How do you know if people are talking about your brand on social media?

If they tagged your brand in their posts, you can simply check your notifications to see what they’re writing about you.

But what if they didn’t?

As a small business owner, you probably don’t have time to run a daily search on every social network out there for mentions of your brand. It’s tedious and a waste of precious time.

A better, faster, more effective way? Social media listening tools.

With the right tools, you’ll immediately know when someone says something positive or negative about your brand, even if they don’t tag you or include your social media name.

Ready to stop guessing and start listening? Here are seven tools that can help you monitor your online reputation, irrespective of your niche.

But first…

Getting started with social listening

Before you choose a social media listening tool, you need to determine what exactly you should listen for.

While your main keywords and topics can change over time as your business grows or as your customers start to use a different language to talk about your business, here are the most important keywords and topics you should monitor from the start:

• Your brand name and handles
• Your product names
• Industry buzzwords
• Your slogan
• Names of key people in your company
• Campaign names, keywords or hashtags
• Your branded hashtags
• Unbranded hashtags related to your niche

Here are the best tools for social listening.

1. Brand24

Brand24 offers the ability to monitor mentions of your business across social media and beyond. You’ll get notifications when you’re talked about in news articles, on blogs in videos and more.

2. HootSuite

You’ve probably heard about HootSuite by now. While it’s best known as a social media scheduling and analytics tool, you can also use it to monitor your brand’s reputation online.

You can set up various streams of social media content based on your mentions, selected keywords, hashtags and locations.

3. TweetDeck

TweetDeck offers a free and simple dashboard for anyone looking to schedule posts and monitor their presence on Twitter.

You can create various columns to monitor conversations about your brand, a campaign hashtag or keywords related to your brand.

It’s ideal for anyone interested in an easy-to-use, free social media monitoring tool.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an effective tool that you can use to discover social conversations and engage with people using your brand or campaign keywords, phrases and hashtags.

It is pricier than other tools on this list, but it does have some great social media engagement and monitoring tools.

Once you’ve set up monitoring, you will receive notifications for all your social media mentions and messages. When you use the discovery features, you can search for specific keywords on Twitter and Instagram. This is useful for finding mentions of your brand when people talk about you but don’t tag your social media profile.

5. SentiOne

With SentiOne you can review what people are saying about your brand on social media as well as blogs, forums, portals and more.

You can monitor anything from mentions of your brand to keywords and keyword phrases related to your brand.

When you set it up, you’ll not only be able to get access to real-time data but historical data too, meaning what people may have said about your brand in the past, before you began using SentiOne.

6. Social Bakers

Social Bakers is an enterprise-level social media management tool. It offers a range of tools to help you improve your social media efforts, including wide-ranging social listening tools.

7. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is different to the social listening tools we’ve looked at so far in this article.

Rather than focussing on what people are saying about your brand, Buzzsumo lets you see what articles people are sharing across social media.

This allows you to identify popular trends in your niche and create content that’s more likely to get shares.

Wrapping up

Keeping track of mentions of your brand, comments and reviews doesn’t have to be daunting when you have the right tools on deck. Try them out and choose the social media listening tool that works best for you.