Social Listening helps Pepsico’s Gatorade

Social media has impacted the lives of people and businesses alike. So much so that some of the world’s largest brands have set up social media control centers, in an effort to tune in and harness the power of online conversations. Social listening helps brands like Pepsico’s Gatorade, Companies like Dell and Salesforce also like to engage with their audience in real-time. In the past, we spoke about brands like Netflix and Southwest Airlines. We talked about how they benefited from a social listening tool. This is probably why the popularity of the social listening tool seems to be ever on an upward trajectory.

Pepsico’s Gatorade

When it comes to promotions, Gatorade has depended mainly on commercials and has built a reputation for its flashy commercials featuring athletes. Interestingly, Gatorade has relied on social media conversations to inform their marketing decisions. Gatorade uses the tool on a day-to-day basis for even conventional marketing tactics.

Gatorade has been working on optimizing their landing pages by personalizing the content for their target audience. The company reports to have increased its engagement rate for product education by 250% and brought down their exit intent rate from 25% to 9%.

How has Social Listening helped Pepsico’s Gatorade?

At their Chicago headquarters, the brand has a control centre at the center of their marketing department. Gatorade has partnered with Radian6 and IBM to create a command center with 6 monitors to track social conversations and visualize the information contained in the data. The company tracks every metric, every comment related to their brand, and every comment mentioning their competitors. The brand also monitors blog conversations and runs sentiment analysis around topics of product/campaign launch.

An example of how Gatorade uses consumer insights:

Gatorade monitored audience engagement when they ran their “Gatorade has evolved” campaign. This campaign featured a snippet of a rap song by David Banner. The brand was quick to notice that audience members were talking about the song. They got in touch with Banner and released a full version of the song for the fans on social media within 24 hours.

And it didn’t end there. Gatorade is planning to build this project on a massive scale. They want to take their sports brand and turn it into the world’s largest participatory brand. And they are relying heavily on social listening practices to achieve this goal. Gatorade has been doing small-scale live events on Ustream and Facebook. These are mostly events where they let fans interact with their favorite athletes and scientists. The brand has also organized sessions where nutritionists answer popular questions by fans. Which tool do you think Gatorade has been using to research for all these campaign plans to ensure their success?

Final Word – The Future

More and more brands are seeing the benefits of social listening command centers. Real-time data provides you with a ground to build your communication strategy. The day isn’t far off when listening centers become standard practice for engaging and communicating with customers.

Build an Effective Social Media Response Team

Consider your social media response team as a personal disaster management team for your business. This team manages the control center for your business by monitoring your brand mentions in real-time. These are the first responders to any online crisis moment that might come your way. They are also at the forefront of online customer engagement. A strong social media response team ensures you build strong customer relationships.

Why do you Need a Star Social Media Response Team?

If you have a dedicated team taking care of your social media you already must be aware of the effectiveness of such a war room set up. This team is great for most of your marketing activities be it:

New product launch
Customer Engagement via live sessions
Crisis management in real-time or
Online Branding

Building a team of people who then build your brand‘s image online needs much deliberation. You need to consider facts like skills, your current situation, and needs, the budget et cetera.

People you need on the Team

One of the many questions marketers ponder upon is what the ideal size of their brand’s social media response team should be. There is no right answer to this. It mainly depends on how your people are delegating, your goals, your hiring budget, and a few other factors. A survey was recently conducted by Ragan and NASDAQ covering over 2000 respondents from various organizations and found that most of these organizations report having 3 people working in their social media response team.

Leader

You need a leader in your team who drives the action plan, strategizes the campaign et cetera. This person is the hub of all the planning and activities. He/She also manages the overall social media marketing process starting from planning to deliberating to measuring the ROI of the campaigns.

Content Creator

The next important person on your team is the content creator. This is your copywriter or graphic designer and they are on the team to help produce content that can go viral. Their input shows the most when brainstorming content ideas.

Analytics Specialist

This person is equally important as the ringleader or the content creator. He/she would be able to help you with the numbers. The leader and content creator both work in tandem with the analytics person. Now, in the modern-day, this role has been perfected in the form of AI tools.

Social Listening Tools help you Build a Strong Social Media Team

Like we mentioned in the previous section, AI tools like social listening can help a great deal. And this isn’t a surprise. Social media listening automatically does half the job when it comes to monitoring and analyzing the audience’s reactions.

It helps the leader and the analytics person while providing them with data based on real-time mentions. You can place filters and explore every detail about what your audience thinks. It gives you an elaborate picture of your online performance and the exact pain points too.
Social listening also helps with content curation. Knowing your audience in & out lets you leverage the information on what they like, their interests, and what they want to know. Social listening to the online conversation allows you to face the common concerns amongst your audience members. Answering or addressing these questions/topics can also offer great content ideas. You could choose to create multiple resources and promote them. It can be a blog post, an infograph, video tutorial, or even a webinar. You can know more about how social listening helps in content marketing here.

Building an effective social media response team can be tough but not with the support of automation. With social listening, you are performing half of your marketing activities automatically like market research, real-time customer feedback, influencer outreach et cetera. In addition, you are also helping your social media support team with insights about the target market.

Integrate Social Listening Insights into Marketing Strategies

Social media marketing enthusiasts have been advocating the use of AI tools for social listening. You may have come across a brand that is already using this technology or maybe you have seen it listed among the upcoming trends to watch. Everyone speaks highly of how social listening insights help your marketing strategy. To begin with, it is quite impossible to monitor every tweet, and every social media comment manually. There are about 3 billion active social media users around the world. Listening to all of them along with your customer base becomes easier. But to make the most out of the social listening insights you need to incorporate the learning into your strategy.

Real-Time Feedback

At the outset, set up the social listening tool with your brand and industry keywords. This brings you all the things your customer has to say about your brand or industry. And this is one of the key steps to building a powerful brand. You can find both positive and negative reviews, comments, and mentions. Take action and extend help to everyone who has posted a negative review. Surf through the mentions that shed a positive light on your brand and use this to promote your brand further. These are real-time testimonials and they are the best marketing weapons you have.

You can also tune into what feedback your competitors are receiving, you could take inspiration from their positives. Remember their target audience is your target audience too. If their customers seem unhappy, and you can deliver better, reach out to the prospects. Social listening tools can help you monitor your competition.

Speak your Audience’s Mind with Social Listening Insights

72% of consumers say they would only engage with marketing messages that have been personalized. The first step towards personalization is knowing your audience’s mind and language. You try to comprehend their train of thought. What product are they looking for within the industry? What specifics are they looking for? Search for keyword phrases, set up a search for secondary keywords on your social listening platform. If you have any doubts about how this will work, use the insights, and create the content for one of your landing pages based on it. Run an A/B test and see for yourself.

Find Leads, Help your Business Development Department

When you are looking for news from your industry keywords, you will also find your target audience. Your potential customers are among this group. The process to reach out and get them transferred to the sales funnel is to begin engaging with them. Now do not spam their inbox with random sales pitches. Chances are they do not even know your brand and would hence block your account if you continue to spam.

Get involved with them over an online conversation. Engage in posts from leaders within the industry. Engage with the commentators on the post. After the initial conversation takes off, offer a valid suggestion or opinion, and send the prospect to a relevant page or your website. You may gain a follower/fan.

Track and Measure Campaign Success

Once you have all your information and marketing processes in place, you will probably start running social media campaigns. Most marketers do not measure the effectiveness of campaigns run by competitors or even their own. Why not? This tool makes it so much easier with built-in metrics trackers. All you need to do is set up the campaign hashtags for social listening. And have a set of goals in your mind. Was your campaign meant to increase awareness? Or was it meant to bring in leads? Once you know your goals, it is easier to look for the right metrics on the dashboard.

Research and Development

The first thing we said was that social media listening helps bring in customer feedback. This feedback could be directed to your brand specifically or towards the entire industry. If the customer feels the industry is lacking some provision in general you could step in and fill the gap. With social listening, you stay ahead of others in identifying these gaps. You can collect these insights and use them to feed your research and development team. You will see customers talk about the need for a particular feature in a product or service. Reach out to them and try to understand their pain point. When you introduce the feature in your own product, they are the first advocates for your product. Listening to a customer and implementing changes and improvements according to their needs makes them feel valued. This in turn buys you a favorable brand image and a loyal customer.

Social listening insights are only being fully utilized when you know all the different ways it can help your brand. Although this article mostly focuses on how social listening helps marketing strategies, this tool goes beyond. You can also tune in to listen to your employees. Your employees are a major asset too. Knowing what they feel about your brand can help you in a broader spectrum of situations.

Why does Social Listening matter?

We find every other report on digital marketing trends today talking about the growth of social listening. This emphasis has seen a sharp rise in the past few months. Brands have come to realize the importance of listening to the online chatter. They wish to build stronger customer relationships in these uncertain times. If you are still wondering why does social listening matter, here are 3 major reasons.

What is Social Listening?

In all probability you already know this, but here’s a quick definition of social listening. It is simply the act of tracking mentions across social media platforms. You could choose to track mentions for your brand, or a specific keyword, your campaign hashtags et cetera. The tools further analyze these mentions to present insights that might help you discover opportunities for improving your business prospects.

Many times, social listening is used interchangeably with the term social media monitoring. And even though the two are similar, they are not the same. Social media monitoring is simply tracking mentions and relevant hashtags. Listening, however, is a more detailed process. It looks beyond the mere number of mentions. Social listening assesses and analyzes the mood of the people talking about you. It presents the analysis using what people have actually said about you.

Put simply, social media monitoring will tell you that 120 people are talking about your brand. This seems great, right? So many people are talking about your brand, you must have done something right. Social listening will get you a better perspective here. It will read into all these mentions. And tell you that out of the 120 people, 90 are unhappy with your service, 20 have a neutral opinion and only 10 are happy. Now, do you see the difference it could make?

Why Does Social Listening Matter?

The one reason why social listening matters is that social media activity is growing each day. Especially since the Coronavirus pandemic has hit, the US saw a massive increase in the number of daily social media and internet users. What makes social listening an important activity during this period is the spread of fake information. The pandemic has caused people to spread false claims and if you aren’t vigilant enough, your brand could take a hit. Social listening during this global pandemic situation is a topic we have covered extensively on our blog here, here and here.

Moving on, the other two reasons which make social listening matter the most are as below:

Provides Quantifiable Data and Metrics

To be honest, there are so many marketing metrics that most marketers have little or no idea of or the ways in which they can help. We would say, the best way to judge the success of your business is to gauge your audience’s reactions. Getting first-hand information from them about their experience helps. But collecting review forms and analyzing them manually isn’t the smartest way to do it. Social media definitely helps in this regard because people use this platform to vent their feelings. Listening tools can catch these subjective details and have the ability to derive quantifiable insights from them.

A social listening tool does not separate individual metrics. It combines all of the KPIs like SOV, SOE, sentiment analysis, demographic analysis to tell you exactly where your brand stands in terms of visibility and performance. Isn’t one platform which takes care of everything better than using many different tools performing different jobs?

Helps with a Wider Range of Marketing Strategies

When we say, it is an all-in-one tool, we don’t just mean it in terms of measuring KPIs. Social media listening lets you maneuver through various marketing activities at the same go. Use it to get started with your influencer marketing campaign. It also aids in keeping you engaged with your audience members and helps build a lasting relationship. You can get content ideas, manage reputation crises, and improve overall customer service all from this one platform. Most of these activities make up the chunk of regular marketing activities for most brands.

The multitude of benefits it provides is exactly why social listening matters. When you have relevant data and the analysis available, you can start focusing on taking action. Take Auris on a ride to help you with the process.

How Auris can Help, in these Uncertain Times?

The World is at a standstill as we try to battle the COVID-19 virus. At this time, people are participating more on social media platforms to share their opinions. This makes it essential for brands to establish their presence online and create a channel for critical communication. Some conversations which happen now can have a global impact. As the world’s attention is fixed on the coronavirus pandemic, marketers may be having a tough time trying to find their brand’s role in the current landscape. There are many questions. What messaging would be relevant to my audience? How do we deliver a message quickly, but with empathy? To help find the answers, we thought we could highlight a collection of Auris features that could help you navigate better.

Auris Features that can help Streamline your Messaging

The list of use cases for Auris as a social listening tool is long. Here we shall discuss the useful features which help in managing your online presence, in the midst of a crisis.

Real-time Alerts

Real-time listening leads to real-time responses. Such responsiveness is highly appreciated by consumers in any situation. This becomes particularly important with the current crisis situation. Auris sends you real-time notifications which can help you respond just in time to any red flags raised.

When in a crisis situation, monitoring in real-time helps you keep up with changing customer needs and concerns and to offer timely support.

Sentiment Analysis

In a stressful situation, people expect brands to be sensitive when it comes to ad promotions. That being said, people do not expect or want brands to stop advertising. However, the message you send out and how it is perceived are of critical importance. Auris helps you here, by gauging the sentiment around your brand and measuring what people feel about your brand. If you were to run a campaign now, how would these people feel about it? What is the general tone of the mentions your brand is receiving? Once you are aware of the overall perception, it would be easier to dive deeper into the analysis and get a clear understanding of customer expectations.

Advanced Social Listening

We cannot stress the importance of social listening enough, at this hour. Social listening gives you a comprehensive picture of all that is being expressed online. With Auris, you can access many advanced social listening features. You can track brand mentions with real-time notifications and get insights using keyword analysis, sentiment analysis and demographic details all on one dashboard. With the news and trends changing so fast, Auris helps you stream all relevant information and even uncover trends across Facebook and Instagram.

Content Management

Most of us are sheltering in place or even locked down but this doesn’t mean that our business entities have to be that way too. Activities related to communication and awareness building must go on. This could also be the best time to think through, strategize, plan your future campaigns and start preparing.

Go through your work pipeline to find all the marketing activities which could still be carried on. We are talking about activities like campaign planning, content creation, email marketing et cetera. Auris can help here too. When you start social listening, you already know what your competitors are doing, which topics are trending (besides COVID-19). This should give you a fair idea about your next step. Whatever you plan, do not lose sight of the current situation and be sensitive to the needs of your target audience.

We are here to help our customers get the most benefit out of using Auris. We hope this article has thrown some light on some of the best features of Auris, which can help you through these trying times. Our team is also here to help, you can reach out to us in case of any questions. Last but not the least, take care and stay safe!

Top 6 Social Media Management Tools to watch out for in 2020

As we advance into the future, the Internet gets more sophisticated. Conducting business online on social media gets easier and complicated at the same time. Reaching a vast audience and trying to deliver your brand’s message correctly is the ultimate goal. There are tools aplenty to help you plan, execute and achieve this goal. Social media management tools help enhance your brand’s capability to engage with the audience and boost your profits. Here are some of our top picks of social media management tools.

What to look for in a Social Media Management Tool?

Consumers are evolving. Your customers today wouldn’t buy the first option available to them. They have done their research, read reviews, asked friends, and are well aware of their specific needs. So it gets crucial that a brand connects with its audience at a human level to break through the noise.

Fortunately, there’s a way for brands to know what customers have in mind and use the insights to connect with them. Listening to social data can help them gauge all the details needed for good customer service.

Here are some social analytics insights that can empower your brand:

Online Reputation Management

As the market gets saturated, there is hardly any scope for your brand to make mistakes. Avoiding brand reputation crisis moments becomes an absolute must. It may just be one bad review and once it starts catching views and likes on social media, there’s no going back. So it is essential to handle any crisis well in time. Social monitoring tools alert you to potential problems. While seeking a tool, this feature becomes important.

Check on Competitors

Competitive benchmarking is vital for your growth. Tools that help you keep an eye on the competition and provide you competitive intelligence are going to be worth investing in. You will need to learn from others’ faults and take inspiration from the top players. This requires you to keep monitoring what they’re doing.

Tracking Influencers, Engaging with Leads

Managing your business over social media takes a lot of effort. You may be promoting your product/service on the official page, but is someone vouching for it? If your brand is launching a fitness band and is promoting it on the official page chances are that very few people know about it. If Marques Brownlee or Linus Sebastian are talking about it, your product is definitely getting more attention. But how will you know about these influencers? How will you get them to collaborate and promote your business? Social media management tools help you with that.

Also, social media management tools are meant to make this task easier for you. Posting content, researching your audience, competitive analysis, tracking brand mentions all at the same time can make everything seem too much. Hence, look for a tool that can be your one-stop solution. There are tools available that allow you to research for your content, schedule posts, follow your competitors, set up keywords for insights and track influencers all at the same place and the same time without you having to do much.

The Top Social Media Management Tools

There are a lot of tools available offering a varying range of services and these are available at different price points. There are many options to choose from, ensure you pick the one that meets your brand’s needs.

1 Auris

A media management solution that brings together all your brand mentions across social media, news, et cetera in one place. Why keep shuffling between apps when you have one platform for multiple solutions? Auris helps brands with actionable insights via social listening, competitor analysis, social media monitoring, influencer outreach and more.

A platform that helps you track brand mentions in real-time, alerts you to potential crisis moments, guards your brand’s health, provides graphic reports and helps you zero in on your operational fault lines is a must-have. If you need a comprehensive solution take Auris for a test drive before you finalize your list for 2020.

2. Audiense

Understanding your audience and their interests and then speaking to them personally is a difficult task. Audience Segmentation helps you be prepared according to the specific interest field of that segment. Sending across a message to someone you know is always easier than trying to communicate with a complete stranger. Messaging your audience based on their interests is a crucial part of social media marketing.

Audiense helps you identify these interests and break them down so you can categorize and send out personalized messages.

3. CrowdBooster

Creators and innovators need funding, crowdfunding is a must for them especially for high profile projects. And there’s a solution for this – getting social influencers to champion the cause. CrowdBooster helps you grow your community on Instagram and/or Pinterest. It helps you raise funding for your innovation or campaign. It also takes care of press releases and shipping after the campaign is funded and done with.

4. Oktopost

The tool is geared to help with specific social media management needs but crucial for business, especially B2B brands. Oktopost helps you measure the impact from every post or campaign your brand puts forth. It also provides employee advocacy insights, engagement metrics et cetera and more importantly integrates easily with a lot of other tools. It helps you attain invaluable insights and can be integrated with other tools making your life easier.

5. Sendible

Sendible helps you streamline and manage multiple brands at the same time. It provides unique inboxes for each brand making the workflow easier and also offers collaborative tools. Plan your client’s content, schedule it, present individualized reports, and collaborate with Sendible.

6. Storyheap

If your brand counts Snapchat and Instagram as the go-to places for marketing and promotions, you must be familiar with stories. Snapchat and Instagram stories have become quite popular. Storytelling is unique and important, so it’s essential you do it right. Storyheap tells you about your stories, tracks your follower growth, no. of opens, no. of swipe up or clicks, no. of screenshots and so on. The data is very specific so you can dive really deep into the analysis.

We understand that picking one tool for your business can be daunting. Especially for smaller businesses, this decision has to come after some budgeting and adjustments. Thus you want the tool to be tailormade to your needs. We would like to point out that social media marketing tools are worth investing in. And there is no need to sweat it out. Most platforms provide a free trial period. Try one or more of these tools for testing out, before you make a full investment.

Listening Platforms: An Important Part of your Social Media Management Arsenal

Companies are increasingly digitalizing their marketing efforts, which need to be managed well if they are to achieve their goals and succeed in their efforts. There are multiple platforms and tools that you can use to market your brand, especially with reference to your social media management.

With the current exponential growth in social media users, marketers today often wonder how to manage their social media profiles for optimum benefits. In today’s post, we try to answer that question.

What is Social Media Management?

Simply put, social media management refers to the process of managing your brand’s/content’s interaction with your audience, across various social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube and so on.

Social media management may typically include creating, scheduling, analyzing and engaging with content and conversations posted online. This could become tiresome and a lengthy process when you do not adopt any social media management tools.

As per DOMO’s Data Never Sleeps 6.0 report, more than 2.5 x 10¹⁸ bytes of data got created each day in 2018. Tracking such an extensive database to gather relevant brand mentions and analyze them daily is a daunting task. This makes social media listening tools an essential part of your social media management arsenal.

Why is Social Listening Important for Efficient Social Media Management?

The primary focus for most brand marketers is the management of their brand’s reputation. Keeping track of one’s brand mentions, and engaging with them over social media is easy and achievable with the support of social media management tools like social listening.

Before investing a lot of time and effort in social media marketing and management, you would want to know how a social listening platform benefits you:

The easiest way to manage your accounts: Social listening platforms help you monitor and analyze all the chatter around your brand.
Engage with your audience in real-time: Social monitoring tools have in-built features that enable you to engage with your audience and to schedule timely responses.
Customer insights: By providing an in-depth analysis of the chatter, these tools provide the most accurate customer insights, helping a brand to improve their services and thereby, their relevance to customers.
Increases credibility: A brand which listens to its customers, responds to their sentiments and reacts in a timely fashion is bound to make a mark in the hearts and minds of people.

Now that we have extensively discussed how the tools benefit your business, here is a handpicked list for your reference.

The Best Social Media Management Tools 2019

In case you want to test the waters, here is a list of the best social media management tools for 2019:

Hootsuite

A popular social media management platform, with over 10 million professionals as active subscribers. Hootsuite allows you to analyze, engage and manage your brand reputation and social media campaigns over various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WordPress, YouTube.

It has a user-friendly interface which hasn’t changed much since its inception. Hootsuite offers a free plan; hence it could be a wise selection for you to start with.

TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is yet another social listening tool designed specifically for Twitter. However, it has a lot of useful features which allows keeping a check on your brand and your competitors’. Be it a keyword you are looking for, or a hashtag, TweetDeck can help you listen to the chatter around it.

Like Hootsuite, TweetDeck is a free service too. An excellent platform to try out.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is the full package for social media management – it lets you engage with your audience, track brand mentions, schedule and create posts across all social media platforms. Besides, it gives you dynamic reports which are open to customization options.

This platform:

Gives you a visual preview of every post you create before you publish it.
Helps you categorize the content you have created and schedule it at specific time slots.
Provides bright and attractive-looking reports.

They do offer a free trial version if you want to check the Agorapulse social media management experience.

Mention

Mention is a social monitoring tool. that allows you to track your brand, find influencers, study your competition and the market data across social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. The real-time push notifications feature helps you manage your brand round the clock. However, the most striking feature is that Mention caters to its customers across 42 different languages.

No digital marketing campaign is fully complete without social media marketing, of which social media management is one key aspect. Once you master that, you are truly prepared to help your business succeed in the digital domain.

The Most Popular Social Listening Tools

Business intelligence holds the key to a company’s progress, and the simplest way to gain crucial business insights is to interact directly with the most valuable stakeholder – your customer. Listening to what your customer has to say helps build your brand in today’s wired world. Once you realize the importance of this, you will want to know all about the best and most popular social listening tools.

Social listening helps you track the direct mentions or discussions which refer to your brand, by name. There’s a huge advantage in this knowledge, as you can effectively deal with any customer issues and inquiries. Moreover, you can also respond to negative comments about you on social media, stopping them from presenting a unilateral viewpoint which could turn away any potential future customers.

Social listening tools are available in plenty, but it’s important to ensure that the tool meets your specific needs. The complexity or simplicity of the tool you use depends on the size of your company and your requirements.

How to Choose the Right Social Listening Tool?

Small businesses would need a simple CRM system to be able to reply, engage and manage the company’s interaction with the customer. Basic social listening tools like Tweetdeck and Boardreader, are efficient and help achieve these root objectives.

Larger companies would need a suite complete tool with real-time listening, competitive insights, ability to engage with consumers, which can monitor their advocacy programs and draw up their future strategies. The list includes names like Hootsuite, Keyhole, TweetReach, and Mention.

A factor to consider is the volume of data and sources. For example, if most of your brand’s chatter is on one channel, say Twitter, a free tool such as TweetDeck should suffice.

A great tool caters to your present and possible future needs. One good way of picking a suitable tool is to go for trial versions before making an informed decision.

We list some of the popular social listening tools here:

1. Hootsuite

This tool tops the list because this free platform offers its services across almost all possible social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google+, Instagram, WordPress. Hootsuite is well known for the array of services they offer which include social monitoring, help with the organic and promoted ads, and analytics among others.

The platform has a very thoughtful approach to the needs of a business. Some of the features worth mentioning include their weekly reports, options for task delegation and team management with a real-time search facility.

2. Keyhole

Keyhole is a tool that can be used for social listening and management on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Their analytical reports are a complete package with not just real-time data but also historical data. Heat maps, one of their reputed features, shows the activity levels at specific geographical locations.

Moreover, the layout of their reports, decked with neatly laid out charts and graphs, is very easy to go through.

3. TweetReach

TweetReach’s snapshot reports make it a great free social listening tool. This can be your go-to tool if you are interested to know the reach and actual impact of your posts and that of your competitors’. Influencer marketing will prove a cakewalk since you can figure out who are the most influential followers you have.

4. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free, simple and user-friendly social listening tool. The simplicity of this app makes it one of the best-fitted options for beginners. The app helps you listen to and follow all chatter related to any hashtag or keyword, retweet, reply, engage and maintain your overall twitter account. The tool has three versions – the web platform, an app for mac and one for chrome.

5. Mention

Mention’s most noteworthy feature is that it allows you to monitor millions of sources in 42 different languages. You have access to all the possible chatter out there and not just in English, making you stay on the top of all the information flow. This tool also lets you keep track of your team members, to delegate tasks and to generate and download reports by exporting mentions.

6. Boardreader

Boardreader helps you follow chatter from regular pages, handles, and message groups as well. Most social media sites have message groups, and this is where major discussions and conversations take place. Boardreader helps you monitor such chatter from messaging boards and newsrooms.

Simply fill in a term and a list returns with all the mentions from over the past two years. Graphs and charts can also be generated from the options given. This tool has options for other languages as well.

By this time, you must already be feeling overwhelmed by the number of these tools. Yet these are only a select few from a large pool of social listening tools. The market is brimming with such tools ready to help you take your brand a step further, all you need to do is select the right one to get started.