5 Social Listening Tools for Social Media Pros

Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, blogs, Reddit (to only name a few) should all be closely monitored. Ideally, you should know when anyone mentions your brand’s name or that of your stakeholders or influencers.

Even more, you should be able to track mentions of your competitors to help you with your marketing efforts.

But can you imagine how much work this would take?

Simply opening each platform and doing a few simple searches could cost you hours every day. Yes, every day, because on social media speed is everything.

So what can you do?

Well, you can get smarter about social listening.

I’ve written about social listening in the past. If you didn’t get a chance to read the article, let me summarize it for you.

Social Listening – What Is it and Why Do You Need it?

Briefly put, social listening refers to tracking the social media conversations around certain words, phrases, brands or events in order to learn what your buyers persona is really interested in.

Well, isn’t clicking on hashtags and @mentions enough? Won’t checking the notifications do?

Not really!

You see, 30% of tweets about a certain brand don’t use their Twitter handle or a hashtag. People don’t really care about making the social media manager’s life easier.

How inconsiderate of them, right?

However you feel about this, one thing is certain: if you only track your notifications, you can miss out on 30% of your chances to get a new lead, a new client, join a meaningful conversation or give a customer support answer really quick.

By the way, it looks like 59% of American social media users say that social channels have made it easier for them to get support. This means that you can’t answer a message or a tweet @you after days. No, not even if it doesn’t have the “@”.

Plus, social listening can help you improve your marketing strategy, give you amazing content ideas, enhance your insights in your buyer persona and help you outsmart the competition.

Just think about this scenario: someone asks your competitor a question on social media. But they don’t do social listening, so it takes them days to get to that public tweet.

This is the perfect opportunity for you to swoop in and showcase your expertise in the matter. And, yes, even openly steal a client from your competitors.

Sounds great, right?

But what are you to do? Hire someone just for social listening, as it appears to be a full time job?

No.

This is where social listening tools come into play. Let’s take a look at them:

Top 5 Social Listening Tools

These social listening tools are designed to save you a lot of time. Remember when you first discovered management tools and your working time got cut in half?

This can be even better!

Scheduling posts in advance is a time saver, indeed. But it doesn’t really give you any insights. These social listening tools, on the other hand, can truly transform your social media marketing.

1. Mention

Mention helps you monitor your brand in real-time. Plus, it offers in-depth analytics and competitor insights.

All you need to do is sign up for the service and create your first alert. You can monitor mentions from any source, from social media networks to blogs, forms and news outlets. Of course, you’ll also know if the message associated to your brand was a positive or a negative one.

You can also connect your social media accounts to it so you can react quickly.

But this isn’t all. One of the features of this social listening tools I like best is its analytics. The stats about the number of mentions in any given period are at your fingertips.

Better yet, you can group and sort them by their social authority. This is an amazing way for you to find and reach out to influencers you haven’t even heard about yet.

If you really want to up your social game, you can use Mention to set up alerts not just for your brand, but for your competitors’ brands, too.

2. Hootsuite

Isn’t it awesome when social listening tools come with a management option? Of course, for Hootsuite it was the other way around first.

I’m pretty sure you already heard of them (along with Buffer, Sendible and Agorapulse), but did you also know you could use it for social listening?

All you need to do is add an @username or a simple phrase or keyword and you’ll get all the mentions in your dashboard.

3. Social Mention

Social Mention is a free, basic tool. It has no fancy analytics, but it comes in handy of you’re bootstrapping.

Using it is pretty simple: type your name/industry/competitor’s name into the bar and allow Social Mention to work its magic. The tool will be searching through social networks, blogs, news outlets and more.

The report you receive is ranked by sentiment (positive/negative/neutral), reach of influencers and sources. This makes Social Mention one of the best social listening tools to easily find influencers and even new keywords.

Who said you have to pay a fortune to be informed?

4. IFTTT

If This Then That (IFTTT) practically gives away its functionality from its name.

IFTTT is more than a social listening tool. As you can see on their website, you can use it for almost anything, including connecting IoT devices and turning on the porch light for the pizza delivery guy.

But since we’re not talking about pizza now, let’s see what got IFTTT in the list of social listening tools.

Here’s how it works: you have to sign up for the service, then create your first applet. [Applet is the IFTTT name for an alert, so don’t worry; it’s nothing too complicated]. Select your favorite platform (Facebook, Twitter, Buffer, Tumblr, RSS feeds and more) and add your trigger.

The “trigger” simply means inputting your keyword, name or phrase. IFTTT will take it from here and you will be notified whenever one of the sources mentioned your “trigger”.

5. Syften

If you want to engage in online conversations monitoring a few brand names is not enough.
Syften assists with marketing on social news sites like Reddit, Hacker News, or Twitter and allows you to keep track of entire phrases.
This allows you to participate in online discussions relevant to your business as they happen.

When someone posts a link to your blog you can give it that initial nudge needed for success. You can stay aware of your team’s online actions and support each other. You can subtly recommend your product when a relevant topic is discussed. Or you can just hunt for qualified leads to reach out to.

As you can see, there’s nothing too complicated about social listening tools. Luckily, more and more social media management services have started adding them to their standard services (Agorapulse is one of them).

As soon as you’ve chosen your favorite tools, you can simply set up your alerts and check in every day to give yourself an ego boost (or a cold shower). If you opt for a tool like Social Mention, just be sure to add checking it regularly to your calendar – it’s so easy to forget!

One Last Piece of Advice

Social listening tools are great to monitor your brand’s reputation and that of your competitors. But why limit yourself to this?

Since most of these tools are paid services, I suggest you make the most of them. Create alerts or rules to monitor your industry as a whole. See what your buyer personas really care about when it comes to your field.

This way, you will be able to deliver better content and strike more meaningful conversations. While these are called social listening tools, it doesn’t mean you only have to use them for social media.

Our social media experts are skilled in these social monitoring tools and in virtually everything related to the industry. Reach out whenever you need help boosting your social media presence!