have to purchase additional third-party tools to supplement it.
As you compare the prices, be on the lookout for discounts and other deals that you can leverage to save money. Most companies offer generous discounts to clients who choose the yearly plan instead of the monthly plan. Weigh your options and make the right decision.
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Skills and Expertise Required
Not all social media monitoring tools are simple to use. Some require specialized skills and training. Therefore, it is important to put into consideration the skill set that your personnel has to select the right one. If training is required, be sure to include it in the budget.
It is impossible to monitor engagement levels or any other metric manually. Even if you have a small group of followers, you need an advanced tool to help you benchmark the strategies.
Most digital marketers use the terms social monitoring and social listening interchangeably. Unknown to them is a difference between the two, even though they are related.
Before we look at their definitions,
it’s important to note that the best monitoring tool has both features or capabilities.
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What is Social Listening?
Social listening is a feature available on social medial analytics tools. Using this feature, the tool can crawl the targeted social media platform and pick data based on your input settings. For example, you can set it to pick brand names, keywords, the specific type of engagement, and many other metrics.
The data collected from social listening will enable you to offer the best experience to the target audiences. It will also supplement your competitive analysis, thereby helping you make accurate and sustainable decisions.
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What is Social Monitoring?
Social monitoring is the process of identifying and responding to independent customer group engagements on various social media platforms. It helps show the followers that they are valued and have a special place in your brand.
Most of the actions taken during social monitoring are manual but supported by the data collected by the social listening tool. For example, by responding to comments quickly, the customers will feel that your brand is interested in making money and satisfying their needs and expectations amicably.
Being proactive in responding to comments will also come in handy when dealing with negative feedback or comments. Be professional and resist the urge to be rude even if you are convinced you are right and sentiments by the followers are unwarranted.
In the past, we have seen brands ruin the reputation they worked for years to build by responding rudely to a negative comment. Instead of trying to justify yourself, focus on providing solutions to the problem.
For example, if a follower complains that the product, they received was faulty, offer to ship a new one for free and collect the faulty piece. You could also give them a discount on their next purchase.
Concisely, giving your social media followers the attention, they desire will transform them into paying customers and eventually brand ambassadors. Remember, word of mouth is still one of the most effective marketing methods.
The social media landscape runs way deeper than what’s often displayed on our timelines. You’d be surprised to know that there are special tools that are specifically designed to open you up to a new world of social media, and which you didn’t even know existed. Talking of unheard of communities, conversations, and articles within your area of operation that you couldn’t have otherwise found or discovered had it NOT been for the binoculars and periscopes of the virtual world.
This is a trick that’s still unknown to many – one that you pull off your back pocket and turbo charge yourself to even greater heights of success provided you know how to put the tools into proper use.
This is what happens – social media channels, through the use of special tools, wises you up on relevant and interesting pieces of information that you could use to fuel up your creativity and stand out from the rest of your competitors who are yet to discover this one very important gem.
This statement is made in reference to no other tool than social media monitoring tools. Through the help of these tools, you can easily keep an eye on whatever is virtually happening within the industry you operate in based on your interest and specialty.
Otherwise referred to as social media listening, social media monitoring is the term describing the process of capturing unstructured data from the various social media channels, blogs, websites, forum, press pages and so forth. The information gathered can then be edited through topic assignment and appropriately tagged to draw meaningful conclusions.
The tool stretches far beyond responding to mentions, as it’s widely assumed. With a proper social media monitoring strategy, you could use the tool to dig up hidden conversions and bring them to surface. But what’s even better is that the tool is designed to help you develop a deeper understanding of the conversions you bring up so you come up with sound ways to put the information obtained into proper use.
Reasons for using the tool abound. Core among them is content curation. Other than that you could use the tool to spy on your competitors (or keep an eye on them), to provide great customer support, to dig out for more growth opportunities, or to come up with suggestions on how best you can improve your products or services.
All this, and so much more, can be achieved using the tool with little strain and less time investment on your part. You don’t have to work around the tool the whole day. What you need instead is a proper plan, and a few other complimentary tools to help you keep track of what’s coming so you can filter out fluff and unnecessary noise for clarity and accurate result data.
Step 1: Decide on What to Monitor
The first step of using the tool is deciding on what’s worth monitoring. You have to decide on the type of searches that are likely to net you the possible results.
Coming up with a surefire way on how to get this done can be a bit of challenge. Meaning most of what you get to discover will be by trial and error. But there are some ideas to set you up on the right track.
Here they are:
Brand Monitoring
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- What’s the name of your brand
- Variations of your brand name
- Possible misspellings of your business or brand name
- Special mentions of some of the campaigns you run
- Your slogan, tagline, or catchphrase
- Names of the most visible or active members of your business or company
- What’s the name of your brand
Industry and Topic Monitoring
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- Keywords that best describe the industry you operate in or your area of interest. For instance, at MediaOne, we’d want to monitor the latest social media marketing strategies in Singapore or some real time digital marketing hacks one could implement in 2019.
- Phrases relating to your industry or area of interest. These are the phrases that complement the services you render or the products you sell.
- Frequently used #hashtags within your industry of operation.
- Keywords that best describe the industry you operate in or your area of interest. For instance, at MediaOne, we’d want to monitor the latest social media marketing strategies in Singapore or some real time digital marketing hacks one could implement in 2019.
Step 2: Choose Your Tools
Once you’ve figured out what to monitor, the next thing to do would be to choose the most efficient monitoring tool for the task head. You’d want to enter your searches into the tool and let it keep tabs on your queries and serve you with results.
There are so many social media monitoring tools that you could use to achieve the same purpose.
But for today, we’ll narrow down the list to the five most popular ones:
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- Google alerts
- Social Mention
- Mention
- Talkwalker
- And Meltwater Icerocket to mention a few.
- Google alerts
While each one of these tool has its own set of unique features and strengths, most of them tend to operate pretty much the same. What happens is that you enter the phrase you wish to monitors, altogether with its related keywords or minus them.
You’ll then be presented with results, with an option to accept periodic alerts send to you via email.
Step 3 Look for Insights
Social media monitoring tools aren’t always crystal ball on the results you’re likely to gain on each passing day. Think of everything as fishing using a net – you can cast then net but you can’t be sure of what to expect.
But on the overall, every piece of information you uncover presents itself as an opportunity. Keep in mind that the opportunities you get can come in various forms including as a chance to create a new, inspired piece of content, suggestion to make necessary changes to your products or services, or a chance to establish a new relationship.
Here’s a list of result you’re likely to get and the corresponding opportunities they present:
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- People’s sentiments. This includes both the negative and positive things people say about your business or brand. Their upside is that they offer you a chance to improve on your services or products so you can start attracting better comments in the future.
- Feedback. You take every feedback you receive with the seriousness it deserves without rushing to respond to it. What matters is that you’re able to listen to it and act on it by making necessary adjustments to its point of reference.
- Questions. The questions asked clue you in some of the problems your customers are encountering. You can use them to come up with really informative content that attempts to answer some of the questions.
- Trends. Trends inform you about the hot topics to write about.
- Influencers. Influencers could introduce you to really prominent people in the industry you operate in. It’s through the influencer results you get that you can know who to follow and for what purpose.
- People’s sentiments. This includes both the negative and positive things people say about your business or brand. Their upside is that they offer you a chance to improve on your services or products so you can start attracting better comments in the future.
Closing Remarks
These are the 14 best social media monitoring tools that you can use to monitor your social marketing campaigns continuously. Choose one that best suits your brand and the objectives of your marketing campaigns. Do not shy away from reaching out to the respective customer care team if you encounter any challenges to get the utmost value from your preferred tool.
Call us today for more insider tips on social media marketing in Singapore.
