6 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools

6 Free Social Media Monitoring Tools. The internet is awash with social media monitoring tools but most of them are quite costly. The paid tools do give a much more in-depth view of your social media standing than the free versions, but the free tools have some good insights to offer too. When measuring your social media success, engagement is your key KPI. This includes likes, follows, shares, mentions, video views and clicks, to name but a few. Depending on your goals, you may have other non-social KPIs such as traffic referrals, conversions and page views which will be available through analytics tools, such as Google Analytics. Here is a list of our favourite free social media monitoring tools that can be used alongside your website analytics to give you a rounded view of how well your social media is performing.

1. Facebook Analytics

Facebook Analytics

Facebook insights have come on leaps and bounds over the years and is now full of useful information about your fans, engagement and reach. You can only view data from the last 28 days on Facebook but there is a handy export button where you can view the raw data for the last six months.

What we like: Export function, post engagement information, fan demographics

What is missing: More detailed information on your fans and what they like, most engaged users

2. Twitter Analytics

Twitter doesn’t seem to shout about its analytics offering but it does contain some useful information. Along with the standard engagement and reach metrics, it also shows you who your most influential followers are. This is really helpful when building your outreach programme.

What we like: Top tweets, conversion tracking, Influential followers, export function

What is missing: data beyond the last 28 days, more information on followers

3. Hootsuite

Add all your social media accounts to one dashboard and manage them from one place.

Hootsuite has been around for a long time and there is a good reason for that. The primary benefit of using Hootsuite is that you can add all your social media accounts to one dashboard and manage them from one place. This makes managing social media much more efficient as not only can you monitor the accounts but you can engage with them from one place too.

What we like: One destination for all your social media accounts, monitors social media mentions, generate reports from social analytics and export them as PDFs

What is missing: A lot of the options are only available if you upgrade to a paid account so you can only get basic monitoring for free.

4. Tweetdeck

As the name suggests, this free tool is for Twitter management only. It is very similar to Hootsuite in its layout, with a dashboard to pull in your streams where you can view your notifications, messages and activity all in one place. You can also use this for scheduling tweets.

What we like: Simple to use, easy to view all activity in one place, create streams for trending topics

What is missing: No insights

5. Mention

Show you social mentions, web, forum and news mentions – great when running a big PR campaign

Similar to Google Alerts, you set up your account using your brand name and it will pull in all the information relating to your brand. Not only will this show you social mentions but will also show you web, forum and news mentions – great for when you’re running a big PR campaign. The caveat is that it’s only free for 14 days.

What we like: Influencers ranked by authority score, mentions from across the web not just social

What is missing: only free for 14 days

Image from Mention

6. Simply Measured

The reports cover a range of platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Technically this isn’t a free tool, however they do have free downloadable reports. The reports cover a range of platforms including Facebook, Twitter and Google+. If you are interested in the other services that Simply Measured has to offer, you can request a free demo.

What we like: Free in-depth reports

What is missing: Nothing missing but it is a bit of a long-winded, data capture fuelled process to download your free report.

Image from Simply Measured 

If you would recommend additional tools for our 6 free social media monitoring tools, then we would love to hear from you and your comments!