Social Media Listening Tools You Should Be Using Right Now

Cutting through the noise to get through the social data that matters to your business can be quite challenging. But thanks to numerous social listening tools available today, online marketers and business owners can now have those business-impacting data.

Why You Should Invest in Social Listening Tools

Social media listening tools basically provide you with the essential data so that you can come up with an effective social media strategy tailored-fit for your business. These tools will help businesses in:

• Gathering real-time social media insights to help craft up a better social media campaign and communications plan.
• Optimizing designs of existing ad campaigns based on customer behavior.
• Developing overall content marketing strategies based on topics customers talk about.
• Establishing trust factor by identifying with key influencers and generating social posts the influencers are talking about.
• Developing and monitoring social media performance metrics. 
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So to be able to help you maximize the power of social media, we have picked the top 8 social media listening tools:

1.       Google Alerts. This social listening tool will send you an email update of the latest happenings on the inter-web based on your queries. These updates will be emailed to you in real-time so you can manage your brand accordingly. Its ability alone to ping you every time your brand gets mentioned online is golden.

2.       Social mention. A free social mention tool that’s surprisingly fast and robust. The tool will basically search content from across the universe (that’s what the tool says!) to give you information about brand discussions. This gives you an easy way to review the most recent mention of your brand on the web. Expectedly, because it’s a free tool, the results are not that extensive.

3.       BoardReader. Marketers focus their efforts on the social media giants like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, neglecting the social activities happening on forums. BoardReader aims to bridge that gap. This social listening tool scours forums for any conversations about a brand. Often, the discussions in forums are lengthy and detailed so this you will help you discover new insights about your business.

4.       Topsy. This social media insight tool focuses on Twitter – tweets, links, photos, videos and influencers relevant to your brand and business. The “sort by date” feature allows you to listen to the most recent conversations about your brand. You can also scan through archives to check out the old conversation and get even more insights.

5.       Loudpixel. This is a paid social media analysis service/tool that will help your business turn social conversation into useful insights that you can use to craft up better social marketing campaigns. You can also track the progress of your campaign against competitors’ by using specialized benchmarking system.

Over to you..
If you want to have your ears on the ground of the social web, these social listening tools will be your most useful set of hearing aids. So, are you using any of the 5 listening tools above? Share your experience with us and how the tools impacted your business.