Social Media is a vital tool for your small business to succeed online. Proper social media management can increase brand awareness, online visibility and even improve your business’s revenue. However, monitoring and tracking your social media accounts can be difficult and time-consuming for small businesses owners.
As a small business digital marketing agency in Colorado Springs, we understand that social media is essential to growing your small business. Succeeding Small understands having a social media presence on multiple platforms can set you apart from your competitors, though we also understand how difficult it is to maintain your social media presence as well as monitor your social platforms to make sure you are getting discovered.
If you find yourself trying to juggle your social media platforms, and need time-saving tools to monitor your small business’ social media, then Succeeding Small is here to provide you with 5 of the best tools for monitoring your social media.
What is Social Media Monitoring?
Social media monitoring is defined as tracking what is being said about your brand. How do you do this? By monitoring hashtags, keywords, and tags relevant to your small business or brand. This helps you stay educated about your audience and industry, as well as any changes that may be occurring within either of them.
Social media monitoring requires a lot of social media listening to your targeted audience. For instance, think of your social media followers as people walking into your office. When they first walk in, you do not immediately start selling them your product or services. Instead, you listen first. It is the same concept with your social media audience; when people start following your small business’s account, you listen first.
Therefore, social media monitoring requires you to listen to what your targeted audience is talking about, who they are following, what they are interested in, and what type of content they are engaging with.
While monitoring your social media you want to focus on two aspects – the metrics and analytics of your account, and listening to other people’s accounts to get inspiration for posts and future social strategies.
By doing this, you can improve social media growth and engagement by maintaining and nurturing your small business’s brand. However, monitoring your social media by yourself can become time-consuming very quickly. That is why we have compiled a list of the 5 best tools to use to monitor your social media.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is not only easy to use but also monitors all of your social media platforms. This tool enables you to zoom in on important topics, hashtags, trends, and social media profiles based on your followers, keywords, and location that is all relevant to your brand. Hootsuite also lets you schedule posts to all your social media accounts at once, which is helpful for small business owners wanting to batch their content.
The best part about Hootsuite is that it can give you an overview of millions of online conversations in real-time. This will help you keep updated on the perception of your brand, and Hootsuite will even give you alerts if your brand awareness increases or decreases.
Hootsuite is great for small businesses, however, the pricing does get more expensive as you upgrade to get more features. We recommend Hootsuite for small businesses if you, or your employees, are running the social media accounts. It can make batching content, researching analytics, and staying on top of brand awareness seamless. Though, if you would rather take the stress of managing social media off of your shoulders, we recommend hiring a digital marketing agency or social media expert.
Mentionlytics
Similar to Hootsuite, Mentionlytics monitors all social media platforms. This tool is extremely useful to hear what other people are saying about your brand.
While this professional-grade tool is more commonly used by bigger companies, it can also help small businesses that are launching an event in a local area or running a large social campaign. Mentionlytics can help make sure you are getting seen by the right people, and likewise, the people who are seeing it are enjoying the content.
Mentionlytics may be pricer than Hootsuite, but it does let you manage your Tik Tok, Reddit, and more that most other social monitoring sites do not offer. Depending on how large your social media presence is, Mentionlytics may be worth the investment.
zoho social
Zoho Social is often compared to Hootsuite, as it offers many of the same services. It is easy to use and a great social media monitoring tool for growing businesses. This tool will give you real-time updates on how people are interacting with your business on social platforms. This is perfect for small businesses trying to scale and gain a newer audience with their brand.
This software is usually praised for its low prices, however, its data gathering isn’t much different than Hootsuite. We recommend Zoho Social for small businesses who are beginners in social media marketing. It is easy to use, budget-friendly, and offers all the services you need to become a social media professional.
Brand24
This powerful and affordable tool is perfect for businesses of all sizes. Brand24 monitors all social platforms along with forums, blogs, and other websites that mention your business. The best part of this tool is that they measure your reach and sentiment.
Unlike the other tools, Brand24 goes the extra mile to make sure the content you are putting out is reaching someone, as well as being meaningful to someone, ultimately resulting in more engagement on your social posts.
We highly recommend this tool for small businesses trying to grow more than their social media, but their digital presence as a whole. Depending on the subscription you purchase, you can access different keywords that can help you manage how your SEO is performing.
Semrush
SemRush is an all encompassing tool for small businesses wanting to do a deep dive into digital marketing as a whole. However, it is not as easy to use as the other tools mentioned above, and may not be worth the investment for small businesses still in the early growing stages of business.
In terms of social media, this a great tool to measure your growth on your social media profiles. Here at Succeeding Small, we use this tool to measure our personal growth, as well as our clients. We highly recommend this tool for businesses wanting to grow a sustainable and effective marketing strategy.
However, when measuring social media growth, it does not include short-term videos (such as reels or IGTV on Instagram) as a post when calculating your profiles metrics. Therefore, it is important to think about how often you post these types of short-form videos and if SemRush will be a good fit for your small business or social media strategy.
Social Media Management Requires A Lot Of Work, Let Succeeding Small Take the Weight Off Your Shoulders
Social media management and monitoring is a challenging task for small business owners trying to juggle everything at once. Monitoring your social media presence can feel like a daunting task, but is rewarding for small businesses wanting to grow their digital presence. With an effective social media strategy, your small business can attract new customers, increase sales, and build better brand awareness.
As a digital marketing agency in Colorado Springs, Succeeding Small specializes in helping partner businesses with our social media marketing referral partners. Our partner’s goal is to create quality content that is consistent to keep your audience engaged while also monitoring your social media data to give your small business the visibility it deserves. Contact Succeeding Small today to reach new people and nurture the relationships you already have through social media marketing.
