Top 10 social media listening tools from fee to free

 

Social media listening tools identify and assess what is being said about a company, individual, product or brand on the internet. They are used to identify trends, track competitors, understand customer sentiment and discover insights for business building.
Whether it comes with a fee or is free, social media listening tools should be able to:

• Listen for specific mentions across social media
• Identify trending topics or phrases
• Detail customer sentiment
• Organize customer information
• Identify thought leaders and influencers

Is this valuable for you business? What are the best ones? Why?
Here are our 10 top social media listening tools from fee to free.

1. SYSOMOS: Is a comprehensive social media listening tools especially relevant for businesses with global reach. It can monitor 186 languages and translate 55. Sysomos is a platform comprised of products with specific roles. Sysomos Everything Together (SET) is an integrated social platform that brings together four of its leading products: 1) MAP – which identifies influencers, understanding customer sentiment, or tracking your own social strategies over time, 2) Heartbeat – to monitor, analyze, and understand all the conversations around specific topics all over the world, 3) Influence – helps identify the individuals that can amplify your message and encourages others to take action and 4) Optimize – to engage directly with your target audience is important for all advertisers. Sysomos requires a subscription licence based on the number of users. Subscription fees are monthly and can be purchase by product for a suite of products. Unlimited use of the Sysomos MAP with no restriction on the number of queries, topics or results and complete support and training of an Account Manager is $2,500/month. For Sysomos Heartbeat, $500/month and $1,000/month for Heartbeat Pro to give you an idea.


2.VISIBLE TECHNOLOGIES: Is an online social reputation management and social media software solution for enterprise marketers and agencies worldwide. Visible Technologies uses two sentiment-analysis techniques for an accuracy of 80 to 90 percent. The company operates Visible Intelligence, a technology platform that focuses on social media monitoring, data analytics and insights, and customer engagement areas. Its platform also facilitates guided search navigation; repeatable search categories, such as demographics, segments, and attributes; post scheduling; reach analytics; advanced filtering; and scheduled reports. Pricing is monthly subscription requiring a one-year contract. It is one of the more expensive option because you are paying for unlimited search. Pricing starts at $12,000/year.

3, SALESFORCE: Is a social media management solution designed to build and maintain relationship throughout the “customer journey.” Salesforce Social Studio is keyword based so it is important to know the topics, subjects and brands you are listening for. Salesforce Social Studio help are to listen more effectively across multiple platforms. Social Studio draws tech strengths from Radian6 including social customer monitoring and engagement as well as management across multiple social channels. Social Studio is also used for scheduling posts, customer engagement and social media publishing. Social Studio is cloud based operating on an annual contract. It has channels for email, mobile, ads, and web it addition to Social Studio that helps brands listen, engage, and publish on social networks. Pricing starts at $15,000/year and is determined based on the number of users, brands and keywords.

4. BRANDWATCH: Is a platform for social media monitoring, allowing you to analyze and utilize conversations from across the social web.  From social media monitoring to functions such as investor relations, public affairs and media relations, Brandwatch integrates data from a wide variety of area into telling dashboards. Online focus groups can even be set up. Brandwatch is one of the strongest social media anayltics tools you can find. Its pricing is going to be a little out of reach for small businesses but it is an excellent social media listening tool for mid-sized business on up. Pricing starts at $800/month.

5. VIRALHEAT: Encompasses every aspect of social media monitoring by providing a very handy solution that allows you insight into how your competitors are performing, who they are engaging with and which users are the big influencers. You can monitor and analyze in real-time and you’ve got a powerful base to create conversations or join conversations that are happening right now. You can also drill deeper into the monitoring of your brand by comparing keywords and monitoring any current trends. ViralHeat was acquired by Cision to build out the most comprehensive suite to build out the most comprehensive suite of social media tools. It is still available on a stand-along basis. Pricing is on a monthly subscription basis. It starts at $9/month and is based on the number of users.

6. SIMPLYMEASURED: Is one of the best single-source solution for web and social analytics out there. SimplyMeasured consolidates metrics into a single, easy-to-use reporting dashboard make to make things easy to digest when sharing metrics across the organisation. Simply Measured is fully compatible with mobiles and tablets. The layout fits perfectly on mobile and tablet, regardless of screen size, with a fully responsive design that looks as gorgeous as the web view on a desktop. Pricing is monthly and starts at $500/month.

7. SPROUTSOCIAL: Makes managing multiple platforms simple by allowing you to schedule, post, and follow up on users. It creates an ability to find new users and search by topics so you can find new followers and topics to keep up with. Sprout Social’s dashboards is very clean and organized. Sprout Social offers excellent integration with Google Analytics as well as excellent customer service. Pricing is monthly, reasonable with opportunities to trade up as needed. For a business that is serious about social media monitoring but not yet ready to make a major financial investment, Sproutsocial should be a strong consideration. They offer a free trial. On an annual basis, costs are in the area of $3,000 for use by a team of 4.

8. HOOTSUITE: Is one of the more popular social media management platforms and probably the most popular with small buisnesses. A primary advantage of Hootsuite is that it connects to virtually every social network. So if you want to run, manage and monitor campaigns on multiple social network, Hootsuite does it simply. The interface on HootSuite is organized by tabs allowing users to divide engagement activity into social networks and streams. The number of social networks that Hootsuite users have access to is determined by their account level: Free, Pro, or Enterprise. The Free version is limited to three networks. Their Pro version is $9.99/month.

9. ADDICTOMATIC: Searches the best live sites on the web for the latest news, blog posts, videos and images. Twazzup, Addict-o-matic and SocialMention are three free platforms that allow you to measure your social media mentions instantly with the buzz on any topic. Addictomatic is a discovery platform. After you search, you can personalize your results dashboard by moving around the source boxes. When you’re done, bookmark the page and keep coming back to your personalized results dashboard for that search.

10. SOCIAL SEARCHER: Social Searcher is also a social search engine. But Social Searcher also provides you with access to some interesting analytical tools, such as sentiment (in terms of positive, negative, neutral and ratio), the source of the content that you have found: Content, types of result (links, photographs, status updates), keywords (1 word, 2 words, 3 words) and popular content (such as retweeted tweets). You can use Social Searcher free for 100 real time searches per day. The basic version allows 200 searches per day going through to the professional version at 800 searches per day, based on network usage. Costs go from €3.49 per month to €19.49 a month.
Did you know about these social media listening tools? Are there any you would add or delete in your top 10? Do you need help identifying the right social media listening tool for your business?