No individual or organization can refute the importance of social media when it comes to increasing your brand awareness and conversions. Around 42% of the world’s population uses social media and consumers now use these platforms to voice their concerns and opinions—and call out whatever they think is worth being called out! Social media advertising budgets are expected to double by 2023, which shows that companies will continue to spend more to enhance their digital footprint. Smart marketers leverage social media platforms to derive insights into consumer behaviour and predict future trends. As they try to build a global outreach, establish their brands and expand their businesses, social media monitoring tools become crucial. These tools allow you to compile quality audience data and social media analytics on one screen—so marketers can make data-driven decisions. Here are the top five social media monitoring tools available to marketers, with details about how they help brands expand globally. Keyhole This tool has made a firm footprint in the market, with brands like H&M, Google and L’Oreal making full use of its offerings. It lets you acquire in-depth information through an easy-to-use dashboard. In fact, Neil Patel– an industry specialist–describes the tool as extremely user-friendly. Marketers can monitor performance keywords, topics and even hashtags and @mentions, gaining relevant information on clients and their engagement with the brand. Such actionable insights let managers evaluate the digital performance of their brand globally. They can monitor areas of concern for users and use that information to develop accurate marketing campaigns. Another benefit of using Keyhole is its ability to provide insights about competitors, allowing brand managers to improve their strategy accordingly. BrandWatch BrandWatch allows you to extract relevant information from different pieces of content, such as forums, blogs and reviews, etc. You can compare your ‘brand mentions’ against those of your competitors to gain a holistic picture of your standing in the market and figure out how audiences perceive different brands in the industry. This allows you to understand the way competing brands deal with customers and how you can make your way into the consumer’s mind. BrandWatch offers demographic data from your niche and it even lets you export information from the dashboard into a PowerPoint presentation. Buzzsumo Buzzsumo gathers analytics from every post to provide you with accurate numbers in a single window. It is also useful for content research as it lets you differentiate the best performing content from the rest. This makes it easier for you to decipher the kind of content your audience is most interested in. Hootsuite Hootsuite offers a detailed dashboard with insights into your business’ digital presence and its online engagement. There are multiple ways to monitor engagement online, such as tracking hashtags, locating the geographical position of potential leads or conducting a demographic analysis of the audience. You can even oversee how different customers engage with the brand. The dashboard also allows you to delegate tasks to relevant people on specific social posts. Marketers use Hootsuite to separate paid media from organic conversations and to get a clear understanding of their impact on social campaigns. You can also check the conversations triggered by particular keywords, which is an excellent way to assess the impact of your chosen keywords. The best part is that marketers can also use Hootsuite’s Weibo integration to manage social media in China. Awario This social media listening tool works best for SMEs that seek to get relevant business and market insights without spending too much. You can use it to gain insight into your competitors’ marketing efforts and monitor your brand mentions to find out what your audience is saying about you. This tool will even help you find any content that has been plagiarized from your website, all within the Awario dashboard. Marketers can also use Awario to turn brand mentions into backlinks, gaining more traffic. KAWO This platform allows marketers to target Chinese social media for in-depth insights on relevant audiences–giving businesses the power to repurpose their social media content for a Chinese audience. The tool allows marketers to manage WeChat and Weibo, two of the leading social platforms in China. It makes targeting simple and easy by being transparent, user-friendly and most of all, affordable! It also allows marketers to translate global posts into Chinese and schedule them for WeChat publication without any hassle. Fun fact: Kobe’s retirement ‘Love Campaign’ was approved, scheduled and executed through KAWO. By now, no one doubts that social media is robust and growing fast as consumers try to connect with global brands online. That usage has increased the need for social media listening tools for marketers. What are people saying about you? Do your products or services meet their needs? Whether you are managing a start-up or a full-fledged corporation, it’ll be challenging, if not impossible, to succeed without these tools. If you want to talk about global social media monitoring or global social media in general, don’t hesitate to contact us.