Whether it’s for customer service or competitive research, social media monitoring is an important tool to use in your arsenal. The right platform can help you understand your audience, grow brand engagement and even find leads through advanced analytics.

To identify the best social media monitoring vendors, start by determining your goals and objectives. Identify what keywords or hashtags are relevant to your company, industry and target audience. Then, select a tool that can track those conversations and analyze the data in real time to identify trends, potential influencers to collaborate with and overall sentiment.

Once the software identifies relevant conversations and mentions, it will organize them into a central database. Using smart algorithms and natural language processing (NLP), the platform will then analyze the collected data to identify important insights like brand performance, competitor analysis and consumer behavior.

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The most popular and powerful monitoring tools include Sprout, Hootsuite, Keyhole, Awario and Synthesio. Sprout, for example, is known as a top choice among SMEs to manage content publishing and media monitoring needs with a simple, user-friendly interface and a low learning curve. This platform offers a Smart Inbox that brings messages, tags and other relevant social media activity from core channels into one place, which simplifies content publishing and allows for collaborative workflows.

If you’re looking for a more robust platform, consider Hootsuite, which works with brands of all sizes and offers four different pricing tiers plus a custom enterprise plan. The tool also boasts a variety of features that enable you to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns, such as advanced keyword and competitor analysis, real-time influencer-related search and analytics, and visualization functions (e.g., heat maps and word clouds).