Listening to what your audience has to say about you, your competitors, and the market, in general, is the key to making the most of social media. Only by measuring and analyzing the performance of your social media activities will you be able to improve on what works and discard what doesn’t. This is just as important for brands as it is for influencers and regular people.
Tracking your social media activities allows you to build a higher-quality following, communicate more effectively, and provide content that is relevant to your audience. Using a great social media monitoring tool, or tools, is the key to gathering the data you require. When you have a clear idea of why you want to track and monitor social media conversations, it is much easier to devise a strategy. The next thing to consider is where you will track.
Benefits of Tracking Your Social Media Activities
Today’s brands must place a greater emphasis on tracking and measuring their reach. Businesses can no longer rely on simply posting content and watching what happens. Continuous measurement and social reporting are essential for getting the most out of your social efforts.
Given that more and more social media platforms are requesting the ability to track a user’s activity, this is one of the best ways to understand how to find consumers and how they can find you. This one-of-a-kind information can help your social media marketing in a variety of ways.
– Tracking social media posts allows you to view all of the analytics
This feature has made things a lot easier for brands because you can now look at the analytical data and see if your user activity is working for you or not. Analytics assists you in making sound decisions; it maintains and improves your current social media marketing strategy.
– Track social media activities to keep your strategy up to date
You can use tracking to determine what is and isn’t working for your brand. Instead of wasting valuable time and resources on ineffective strategies, tracking can assist your brand in determining the most effective steps to take for each campaign.
– Social media tracking for business benefits small businesses
Users can engage with their content like never before, thanks to social media tracking. Users may inquire about specific offerings, which may result in the small business’s content being shared. Allowing social media to track your activity in this manner can spark fruitful conversations for your brand as well as engagement, such as likes, shares, and comments.
– Track social media activities to allow you to engage immediately
When you get alerts about your brand or come across a particularly relevant discussion, you should jump in right away. If someone is disparaging your brand, this is a golden opportunity. If you can avoid being defensive, people will appreciate your response and most likely respond positively.
– Tracking social media activities such as posting gives you a competitive advantage
Social media tracking provides businesses with information about their brand as well as what their competitors are doing. It provides businesses with a better understanding of the issues their customers have with their products and services, how their customers use their products, and their overall perception of the company. This enables businesses to understand their advantages and disadvantages and take appropriate corrective action.
– Social media tracking tools help you discover industry influencers
Regardless of industry, it is easy to see how some people become more visible on social media. These people are referred to as “influencers.” Companies are actively promoting their brands by leveraging their popularity. The monitoring tool is an excellent way to locate such influencers.
– Social listening tools identify your most effective social networks
Not every social network will be ideal for you. The only way to know which social networks are the most effective is to experiment and use analytics to track how much engagement, traffic, and sales you are receiving. This information can be used to focus more on social networks that are beneficial to you while eliminating those that aren’t. You can also use the information to prioritize how much time you spend on each social network.
Steps to Track Social Media Activities
After explaining what social media tracking is and what benefits it provides, it’s time to show you how to do it. Before going into the step-by-step explanation, here are the best social media tracking tools you can use for social media tracking.
1. Keyhole
Keyhole provides trends, insights, and analysis of your preferred hashtags, keywords, or accounts rather than finding individual mentions of your brand. It will track them in real-time and generate a dashboard with all of the mentions, allowing you to sort by engagement, date, and other metrics. Based on the mentions collected, you can also see influencers, sentiment, and trending topics. Another impressive feature of Keyhole is that it displays data in real-time and visualizes it as heat maps, so you can see your global impact.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is fundamentally a social media management tool that allows you to schedule and send updates across a variety of social media platforms. You can also manage social media accounts by posting on multiple platforms at the same time. You can also delegate tasks if more than one person manages a social media account. It also has a URL shortener and a link tracking mechanism.
Hootsuite’s customizable search streams will monitor any social platform you choose, allowing you to see what’s going on at a glance. In addition, Hootsuite integrates with over a hundred apps to allow you to do more from its dashboard. Hootsuite also allows you to post to your personal or organization’s social networks using RSS feeds.
3. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a popular social media monitoring tool because it provides the analytics required to increase social media engagement. Like Hootsuite, it includes monitoring and engagement tools as part of its social media management software. You can use Sprout for social listening and analytics, customer service, and employee advocacy. Furthermore, you can track multiple platforms in real-time without having to navigate in and out of the app. Everything is then brought together in their smart inbox. All networks, brand keywords, search results, and even hashtag campaigns will appear in your inbox in real-time. You can use the discovery feature to search for specific keywords on Twitter or Instagram.
4. Socialays
Unlike other complex and difficult-to-use social media management systems, Socialays offers a clean, simple, and user-friendly dashboard. It keeps track of your most liked, most positively or negatively commented post, and most positively or negatively commented followers. In addition, you have the option to list and filter your comments, posts, and mentions by specific time period, sentiment filter, emotion filter, comments containing questions or inquiries, comments with spam or ad content, and hidden/deleted comments.
Socialays provides simplicity in reading your social media comments thanks to its artificial intelligence, which helps you understand your social media comments better, and faster and guides you to make better decisions on a single platform. All your comments and messages are read by Socialays in seconds and emotion analysis is performed in 9 categories such as hate, happiness, sadness, neutral, worry, fun, love, relief, and surprise. The sentiment analyses categorized as “positive,” “negative,” and “neutral” by Socialays have the highest accuracy rate in the market.
It is not possible for people to follow their social media accounts uninterruptedly at any time and evaluate and interfere with all comments. At this point, Socialays steps in and deletes comments containing profanity and hate speech on your behalf and automatically hides spam and advertising content. Allowing you to follow your mentions instantly, Socialays prevents you from missing important questions from your followers. In addition, you can specify which notifications you want to receive and your reporting period with special settings. Being a powerful and smart system, Socialays searches all social media accounts for a follower or phrase you want to search for. With all these advantages of Socialays, it is enough to subscribe to Socialays to monitor your social media activities.
5. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media management dashboard that allows you to publish and schedule posts, track social activity, and analyze your social media performance. From a single dashboard, you can track conversations and measure performance. You’ll get real-time updates on how people are interacting with your brands on the Zoho Social dashboard.
Keep track of what social media users are saying about your brand and respond to brand mentions as soon as possible, or look through your conversation history for context. Check in on a regular basis to see which of your keywords are being searched on social media channels. Alternatively, use the search function to discover relevant hashtags, events, and what your competitors are up to.
6. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is one of the most effective social media monitoring tools available. It can monitor print, TV, and radio broadcasts in addition to social media platforms and websites. It even has image recognition technology to help you find social media posts about your brand or product even if it isn’t mentioned in the caption. Engagement, reach, comments, and brand sentiment can all be easily analyzed.
You can use the tool to detect emerging themes, identify market gaps, and serve your customers with more relevant content and offers. The Conversation Clusters feature provides AI-based data that allows you to discover hidden connections between trending conversations, discover conversation drivers, and understand the core customer needs that initiate and move conversations in a specific direction.
7. Falcon.io
Falcon.io is a marketing platform for social media marketers that assists them with social listening, customer engagement, content marketing, and audience management. Through team collaboration, it enables businesses to maintain a consistent brand presence across all social media platforms. Falcon.io keeps you up to date on online conversations and trends, tracks your campaigns, and identifies top influencers who are engaging with your brand.
The platform has a highly intuitive and collaborative user interface, and it is backed up by comprehensive support and consulting services. It also includes a social CRM, which allows you to create customer profiles based on their social media activities, email addresses, gender, and location.
8. Buffer
Buffer, also known as Bufferapp, is an excellent tool for scheduling, publishing, and analyzing your posts all in one location. Buffer’s Analytics tab allows you to track all of your social media posts. Furthermore, you can shorten your links using Bitly or other URL shortening tools from within the app, which allows you to track the reach of your link. This comprehensive tool makes it simple to find and participate in the most important conversations. Buffer has a centralized dashboard and a team-shared inbox, allowing you to post content and engage with others from a single location.
9. Digimind
Digimind provides all of the content required to interpret social and online data and turn it into actionable business insights. It is AI-powered and does all of the heavy lifting for you. A substantial amount of information is neatly presented in one place. It is ideal for brands and agencies looking to accelerate their digital transformation through the use of data and insights. You can use monitoring apps to listen, interact with, analyze, and report your brand’s activities. Furthermore, you can track the performance of your own content while comparing it to the social performance of your competitors. Digimind is also one of the best social listening tools for determining public sentiment toward your brand.
10. Mention
Mention crawls a wide range of web sources, including social media, forums, blogs, news, and review sites. Stay ahead of the competition by monitoring what is said about them online and measuring their share of voice. Mention makes it simple to understand how your brand is perceived online and respond to crises before they escalate. This Mention feature can help you grow your business by managing customer channels and presenting special reports. Mention allows you to preview and organize your content in a multi-channel editorial calendar while developing your social strategy.
11. Social Mention
Social Mention is a free tool that tracks the reach of keywords used in social media campaigns. It allows you to discover and quantify what people are saying about your brand and products on social media platforms. You can set up email alerts for keywords related to your social media campaign that you want to track across the web. Social Mention is a very basic social listening tool when compared to others. The analytics section of the tool is limited. Nonetheless, a free tool, it provides useful information for those who are just getting started with social media monitoring.
Easy Steps to Track Social Media Activities
Step 1- Identify Your Goals: Before you start tracking every single tweet, photo, and Facebook comment about your brand, consider your social media goals. Make a list of the goals you want to achieve with your social media efforts. Next, consider what you want your audience to do with your content.
Step 2- Create Metrics: Align your objectives with measurable metrics and behaviors. Look for metrics such as retweets, comments, replies, and participants if you want to measure engagement. To increase brand awareness, you can also measure metrics such as volume, reach, exposure, and amplification. Track your:
- URL shares, clicks, and conversions if your goal is to drive traffic to your website.
- volume in comparison to your closest competitors to increase your brand’s share of voice.
- contribute and influence if you want to find advocates and fans.
Step 3- Measure: After you’ve identified the metrics you want to focus on, you’ll need to find tools that capture these metrics and begin measuring them. In some cases, social media channels themselves offer analytics. You may need to rely on third-party tools or create your own using APIs.
Step 4- Monitor and Report: Use your preliminary findings to establish a baseline for future measurement and share these findings with your key stakeholders. Include benchmarks or other contextual information in reports so stakeholders can quickly understand what the report is all about. Consider including data visualizations to help communicate your results quickly and clearly.
Step 5- Adjust and Repeat: Determine what you can improve, make the changes, and then measure again. Check your goals to ensure that your new metrics are assisting you in meeting those objectives. Analytics that are consistent and reliable can help you track your progress and improve when necessary.
