As much as content marketers love social media, figuring out how to best manage and monitor your online presence can be difficult. Though there are many social media monitoring services that can help, it can be difficult to determine which ones are right for you. An important first step is to think in terms of what service is best for my purposes rather than what is the best service. For today’s blog post we would like to identify the top 5 social media monitoring tools that we use at Uberflip and how they’ve helped improve our online efforts.
#1 – Buffer
This useful tool allows us to easily schedule tweets and Facebook posts in advance. By doing so, we are able to ensure that our posts are well-timed and organized. But be warned – it is still important to regularly check in and monitor your social networks throughout the day in order to engage with your online community!
Additionally, Buffer allows us to monitor the success of our posts by showing how many retweets, mentions, favourites and clicks (if the post has a link) a post has received. Our only complaint with Buffer is that when posting a link, the total amount of clicks a link has received refers to the amount per link rather than per post. So, if you see that a link has received 45 clicks, there is no way to tell how many of those clicks were from the first tweet as opposed to the third tweet with the same link. This is by no means a make or break problem, though it is definitely something that the folks at Buffer should work out ASAP!
Tip: Install the Buffer extension in Firefox or Chrome to easily schedule a post for the site you are currently viewing, without having to leave the page.
#2 – Facebook Insights
Unlike its competitors, Facebook is one of the few social networks to actually include its own analytics service for page administrators. Facebook Insights does a phenomenal job of monitoring our posts and how well they have been received by our audience. We can easily see our contents’ reach (people that saw a post), how many people clicked on a post and how many commented on or liked it. Additionally, it is possible to break down our audience by age, gender and location – very helpful for tailoring our content for our community!
Tip: Insights is very limited when using Facebook on a smartphone or tablet, so make sure to download the Facebook Pages Manager app.
#3 – Hootsuite
Sometimes it can be overwhelming to manage your brand’s many social networks. Hootsuite simplifies this task by allowing users to manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts from within a single dashboard. Users can also make custom lists of things they would like to follow, everything from retweets and mentions to certain keywords and lists of users. Similar to Buffer, users can also schedule tweets in advance. We’ve found Hootsuite to be very helpful at keeping up to date on what’s happening on Twitter by closely following certain targeted keywords.
Tip: If you have multiple social media managers, use the Assignments feature to coordinate with team members and make sure everyone is up to speed on what’s happening.
#4 – Qwitter
It might at first sound puzzling why it’s important to see who’s not following you, but this can actually be one of the most important things to monitor. Qwitter is a no frills app that shows who has recently unfollowed your Twitter account and how many followers they have. This is essential for understanding what tweets are having the unintentional effect of annoying targeted users. One important feature that Qwitter desperately needs is the ability to see at what time someone unfollowed you. Currently the closest you can get is seeing a daily report (if you upgrade to Pro), which makes it difficult to determine exactly what tweet caused someone to unfollow.
Tip: Make sure to sign up for Qwitter sooner than later because it is only able to start tracking your unfollows once you sign up!
#5 – Reachli
Formerly known as Pinerly, Reachli is one of the best tools currently available for monitoring your Pinterest analytics. By posting through Reachli onto Pinterest, users can monitor a Pin’s reach, clicks, likes and repins. For those looking to expand their advertising efforts, Reachli makes it easy to turn pins into unobtrusive advertisements on relevant websites.
Tip: Put the Reachli bookmarklet in your browser’s bookmark bar to easily create a pin for whatever website you are currently viewing.
Agree? Disagree? Know of any other great social media monitoring tools? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter @Uberflip!
