New businesses more than anyone else have to monitor their brand mentions. There is a number of reasons for that.
First, it is common knowledge that the best way to compete with huge brands is by offering unique and personal experience. It’s easy to seem personal over social media: all you have to do is consistently reply to people that mention you, in real time and in a friendly way.
Second, while most big brands already have a reputation (granted, not always a good one), new businesses have to establish one. These days people rely on the Internet more than on any other kind of media to make up their opinion about brands and products. Hence, entrepreneurs should be aware of all online reviews about them to quickly fix any problems that arise.
Third, every business starts with a thorough market research. To make your product and marketing campaigns truly relevant to your target audience, you simply have to collect information that is online.
The list of reasons for Social Media Monitoring goes on and on. Yet, free SMM tools aren’t doing the job right (Google Alerts anyone?), and complex tools ( e.g., Brandwatch) are simply too expensive for any small business.
Keeping that in mind I’ve made a list of brand monitoring tools that hit that golden mean by being both reliable and affordable.
Awario
Awario is undoubtedly one the best SMM tools on the market. Unlike many other apps, it doesn’t just gather mentions from social media – it covers the whole web, including blogs, forums and news.
Awario searchers for mentions of any given keyword all over the web and delivers mentions in real time. It also saves mentions’ history for your future reference. Awario lets you know what social media site your mention has come from (Facebook, Twitter, Google +, YouTube) and shows the level of site popularity (traffic) if the mention has come from a non-social media site. You can choose to filter mentions by language.
A very handy Awario’s function is its Reach metric. It lets you know the level of influence of the mention author. Reach is calculated based on the author’s popularity. This makes it easier for you to prioritize your responses if you don’t have time to reply to everyone.
Awario also analyzes your mentions in a very comprehensive way. It tells you how mentions increase and decrease over time, compares alerts by their popularity on different social media and web sites, and lists most popular authors based on their engagement, i.e. how often they mention your keywords.
Awario is compatible with all devices, and you can set up weekly or daily email notifications with a summary of mentions found. You can export data anytime.
Pricing
The cheapest Awario plan in only 19$ /mo. It is also possible to create a plan tailored to the needs of your business. A Free 14-Day trial is provided (no credit card required).
Brand24
Brand24 is another tool that goes beyond Social Media Monitoring and searches for mentions across the web. It works in real time, too, and saves historic data. Similarly to Awario, Brand24 identifies people with the most social influence, shows the most active and the most influential authors.
Brand24 also performs sentiment analysis. The level of this function’s helpfulness depends on your general level of trust. Sentiment analysis sorts your mentions based on positive and negative (sometimes neutral) words in them. So mentions that include words “good”, “great”, “cool” would be marked as positive – you get the idea. Personally, I don’t think of sentiment analysis as very helpful – most words’ sentiment depend on the context, and the use of sarcasm on social media is over the top these days, which makes it pretty dangerous to trust this kind of analysis.
A good feature of Brand24 is that they offer handy PDF reports and data export. You can set up email notifications and get a mobile app to make sure you never miss an important conversation.
Pricing
Personal KickStart plan starts with 49$ /mo. A free 14-Day trial is provided (no credit card required).
Mention
Mention is probably one of the most well-known Social Media Monitoring tools. Same as Awario and Brand24, it monitors real-time data for mentions of chosen keywords. However, unlike the two above, it doesn’t save any historic data. Mention is probably a better tool for an aspiring marketing department than for an entrepreneur: it enables you to share mentions with other team members and assign tasks to them. They have a pretty helpful analytics too. You get to see top influential sources, location where the mentions are coming from, and activity by the day of the week. Mention also shows sentiment analytics discussed above.
Besides email alerts and mobile compatibility, Mention has a helpful feature of notifying you whenever there is a significant increase in the number of mentions.
Pricing
A solo pack is 29$ /mo. It is possible to create a custom plan tailored to your requirements. A free 14-day trial is available (no credit card required).
Mediatoolkit
Mediatoolkit is another Social Media monitoring tool that delivers reliable results. It monitors major social media websites ( Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram) and 10 million websites non-social sites, all in real time. Their analytics dashboard doesn’t differ much from any of the above: you can look at mentions growth over time, top influencers, performs sentiment analysis, and compare alerts. There is also a nice “Topics & Tags” function that shows you a word cloud of words that are associated with your keyword.
You can add you colleagues to the account to delegate monitoring to other people. Exports are available in Excel in the cheapest paid plan, and you can set up real-time, daily or weekly alerts.
Pricing
You can track one query free, forever, with no analytics available. Or you can buy a 15 €/mo per query paid plan. A free 14-day trial is available (no credit card required).
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is more of a Social Media Management platform. One of the first and most popular ones as well. Social media monitoring is included in Hootsuite’s set of function, so it is more than possible to use it exactly for that. Understandably, it offers less possibilities than tools made specifically for the SMM purposes. Instead of monitoring every mention of the Internet, Hootsuite monitors only most popular social networks. However, mentions are also in real time, and it is also possible to respond to them within the app itself. Besides, you can add social media profiles and RSS feeds, and you can schedule social media posts. Hootsuite’s free plan offers only 1 analytics report, and Pro one doesn’t provide you with many either, so if you are interested in analytics at all and can’t pay 50$ for every new analytics report (a very detailed one, though) I wouldn’t recommend it. However, if your priority is to engage as easily as possible with your social media leads, this tool is no less helpful than all of the above.
Pricing
Hootsuite offers a free plan, a Pro that starts with 9.99$ /mo if you pay annually, and 14.99$ /mo if you pay monthly. There is a free 30-day trial (credit card required).
In conclusion
With people of all demographics getting more active online every year, it became absolutely necessary for entrepreneurs to take care of their digital marketing strategy. It is close to impossible to watch every social media site, blog, forum and review platform yourself, and a wide range of tools that have arrived in response to this need are indeed very helpful. However, it is often difficult to find one most suited to your business. If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, I suggest you to try each of the above (as every one of them offers a free trial) and decide for yourself.
Image credits
lead image: scyther5 / Shutterstock.com
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