In your personal life, as reading people’s minds are something which is questionable superpower. But the business benefits of being able to listen in on people’s thoughts are infinite as well. And while social media monitoring is not exactly about reading people’s minds, it’s as close to it as it gets.

Social listening gives you the access to what people are saying about your brand, industry, or competitors across social media and the web – often without them being aware of you listening to them. If you know how to word your queries and filter the results, then you’ll end up with the most authentic, unbiased insights you can get as a business.

But what is social listening?

The Social management and analytics is not just about firing off content and then tracking the views and shares. The platforms through which you oversee your company’s brand and social media presence are often in the front line for today’s digital marketing campaigns, customer relationship management (CRM) initiatives, and the primary channel for interacting with the new generations of users. That’s a lot of information you’re just putting out across a lot of different channels. Putting that information out there is certainly a good thing, but an even better thing is having some idea of who is listening and what they think of all your hard work you put in.

There are plenty of ways to gauge your company’s social effectiveness, from measuring your social maturity to having a Social CRM strategy in the place. But the easiest way to gauge your social media presence is by listening to it. The definition of social listening varies but the gist is this: Monitoring the digital media channels to learn about your customers, your competition, and relevant business growth opportunities in the social sphere—be it content topics, hash tags and keywords, or simply users who are either already following you or should be.

Once you are listening (i.e., running queries, monitoring trends, gathering data, and generating reports and user lists), then you will need to do something with all of that information. Best social listening tools platforms that go beyond surface-level analytics to provide deep social listening data and influencer identification features for businesses of all shapes and sizes.

But how will you going to know whether your business is getting maximum leverage through the social media? How you will be figuring out whether people are talking about your brand and are interested in your product and services.

You need have to monitor your audience behavior and figure out how they actually perceive your brand having this information will be able to give you knowledge about your brand performance, who are you real competitors are and how you will survive the competition. You will be able to make informed decision on how you can get maximum engagement for your brand. Incidentally, there are some best social listening tools which will make your work easier and better. These tools will bring out complete information about your brand. You can track up the keywords, hash tags, URLs and much more. Let’s try to dig some of these.

  1. KEYHOLE: it is one of the great tools to monitor your twitter and instagram feeds. It is basically a social conversation tracker where you get the inputs on keywords, hash tags, URLs and usernames. You can check-up the real time data and past information. The tool will also allows you to monitor you activity across the world though the heat maps.
  2. HOOTSUITE: it is one of the most popular social media packers and includes the holy grail of the platforms like Face book, Twitter, Instagram, Google+ and Word Press. Though there are many who use the hoot suite because of their content optimization tool, it is a brilliant social monitoring platform. It also provides to the best functionality across all social media platform, the dashboard is updated almost regularly in a week.
  3. MENTION: it is the king of the pack. Mention is the best social monitoring tool which gives you the most of the tracking competitors online and at the same time monitoring the social media. You can run keyword searches and discover twitter and Instagram influencers. The most important thing is about mention is that it comes with dats-rich reports out of the box. Thought the real mojo about this tool is that you can build up your own reports and automate the delivery.

So, there you go with the best social listening tools. All these will help you to get on with you act of monitoring your audience. The numero Uno thing about Hootsuite is the dashboard where you can manage everything from one centralized location. The dashboard integrates all the platforms including Face book, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and Instagram. You can track up the trends and measure growth right from the dashboard.