Updated
August 2016: We have removed some tools that no longer exist and included some
other free tools worth trying out – all aimed at helping monitor your social
accounts effectively.
The key to
making the most of social media is listening to what your audience has to say
about you, your competitors, and the market in general. Once you have the data
you can undertake analysis, and finally, reach social business intelligence;
using all these insights to know your customers better and improve your
marketing strategy.
If you are
a social media rookie, this list of the Top Free Social Media Monitoring Tools
might come in handy. When looking for a tool, it’s a good idea to try a couple
of them and choose the one that suits your needs best.
However,
bear in mind that these tools are not an alternative to Enterprise-level tools,
such as Brandwatch, which brought social media monitoring to a new level,
offering a much higher variety of services, functionality, and in-depth
analysis. It all depends on your needs.
That being
said, let’s take a look at some of the best free monitoring tools:
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite
is one of the best free social media listening tools available and covers
multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress,
Foursquare and Google+. It is well known for its social media management
functions.
The weekly reports
and the excellent team management facility (delegating tasks, sending private
messages) can be very useful when there’s more than one person handling the
social media accounts.
Hootsuite
Social Media Listening Tool
2) TweetReach
TweetReach
is a great monitoring tool for your business if you’re interested in checking
how far your Tweets travel. TweetReach measures the actual impact and
implications of social media discussions.
It is a
good way of finding out who are your most influential followers, implicitly
guiding you towards the right people you should be targeting when aiming to
share and promote online content.
TweetReach
is social media listening for twitter
3) Klout
Klout is
probably one of the most controversial social media monitoring tools. There are
those who hate it and claim that its scoring system is completely inaccurate
and that trying to interact with them is an impossible mission (a curious thing
as they provide interaction-measurement services).
On the
other hand, some people find it useful, as it measures influence through
engagement on Twitter. It is a good means of keeping an eye on what people
think about your brand, and to see what influences them the most.
Using the
Klout score you can adjust your posts according to your target audience’s
interests and increase your engagement rate.
klout -
social monitoring that assigns a score to each user
4) Social Mention
Quite
popular among social media enthusiasts, Social Mention monitors over one
hundred social media sites. It is probably one of the best free listening tools
on the market, as it analyses data in more depth and measures influence with 4
categories: Strength, Sentiment, Passion, and Reach. It also displays top
keywords, hashtags, and sites.
Socialmention
is one of the best social media monitoring tools
5) Twazzup
Twazzup is
great for social media beginners looking for a Twitter monitoring tool. You
just enter the name you want to track and you instantly get real-time updates,
meaning the most active top influencers, most retweeted photos and links, and
most importantly, the top 10 keywords related to your search.
twazzup
helps you listen to online media
6) Addictomatic
If aiming
to get an overall view of a brand, Addictomatic can be very useful and as
straightforward as Twazzup. The only difference is that Addictomatic focuses on
a variety of platforms, including Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, WordPress, Bing
News, Delicious, Google, Ask.com, etc. It’s really useful for keeping an eye on
recent industry developments and brand reputation.
addict-o-matic
free listening
7) HowSociable
HowSociable
is a handy tool for measuring your and your competitors’ social media presence.
A free
account allows you to track 12 social sites, including Tumblr and WordPress.
However, if you’re interested in 24 more, such as Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter,
etc. a pro account is required.
HowSociable’s
approach to social monitoring is a bit different as it breaks down scores for
different social media platforms, allowing you to see which social media
platforms work best for you and which ones need further development.
how-socialable
for online media monitoring
8)
IceRocket
This tool
offers blog, Twitter and Facebook monitoring in 20 languages, as well as
results graphs that you can play with. It allows you to choose the period of
time you are interested in monitoring.
It can be
used for keeping an eye on blog activity mentioning your brand, as they have
around 200 million blogs in their database and they also provide the
possibility of finding the latest trend terms related to your search.
meltwater
icerocket helps you manage social media
9) TweetDeck
TweetDeck
covers the basic needs of any Twitter user, so is a good option for beginners.
It’s a great tool for scheduling tweets and monitoring your interactions and
messages, as well as tracking hashtags and managing multiple accounts. There is
a web app, chrome ap, or mac app. The Windows app ceased functioning in April
2016.
tweetdeck
helps you schedule tweets, and monitor your twitter better
10) Mention
Mention
monitors million of sources in 42 languages, helping you stay on top of all
your brand mentions on social networks, news sites, forums, blogs or any web
page.
The app
lets you keep track of your team’s actions, share alerts and assign tasks.
Generating reports and exporting mentions can help you get a snapshot of your
mentions by source or language over a selected period of time. They offer a
14-day free trial.
mention -
free online listening tool
11) Twitonomy
Twitonomy
offers a range of metrics for free, with premium features enabled for
$19/month. Simply sign in with your Twitter account for robust monitoring and
metrics about your account. You can add your competitor’s Twitter handles to
gain insights about their activity too.
Twitonomy
shows you details of your Twitter lists, followers and followings, your most
popular Tweets, engagement statistics and much more.
You can
track conversations on Twitter based on hashtags, users, or lists. The details
are displayed in graphs and easily digestible stats.
Twitonomy
is used for analysing tweets
12) Followerwonk
Focusing
specifically on Twitter, Followerwonk is the right tool to find, analyze and
optimize your online presence for social growth.
The tool is
perfect for planning outreach campaigns by allowing you to search Twitter bios,
connect with influencers or fans and break them out by location, authority,
number of followers and more.
Interestingly,
with Followerwonk you can compare your social graph to competitors, friends or
industry leaders and measure how well you are doing.
followerwonk
is a free social media tracking tool from Moz
13) SumAll
Targeted at
small-medium businesses, SumAll is a cross-platform social media monitoring
tool that will help you understand the correlation between your social
channels.
The user
interface does take a bit of time to get familiar with, but there are an
extensive amount of metrics you can analyze.
The daily
email updates can give you a quick overview of top-level stats for your account
compared to the previous week, allowing you to quickly react and respond to
urgent issues.
sumall is a
great online social tool
14) Simply Measured
Simply
Measured makes it easy to analyze your paid, owned and earned activity. The
main suite is a paid tool, but it can still be used to create free individual
reports for Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Vine and Google+.
They
provide insights such as Facebook content, competitor and fan page analysis,
key customer service metrics measurement on Twitter, Instagram engagement,
content and trends analysis and many others.
simply
measured - great graphs
15) Google Alerts
With Google
Alerts you can monitor the web for interesting new content, mentions of your
brand or even yourself, your competitors, industry leaders and so on. As
they’re extremely easy to set up, this is social media montioring for
beginners.
By creating
a Google Alert, you will receive email notifications every time Google finds
new results on a topic that interests you across blogs, forums and news sites.
google
alerts is a great beginners tool
It should
be clear if you’ve got this far that the social listening tool space is a
crowded one.
We’ve
developed our own social media monitoring technology with larger, more
sophisticated organisations in mind, but we hope this list for getting started
is a useful foundation.
If you are
interested in seeing what more advanced tools like Brandwatch can offer, the please
do get in touch by booking a demo.
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