MarTech Series Features 20 Brands That Are Helping Businesses Maintain Their Social Media Footprint

Brands are getting keener to know what is being spoken about their products and services on the World Wide Web. We are talking about a global platform (the internet in entirety) and fragmented enterprise data scattered across multiple channels! Further, brands would ideally like this data to be collated to harbor rich insights and assess their brand’s value on a macro level.

Impossible, right? Not anymore. Thanks to advancing technological capabilities, this seemingly complex situation is getting resolved. Social Media Monitoring (SMM) is emerging as a firebrand business sphere that can achieve this impossible. We take a look at the the top 20 enterprises that develop SMM tools.

This is Part I of the comprehensive list and features the top 10.

The 10 Hot Social Media Monitoring Brands

1.            Brandwatch

2.            HubSpot Marketing

3.            Google Alerts

4.            Zoho Social

5.            BuzzSumo

6.            Qwaya

7.            Hootsuite

8.            AdRoll

9.            SharpSpring

10.         Yext

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Brandwatch

Brandwatch makes a difference to your brand’s SMM from the start. The tool indicates important mistakes that your brand is making and suggests ways to fix it. Brandwatch proves that SMM, as a concept, works in improving marketing campaigns. What it also does is:

• Helps you understand your customer better
• Helps you get clarity on product development
• Suggests the need for a thorough marketing research prior to launching marketing campaigns
• Aids in thoroughly understanding market trends

We spoke to Pat Phelan, Chief Customer Officer, Brandwatch:

“It’s not simply a case of sustaining, Social Listening also helps to create and evolve brand perception and equity across all of our customers’ digital channels. It’s critical now more than ever because of the speed that this messaging may need to change depending on circumstances and market environment. What’s hot now may not be hot in a month.  How do you keep pace with that?  How do you make sure that your brand is ahead of the curve when it comes to what matters to their customers? Our customers have the tools to get immediate access to social insight that allows them to make rapid but highly informed decisions about their brand, based on what their customers are saying.”

“As we see it, the brand value is about perception and subsequent action i.e. what’s the relationship your customers have with your brand and how do you turn that into a subsequent desired action?  The most effective ‘social’ brands right now are the ones that heavily leverage social intelligence to influence brand perception through the creation of engagement strategies, brand messaging and consumer advocacy programs that are all driven by understanding the authentic customer voice in social and, subsequently, tracking and measuring the success of those activities through campaign analysis, share of voice analysis and brand sentiment tracking.  Ultimately it’s the brands that are connected with their customers — based on a deep understanding of what matters to them — that are the ones that win.”

Tweet Pat for more on SMM.

HubSpot Marketing

HubSpot is extremely popular among marketers mostly because it simplifies possibly every roadblock that they come across. Part of a larger suite, HubSpot Marketing is the strongest platform adjacent to SMM.

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Google Alerts

Google Alerts has simple functionality. It is free and available only to Gmail users — business and individual accounts. Essentially, Google Alerts monitors the web for you and provides real-time updates about a topic that you have entered. Alerts’ updates can also be planned and the tool works best to monitor online conversations, YouTube Videos, brand/ individual mentions, etc.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social’s popularity is rising due to its affordability and ability to tweak itself according to precise SMM needs that brands have. Its other salient features are:

• Managing an array of social networks simultaneously
• Scheduling Social Media posts — not restricted to a certain number
• Easy monitoring of keywords/keyphrases
• Real-time communication

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is one of the best tools for research pertaining to content and influencer marketing. Users can pitch and track content to counter competitor strategy effortlessly. A brilliant interface and adaptability across a variety of industries and publishing platforms makes BuzzSumo a hot favorite in the marketing community.

BuzzSumo’s key clients include:

• Yahoo
• CapitalOne
• National Geographic
• The Telegraph

We spoke to Susan Moeller, Senior Marketing Manager, BuzzSumo:

“Most consumers begin their purchase decisions with online research. Their research preferences encompass social networks, brand sites, e-commerce sites, blogs, search engines, Q and A forums, and retail giants. To gain new customers, we need to be easy-to-find in all of these places. Increasingly, however, a simple, static presence is not enough. We also need to be winsome and engaged in order to compete well with other products.”

“To an extent, brand value is determined by customer and market perception. Bolstering that value begins with an honest look at what our audience thinks of us. Social media monitoring is a great lens for this type of sentiment. Do customers and prospects love us? Do they hate us? Do they ever think of us at all? Social media monitoring can help answer those questions.

Social media monitoring can also offer us ideas to move opinion from apathy or hate to respect and love or to sustain and increase positive brand value. How? Through consistent observation and application of techniques used by others in our industry. We monitor other brands to learn from their successes and failures so that we can accelerate our own growth.”

Tweet Susan for more on SMM.

Qwaya

Qwaya launched itself as a niche enterprise product that monitors Facebook and Instagram and can analyze advertisement performance on other Social Networks. Qwaya is a reliable tool that facilitates marketers to easily carry out lead-to-deal marketing campaigns. Most of the features of this tool are unique such as:

• Automatically rotate advertisements in Social Networks
• Plug-and-play integrations for Google Analytics
• Building custom URLs

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is hailed by most brands as the paramount of everything Social Media. It works seamlessly on a simple yet reliable strategy (applied on 15 million websites) explained in the five steps below:

1. Listen to what your audience is saying
2. Suggest what to do accordingly
3. Help infuse brand content developed as per Hootsuite’s suggestions
4. Compare performance as against competitors
5. Explore new opportunities

AdRoll

AdRoll resolves a difficult problem in a marketer’s role-that of retargeting and reengaging.

AdRoll’s Key attributes are:

• Access to 500+ ad exchanges
• Native inventory that’s at par with the likes of Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram
• Availability in various languages
• Pre-integration with BidIQ

SharpSpring

Marketing Experts love SharpSpring due to the tool’s automation rules, tracking capabilities and form integrations for the CRM. The tool is one of the most in-depth marketing automation tools that specialize in collecting and converting leads. Other features are excellent content distribution and the fact that it can work in conjunction with almost all leading CMS/CRM Systems.

Yext

Yext integrates with a plethora of tools that are more than likely to contain business information. We are talking about places such as Google Maps, Yelp, Apple Siri etc. What Yext’s platform does is standardize business information throughout every channel that a brand is connected to. Amazing isn’t it? However, don’t take our word for it. We spoke to Liz Walton, Vice President of Marketing, Yext–

“Consumers have greater access to information now more than ever. Whether it’s through maps, apps, search engines, voice assistants, or other AI-powered discovery services, the number of digital touchpoints through which consumers can find information is virtually endless and growing every day. For brands, this means that the customer journey begins off their website. Consumers expect correct information no matter where they look or how they search, and brands that can’t deliver accurate, up-to-date information across all of these digital touchpoints will lose business and fall behind to competition.

That’s where Yext comes in. Our mission is simple: give businesses control over their facts and assets across the ever-expanding digital universe. No matter where customers search, they need to find the right information about people, services, locations, and events. Modern businesses need a single platform where they can control their business facts and keep it updated across the entire digital ecosystem. Yext is that platform.”

Tweet Liz for more on Social Media Monitoring.

Please check Part II for the next 10 hot brands.

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