For any brand these days, having an online presence is of utmost importance. Interaction with the audience on social media helps make or break your online image. Customers tend to opt for a brand with a positive image.
Social media is one of the most powerful and fast mediums of communications these days. Brands have to always be on their toes to ensure no negative comments or mentions about them go unanswered.
It is necessary to attend to social media interactions as soon as possible. In short, all your online channels need to be monitored at all times. This is where brand monitoring tools come handy.
Brand monitoring is a process to track the various mediums for assessing all the online activity concerned with your brand.
This includes the places where your brand is mentioned or tagged and what is being said about it.
With the number of online channels at our disposal, it is humanly impossible to track everything manually. Brand monitoring tools help you track your company’s online activity.
Google Alerts is possibly one of the best brand monitoring tools you can find out there. It allows you to choose the parameters as to how you wish to monitor your brand.
It can scan for your keywords based on the number of times it has appeared in searches in publications, websites, news, etc.
There are various filters with which you can play around. You can have all the details available for you in a feed or have them emailed.
It is free to use, but that comes with certain downsides such as missing out on some advanced options which other tools provide.
Sometimes the results are not always completely accurate, and it does not allow you to monitor your social media platforms.
If your business branding is dependent heavily on social media, then this is the tool for you.
Social Mention will provide you an update of every single impression for your brand. Be it any keyword, competitor updates, mentions of your brand, or any activity on all of your posts as well.
It comes with a handy widget that provides you live updates on the page directly. It will provide you with information such as the number of views, likes, comments, shares, etc. on each social media platform.
Brandwatch is an all in one brand monitoring tool. It promises to provide highlights and insights into your brand’s performance across all digital channels.
They provide statistics on how you can improve your online presence and brand image through various channels such as social media, content creation, etc.
Brandwatch helps brands understand how customers perceive their brand and its health online.
The real-time alerts can help track activity and make any tweaks if necessary. It is one of the best all-round option available in the brand monitoring tools market.
To counter the free to use Google Alerts, Mention is available for brands looking for an effective monitoring tool.
It provides all the important information and more through its monitoring engine.
Mention can scan through multiple sources such as news, blogs, feeds, and social channels. Though its reach is currently limited to Facebook and Twitter, it is a good option for B2C brands to leverage.
Mention also comes with a mobile application to enable remote access from anywhere. It helps you keep a real-time watch on the brand’s online performance.
One of the key features of mention is its anti-noise technology. It only showcases results that the users have asked for.
The free plan allows one user to manage up to three social media accounts.
SharedCount is targeted towards individual users who might not have the capacity to pay for premium products. It is the best available free monitoring tool and can be real handy for freelancers in particular.
Being free to use, it does have its limitations. It only provides the number of shares received for a particular URL.
The user has to enter the URL that s/he needs to track. SharedCount will then provide you the details as to how many times the post has been shared.
It is quite rudimentary since the UI is pretty simple, and usage can be cumbersome for a new user.
But it does provide the share count from various social media channels as well.
For heavy content users, SumoMe is the perfect tool, especially for website owners. Website owners are concerned about the kind of content that users are accessing the most.
Which topics are receiving the highest number of hits is what the owners are concerned with. SumoMe provides the exact information in a Heatmap format.
One can argue that it is similar to Google Analytics, though claims are that it is more advanced. Though what it lacks is the share count display, which can repel some potential users from it.
SumoMe is available for free to use for up to 100 users per day. For more, customers will have to opt for their premium plans.
Also Read: 10 Best Free Content Curation Tools
Google Webmasters is one of the most reliable tools to track online traffic on your website.
It provides you with information such as the time and geography about the traffic to your website. It is a very reliable tool since all the stats are, according to Google’s search engine.
It is easy to check and fix any indexing and crawling using the search console. It also provides you with reports of your most searched keywords. It is an entirely free tool.
Tweetdeck is a social media dashboard application specially designed for Twitter. Twitter officially acquired Tweetdeck in 2011.
Tweetdeck allows us to manage multiple Twitter accounts from one dashboard. There is no limit to the number of profiles that you can manage from one account.
It allows users to monitor numerous lists, searches, and hashtags from the account. It is an entirely free application.
Hootsuite is a social media management tool. It helps you to manage your social media profiles from one platform.
You can post directly to your social profiles from the Hootsuite dashboard. You can also schedule multiple posts to different profiles from Hootsuite.
The free account allows you to manage up to 3 profiles from the Hootsuite dashboard and have one user use it at a time. The free account lets you schedule up to 30 posts per month.
Like Tweetdeck, Twilert is another Twitter monitoring tool. However, they do differ in functionality.
Twilert sends you alerts when your brand/profile is mentioned in any twitter post. You can also set alerts for hashtags or keywords of your choice.
So, whenever the keyword or your brand name or hashtags is used in a tweet, you receive an email alert from Twilert.
You can also set the frequency of the email alerts you wish to receive from Twilert.
If your brand is dependent on blog marketing or gaining some popularity within the blogging community, then Technorati is the tool for you.
All you need to do it enter your brand name, which you want to monitor. Technorati will then scour through all the blogging channels and feeds to check where your brand name has been featured or mentioned.
It will then provide you the information in an RSS feed. It is a pretty basic tool, targeting only the blogging community and hence falls in a very niche segment.
Buffer.com acquired Respondly, customer service, and brand monitoring tools in 2015.
Now rebranded to Buffer Reply, it allows you to manage multiple social media profiles from a single account. It lets you directly post to the social profile and also lets you schedule posts for later.
Similar to Hootsuite, it has paid plans that offer a number of benefits. However, its free plan allows users to add up to 3 accounts and schedule 10 posts per month. Only one user can access the account in the free plan.
Continuous monitoring of a brand’s online activity is very important. We now have a number of tools as above available to your disposal.
These tools work in different areas and enable us in various ways. Which tool to select depends on your organization’s requirements.
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