Best Social Media Monitoring Software in 2024

Social media monitoring tools offer a range of social CRM capabilities including helping to monitor conversations about your company or brand. The best programs can be used to perform a host of tasks including promoting your product, conducting market research, collecting customer feedback for product development, locating communities with whom you can engage, monitoring trending conversations, tracking competitors’ activities, spotting leading influencers in your field, alleviating online customer criticism and more. This buyer’s guide helps you out by giving useful pointers on how to do educated comparisons to select the best social media monitoring software for small business or large companies.

A good course of action is to sign up for at least a few free trials or demo and basic unpaid plans from popular social media monitoring software providers. With that method you will have the opportunity to test the important elements and you will get a good comparison of the tools of each app. The best thing to do when choosing the best Social Media Monitoring software is to try platforms that currently have the highest SmartScore rankings and Customer Satisfaction Rating in our social media monitoring software reviews: Cyfe reviews, Sprout Social, Swift Social, Oktopost, and Attensity.

Buyers of social media monitoring software typically fall into the following main categories:

• Enterprise customers – Large businesses usually use a comprehensive CRM suite and look to invest in an app that integrates smoothly with existing solutions. If you’re looking to invest in a CRM app, there are many that include social media monitoring features, but these may not be as powerful as dedicated systems. Recommended products include Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Oracle, and Salesforce.
• Best-of-breed customers – A number of programs cater to this space and they include advanced analytics and features. But on the flipside, they may not integrate smoothly with enterprise apps. Recommended solutions include Spredfast, Attentio, and Attensity.
• Soloprenuers and small companies – Individuals and small firms that don’t require robust contact management and other CRM features can make use of less expensive options. They can also consider combining a couple of the many available free programs. Ideal products include Social Mention and ViralHeat.
• Marketing agencies and consultants – Firms and freelance marketers can take advantage of social media monitoring platforms to assist them in taking care of their clients’ reputation online.

• Cyfe: An all-in-one dashboard app that monitors and analyzes data across different online services, and provides one of the most robust feature suits for revealing data in real time.
• Marketo: One of the leading marketing automation platforms with strong social monitoring capacity, able to streamline most marketing-related tasks that help your business grow.
• Sprout Social: A popular SaaS solution that promotes communication. Its main functionalities are: Publishing, Engagement, and Analytics.
• Brand24: Multi-awarded social media monitoring solution designed to help companies identify social mentions, and react to them in an engaging manner.
• Swift Social: A comprehensive Twitter management solution, which allows companies gain total control over their Twitter accounts, and maintain an impressive social presence to drive more traffic to their websites.

There are many different types of social media monitoring software, varying from free and basic tool suites to ultra costly and accurate programs. Features can also act as categorization criteria, as certain programs do nothing but count social mentions, while others are more robust and they allow marketers to listen and analyse sentiments, curate, sell, take proper care of customers, and even do some custom branding. Deployment is also an important factor based on which there are:

• On-premise social media marketing. These are covered with a single license, and are hosted on the client’s local server. They qualify as the most expensive ones, due the fact that they require complex setup and occasionally some hardware installation.
• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) social media marketing. These are usually paid per month, and are hosted on the vendor’s server. The business owner is not responsible for installation, updating, and maintenance.
• Cloud-hosted social media marketing. Most of these offer free basic plans, and qualify as the most affordable ones due to their universal access and the fact that the client doesn’t need to update them or to pay for maintenance.

These are the main features to expect from your next social media monitoring system:

• Analytics and searching – These tools scour the Web to spot new data and remove ads, spam, duplicates, false matches, out-of-date pages, and navigation text from it to offer you useful data for your business.
• Automated responses – Many social listening tools enable you to respond automatically to messages regarding your brand, saving valuable employee time spent in responding to common concerns. You can retweet messages with your business hashtag or use templates to answer technical support queries.
• Internal collaboration – You can use this feature to route messages to the concerned person within the company and identify when a communication trail with a client has closed.
• Spot influencers – Social media tracking tools enable you to identify evangelists, connectors, and mavens—people who exert great influence over your brand. You can identify people who tweet the most, engage readers in the best manner, or have the highest number of followers. You can then nurture relationships with these people to improve brand image and visibility.
• Locate pertinent communities – You can also spot communities that relate to your brand and engage with them to market your product better and improve brand performance.
• Sentiment analysis – How do customers and the general public feel about a company’s products or services? With a sentiment analysis tool, they can gauge the answer based on the tweets and posts of social media users.

Here comes a list of the main benefits companies experience when using a solid social media monitoring system:

• They are able to benchmark competitors’ social media campaigns. What this means is that a good social media monitoring system is supposed to gather social mentions, capture trends, and learn from demographics to provide you with live social intelligence. As a result, the company will have invaluable information for developing better marketing strategies and will do it at a fraction of the price it would pay without such a system.
• Find and engage important influencers in your industry. Finding and engaging the right influencers is a key factor for the success of every business, and this software facilitates it by giving companies a clear idea of who those influencers are and how to engage them. Better yet, companies get to understand their social media presence, identify negative mentions, and automate sentiments.
• Enhance your reputation by responding to customer queries quickly. Social media monitoring tools enable companies to engage in conversations that concern them as well as respond to both positive and negative social mentions accordingly and in time. This practice makes their brand more trustworthy and creates an image of a responsible and professional company that genuinely cares about its current and prospective customers.
• Monitor and measure your marketing and brand campaigns across the web. These tools observe and measure the effects of your campaign and the campaigns of your competitors. This way, you can understand what social media is actually doing for your brand and how you could use it to plan your next outreach campaigns.
• Identify emerging trends and perform market research. The best thing about running a social media monitoring tool is probably keeping an eye on emerging trends and practices. This lets you plan campaigns accordingly. With just little effort, your social monitoring tool will keep you in control of your social presence, and empower you to make the most of it.
• Generating leads on social media networks. In 2019, there were 2.95 billion social media users. This number is set to rise as the Internet becomes more accessible through mobile data. That is why social media platforms are a rich ground for generating new leads.

Real-time tracking: Brands can set how they want to monitor chatter about them on social media, apart from tags and mentions. They can also opt to track keywords and phrases and the best thing about that is they can do so in real-time. This means that as soon as someone mentions a keyword or keyphrase, they receive a notification. As a result, they can leverage positive mentions and mitigate issues immediately.

Community influencers: This trend has been around for a while and it is likely to continue in an upward manner. Brands that do not yet do so may want to leverage influencers, too, since consumers’ buying decisions are 33% influenced by customer reviews. A social media monitoring software can help companies find them and assess their reach to ensure that they can provide a good ROI.

Social data for enhanced support and service: Social media monitoring solutions are good for ensuring there are little to no negative mentions about your brand on platforms. However, social data has another purpose: better support and service. Since many people won’t post about their issues online, customer support representatives can reach out to them to solve their problems. Overall, the company can use information from social strata to improve its services.

Filtering negative mentions: As much as brands need to mitigate negative perceptions of the public about them, focusing on such mentions can be counterproductive. If they spend too much time trying to bury or filter those, they may miss opportunities to improve their goods or services. Instead, they can try to understand why people keep on posting adverse reviews.

Fighting spam: Bots abound even on social media sites. As such, businesses may encounter plenty of spam coming from them. The same can be said for accounts that are zealously posting or tweeting for promotional or other purposes. They can waste a huge amount of time that is better spent on interacting with actual customers or audiences.

Connections with other software: Social data is a minefield of opportunities for business improvement. However, a company can only take advantage of it fully when they can integrate their social monitoring tool with their marketing and customer support tech stack. If it is not possible, they can still do so manually or via a separate solution but at a slower pace.