Proper social media management can increase brand awareness, boost online visibility, and even improve your business’s revenue. However, monitoring and tracking mentions of your brand across social media channels can be difficult and time-consuming for small business owners.
As a small business digital marketing agency in Colorado Springs, we understand that social media is essential for growing your business. Having a presence on multiple social networks can set you apart from your competitors, but maintaining and monitoring your accounts to ensure you’re getting discovered requires ongoing effort.
If you find yourself trying to juggle your social media platforms and need time-saving tools to monitor conversations about your small business, Succeeding Small is here to provide you with the best tools for social media monitoring.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is defined as tracking mentions of your brand online. You can do this by monitoring hashtags, keywords, and tags relevant to your business. This practice helps you stay educated about your audience and industry trends and allows you to make more informed decisions about your content and marketing campaigns.
Effective monitoring requires strong social listening — paying attention to what your targeted audience is saying, what content they engage with, and how they perceive your brand. Think of it like customer service in real life: when someone walks into your office, you don’t immediately start selling — you listen first. Similarly, social media monitoring is about listening to your followers to improve customer engagement and build brand reputation.
When monitoring, focus on two main areas: your account’s metrics and analytics (such as custom reports and sentiment analysis), and listening to others to gain inspiration for future posts and strategies.
By actively monitoring and engaging, you can improve your social media growth, nurture relationships, and protect your reputation management efforts. However, doing this alone can be time-consuming. That’s why we recommend these five top social monitoring tools.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an easy-to-use social monitoring tool that allows you to manage all your social media channels in one place. You can track mentions, hashtags, trends, and keywords relevant to your brand, plus schedule content to streamline your marketing campaigns.
With Hootsuite, you can gain a real-time overview of millions of conversations, helping you understand your brand reputation and overall sentiment. Custom reports allow you to analyze performance and make informed decisions to strengthen your strategy.
Though Hootsuite can become pricier as you scale, it’s an excellent choice for small businesses managing their own social media, aiming for stronger customer engagement and consistent content.
Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics offers powerful capabilities to monitor conversations across social networks, track brand reputation, and understand what people are saying about your business.
This professional-grade tool is especially useful for local events or large marketing campaigns, helping ensure your content resonates with the right audience. It also supports platforms like TikTok and Reddit, which many other tools overlook.
Mentionlytics’ robust sentiment analysis and comprehensive data make it worth the investment for businesses focused on reputation management and maximizing reach.
Zoho Social
Zoho Social is often compared to Hootsuite due to its similar features, but it stands out for its simplicity and budget-friendly options. It provides real-time updates, tracks user-generated content, and offers custom reports to help small businesses understand their audience and improve customer service.
Perfect for businesses new to social media marketing, Zoho Social empowers you to scale confidently and build stronger customer engagement without breaking the bank.
Brand24
Brand24 monitors social media, blogs, forums, and other websites to track mentions of your business. Beyond basic tracking, it focuses on measuring reach and sentiment, offering powerful insights through its sentiment analysis features.
This tool helps ensure that your content not only reaches your audience but also resonates in a meaningful way, fostering higher engagement.
Additionally, Brand24 supports reputation management and can even help inform your SEO strategy by tracking relevant keywords and topics.
Semrush
Semrush is an all-in-one marketing tool that covers much more than social media monitoring. While it’s more advanced and has a steeper learning curve, it offers deep insights through custom reports and advanced analytics.
It excels at tracking long-term growth, analyzing marketing campaigns, and providing data-driven recommendations. However, it currently does not account for short-form video posts when measuring your profile’s metrics, so consider this when planning content across social media channels.
Social Media Management Requires A Lot Of Work, Let Succeeding Small Take the Weight Off Your Shoulders
Social media monitoring and management involve a wide range of activities: tracking mentions, performing sentiment analysis, creating marketing campaigns, monitoring conversations, and more. These tasks can be overwhelming, but they’re essential for building customer engagement, improving brand reputation, and making informed decisions that support business growth.
As a digital marketing agency in Colorado Springs, Succeeding Small helps local businesses through our social media marketing referral partners. Our partners focus on creating consistent, high-quality content, monitoring your brand’s presence, and providing insights to ensure your business stands out online.
If you’re ready to grow your brand on social media without the stress, contact Succeeding Small today to learn how we can help you succeed online.
