In the time it takes to read this sentence, tens of thousands more tweets will have been loosed upon the world.
Twitter claims there are 500 million tweets published each day. And that’s just one of the major social networks that, in only a decade-plus of existence, have come to steer our personal and professional lives. You can’t read every post (and please, don’t try). But social media monitoring software, also known as social media listening software, can help you seine the waters for nuggets of gold.
With these modern tools, your marketing team can track mentions of your brand across the social-sphere to get a clearer picture of your reputation. You can identify trends or news items from social media that are relevant to your business. You can also keep tabs on your competitors and your followers, using these insights to refine your practices or make timely decisions.
You can leverage this technology in a number of ways, however best serves your company or a particular project. Not all products share the same features, so it’s important to shop around and do the research. Depending on the size of your company or your relationship with social media, a basic offering might be more than enough, without the deluxe feature set that’s included in some of the pricier tools. Fortunately, a number of respected software vendors have free social media monitoring tools available for download. These are perfect for a burgeoning social media team or a small business looking to test the waters before a significant commitment of time and resources.
When put to use alongside other social media marketing software, even the low-cost solutions in this category can supercharge your social presence and your organization as a whole.
Learn more about this software space with our helpful guide, What Is Social Media Monitoring and Why Are More Brands Using It?
To help you along on your search, we’ve gathered from our listings some of the best-reviewed social media monitoring products that have a zero-cost variation. These products alone have more than 160 validated user reviews on G2 Crowd as of April 17, 2019, and only represent a small portion of the 180-plus social media monitoring software solutions listed on our platform. Whenever possible, the products are ranked by user Satisfaction score.
For each product we provide:
For products with G2 verified user reviews, we have included:
The list we’ve outlined here includes any social media monitoring solution with an available free offering. It should be noted that this does not include products that are only free on a temporary basis, such as limited trial versions for new users. They may only support one user or one project, but they’re truly free offerings. Scaling, however, will often require full investments.
G2 star ratings updated as of June 20, 2019.
Product name: Cyfe
G2 star rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Cyfe describes itself as an “all-in-one business dashboard.” The platform is composed of customizable dashboards that provide users with valuable insights on a variety of topics, from marketing performance to basic KPIs. Social media monitoring is a primary feature, with real-time data that captures business and client traction across the largest social networks. It also helps users measure the ROI on social campaigns.
Image courtesy of Cyfe
“Probably the biggest advantages that Cyfe offers are that you can visualize and monitor through a single screen, integrating accounts such as LinkedIn, Facebook and Mailchimp. It is easy to manage, so we are aware of what happens on our websites and the progress this generates for our businesses.”
— Cyfe review by Cilia F.
“The insights that you can gain from Cyfe data is very basic at best. While it's great for quickly glancing at your metrics, in the end it's difficult to delve deeper than your basic vanity metrics.”
— Cyfe review by Luis M.
“If you are tired of utilizing multiple dashboards across multiple accounts, Cyfe makes integration simple and consolidates data for easy consumption.”
— Cyfe review by Dan T.
Product name: Feedly
G2 star rating: 4.5 out of 5.0 stars
Feedly is a content aggregator that is completely free to access. Users establish a unique set of guidelines such as specific publications, keywords and hashtags. Feedly then collects the most relevant content from around the web, including Twitter, YouTube and blogs, and neatly organizes it for optimal consumption. The application enables users to monitor news about their company, product offerings and competitors, as well as the industry or specialization itself. Valuable bits of content can be easily shared with teammates or followers thanks to handy integrations like Trello and Hootsuite.
Image courtesy of Veodesign
“The thing that I love most about Feedly is there are no constant aggravating ads. Not begging you to upgrade your plan every time you open the app or throwing unnecessary marketing in your face.”
— Feedly review by Katy F.
“Feedly provides us with filtering and tagging tools, but it's not quite as advanced as I'd like. There is so much content floating out there these days that even deep filtering can still leave you with tons of insignificant content.”
— Feedly review by Martin D.
“Take the time to change the preferences so that it's efficient for you when reading and using Feedly. Also highly recommend using the mobile app. Syncs seamlessly when using between the app and web browser.”
— Feedly review by Cecilia N.
Product name: Commun.it
G2 star rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars
Commun.it is specially designed for Twitter, offering a handful of helpful tools for marketing and community management on the ever-popular social network. Among these features are content curation and convenient monitoring of brand and product mentions. The product also falls into the category of social media analytics and can provide users with essential data on followers and engagement related to specific posts.
Free option
Image courtesy of Commun.it
“Commun.it has really simplified my Twitter interactions. I'm able to keep track of who has interacted with my contact and I can easily connect with people who fit into my niche (thanks to the recommendations). It's also great at filtering out people who are essentially ghost followers which is so important when you're trying to grow your brand/following on Twitter so you can focus on those who are actually taking the time to interact with you and what you post.”
— Commun.it review by Korianne M.
“Probably the thing I dislike the most is the constant request to upgrade. Even if you clear the popup messages on the bottom right, they reappear when you switch tabs. The stacked notifications can obscure the interface. This is badgering and not welcome.”
— Commun.it review by Rick P.
“Use this to gain meaningful insights into your followers to grow your audience intelligently.”
— Commun.it review by Stuart N.
Product name: Alerti
G2 star rating: 4.3 out of 5.0 stars
Alerti is a social media monitoring tool in the truest sense. The primary function of the platform is creating customized alerts surrounding particular mentions or activity on social media, whether that means conversations about your product, news items about your competitors or noteworthy trends in your industry. With the full solution, businesses can also gain insights into their network of followers on different social channels and identify influencers, among other features.
“Alerti is an awesome tool you can use to be on top of the marketing chain and monitor everything going over the web at a single dashboard. The setup process is really simple, all you have to do is sign up and fill the alert setup.”
— Alerti review by Linda S.
“The customer service is really poor. When I tried to add comments on a report and it wasn't showing up, I contacted them which took over two days to get replied.”
— Alerti review by Kevin S.
“Alerti is a fantastic platform to gather information on your business, make sure you make good use of it.”
— Alerti review by Joseph V.
Product name: Unmetric
G2 star rating: 4.2 out of 5.0 stars
The NYC-based Unmetric offers a set of solutions designed to help social marketing teams optimize their content strategy, with a focus on audience and competitor analysis. The Unmetric website lists three primary products that assist in these efforts: Analyze, Discover and Track. These solutions are bolstered by Xia, the developer’s proprietary artificial intelligence software.
Image courtesy of Unmetric
“Unmetric is a user-friendly tool that provides great social insight in the matter of minutes. Where competitive analysis used to be a tedious, pain process, Unmetric has made it simple to get a great pulse on competitive performance in a matter of minutes.”
— Unmetric review by Christopher B.
“The one problem we run into is the lack of brands in the database. All major brands are there, but when we are looking into a smaller brand data is not there sometimes.”
— Unmetric review by an anonymous user.
“Be as vocal as possible with Unmetric in things you like and dislike. They may, if they enjoy your feedback, add it into future product offerings, which is awesome.”
— Unmetric review by an anonymous user
Product name: socialmention
G2 star rating: 3.2 out of 5.0 stars
Social Mention, or socialmention, is an easy-to-use search engine that offers real-time aggregation and analysis of content on social media channels. It can also search other sources on the web, such as blogs and microblogs. When visitors enter a query, the results will be filtered by the preferred channels, and displayed alongside some basic analytics like sentiment and top related keywords. Because the tool is embedded on the socialmention website, there is no need to download or install any software.
Image courtesy of viaSport
“Instant analysis of the most talked about topics of the day along with positive/neutral/negative stats. Allows me to quickly gauge the effectiveness of a campaign and provide the client with daily (if not hourly) status reports.”
— socialmention review by Sandra K.
“Lots of mentions missing, very old content presented as new, no noise filtering.”
— socialmention review by an anonymous user
Product name: Mentionmapp Analytics
Mentionmapp Analytics is a multi-layered monitoring platform built for insights and analysis of Twitter content. By entering relevant hashtags or handles, users can get a comprehensive view of recent conversations and interactions that may have value for their business. One of the product’s unique features is a “network map” that illustrates the different relationships between your followers and advocates, and helps identify both strong and weak engagement points.
Image courtesy of Brand24
Be the first user to write a Mentionmapp Analytics review!
Product name: Notify
Notify is a simple solution for monitoring brand mentions across the social landscape. Once users set up a free account, they are prompted to create notifications related to their company’s name, their competitors or industry topics. They will then choose the preferred media sources to monitor and pull from, which can include social sites like Facebook and Reddit. Once settings are established, notifications will be sent directly to the user’s Slack accounts.
Be the first user to write a Notify review!
If you’ve been up and running as a company but out of touch with social media, you may already be missing out on some critical conversations. These social media statistics help to illustrate the dominance of social networks and the benefits to businesses of getting involved. (This list of the most popular social media networks is a solid starting point for setting up your accounts and your strategy for scrolling.)
A quality social media monitoring software, whether free or paid, can fuel your efforts to weed through the noise and get involved wherever possible. And tracking your brand’s reputation and other relevant topics on social media is only half the battle. Proper social listening requires professional teams to react accordingly to these ongoing discoveries.
Check out our introductory guide, What Is Social Listening?, to learn how to put social data into action in your marketing efforts and company strategy as a whole.
* Please note: Reviews may have been edited for spelling and grammar.
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