Any good marketer or brand manager knows that a strong strategy is essential for success. And a crucial component of every good strategy is monitoring.
Monitoring and ongoing analysis are vital for almost every aspect of your business – from keeping track of overheads to adjusting your sales funnel. But they are particularly important if your brand is active on social media platforms like Facebook.
On Facebook, things can change very fast. A campaign can take off and spread like wildfire, and if you’re on the ball enough to leap on the opportunity your brand can get an enormous boost in a very short amount of time. On the other hand, if you go viral for the wrong reasons and aren’t quick enough to put out the fire, your brand reputation could take a beating.
But how can you monitor your Facebook to the best effect? While Facebook will do a certain amount for you, you can’t rely on it to prod you every time something needs your attention, and its analytics aren’t as granular as you might need.
Luckily, there are plenty of social media monitoring tools out there that can help you to keep a close eye on activity on and around your Facebook. Here, we’ll take you through five of the best tools for monitoring your Facebook.
What should you look for in a social media monitoring tool?
Before you pick a Facebook monitoring tool, think hard about what you need. There are many kinds of social media monitoring tools, all of which have a range of features and capabilities.
Think about which of these tools would be most useful for you, and pick a platform that features them:
- Social listening tools: These track brand mentions and analyze sentiment around brand chatter to give you insight into what people are saying about you and where they’re saying it.
- Audience insights: Audience insight tools will give you detailed information on your audience, including demographic, behavioral, geographic, and psychographic data.
- Customizable dashboards: These allow you to format and display the information you need in a way that suits you.
- Trend identification: Trend identification tools pick up on burgeoning trends quickly, allowing you to capitalize on useful Facebook trends.
- Customizable reports: These are very useful when presenting information to colleagues and stakeholders.
- Content creation/posting capabilities: Some social media monitoring tools also stray into social media management. You can use these platforms to schedule posts, engage with followers, and even create content for your Facebook page all within one platform. Remember to SEO optimize your social media content, too, and make sure it aligns with your goals by regularly auditing it with audit SEO SaaS tools.
The 5 best Facebook monitoring tools for 2024
So, now you know what you’re looking for in a Facebook monitoring tool, here are some suggestions to get you started. We’ve compiled a list of five of the best social media monitoring tools available in today’s market, and given you a quick rundown of what you can expect from each.
1. Keyhole: Best for tracking campaign impact
Keyhole is a comprehensive social media monitoring platform that does everything from brand monitoring to influencer management. What it really excels at, though, is tracking the impact of your Facebook campaigns.
Keyhole is intuitive, simple to use, and easy to master. Users can quickly access dashboards that display analytics in clear, easily comprehensible ways. You can gauge customer sentiment, create customized reports, spot audience opportunities, make startlingly accurate campaign predictions, and more with just a few keystrokes.
If you want to truly understand how your social media campaigns are working, where they’re having the most impact, how you can best expand your reach to new Facebook audiences, and much, much more, Keyhole is the platform for you.
Pricing: Custom
2. Sprout Social: Great for content management
Sprout Social is a big name in the world of social media management. It’s a diverse platform that’s popular with SMEs for its wide range of functions.
Sprout Social markets itself as a social content tool, designed to help SMEs publish content on a consistent schedule. But it also has a lot of monitoring functions that come in very useful for brands wanting to keep a close eye on their Facebook activity.
At its core, Sprout Social provides a centralized interface from which social media managers can access analytics across all their social channels. It has a focus on content performance, but also features a range of social media management tools and will provide valuable insights on everything from sentiment analysis to competitor activity.
Sprout’s keyword tracking and analysis capabilities are also pretty impressive, as they can give a lot of insight into the terms and phrases that people search in relation to your brand.
Pricing: Sprout Social offers a 30-day free trial. Following this, pricing starts at $199/seat/month.
3. Meltwater: A decent all-rounder
Meltwater is a strong social media monitoring tool with a wide range of features and functions. If you’re not looking for something too specialized and would like to cover a lot of bases, Meltwater could be the platform for you.
Meltwater is designed with a focus on PR through social media monitoring and management. In practice, this makes for a versatile platform with an impressive range of use cases. From tracking brand mentions across the internet to hauling in detailed analyses of activity on all your social media platforms, Meltwater is a great all-rounder that can yield broad and valuable insights into your socials.
You can even use Meltwater to directly manage as well as monitor your Facebook channels. Publishing content across your socials and even via email is simple from Meltwater’s dashboard. And if you’re working with influencers, Meltwater makes it easy to manage influencer relations through a variety of intuitive management tools.
Pricing: Meltwater has a free demo. Contact Meltwater for more information on the pricing of paid tiers.
4. Hootsuite: Good for Streams
Hootsuite is known for its intuitive, centralized dashboard which brings all your social media ‘streams’ together in one place. Through Hootsuite’s social listening streams, you can watch all your brand mentions, comments, and general engagement coming in and respond with ease in real-time. No more hopping between social media channels – you can see and do everything in one place.
Similarly, Hootsuite’s inbox pulls in messages from all your social networks, allowing you to respond easily without the need for constantly clicking between different social media accounts.
Hootsuite Insights provides sophisticated social media analytics from which good marketers can draw some seriously actionable insights to boost their Facebook performance and engagement.
Pricing: Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial. Following this, paid plans start at $115/month (with 20% off if you skip the free trial!)
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5. Cyfe: Great for visualization
Cyfe is a handy tool if your social media manager is a visual learner.
The platform pulls insights from your social media, media activity, and marketing channels and presents them in a series of handy dashboards with plenty of widgets to toggle data and presentation. The SEO dashboard also helps simplify things like SaaS technical SEO, which is useful to know as you direct people from social platforms to your website.
Cyfe is more about passive monitoring than active engagement with your social media channels, so if you’re looking for analytics tools that let you get directly involved with your socials from within the platform, Cyfe might not be for you. But if you want comprehensive monitoring data pulled straight from your socials and presented in a clear, visual format, Cyfe is brilliant.
You can set up alerts for things like a spike in brand mentions or if one of your Facebook posts suddenly gets an influx of commenters. This is very useful for catching both opportunities and threats and addressing them in real-time.
Pricing: Cyfe offers a 14-day free trial. Following this, paid plans start at $19/month.
Read More: What is Metaverse Marketing? 5 Key Strategies to Implement
Optimize your marketing strategy with social media monitoring tools
If you get your social media strategy right, Facebook can bring huge benefits to your business. There are large, receptive audiences waiting on Facebook to enjoy your content and support your brand. But in order to reach those audiences, you need to put some serious work in.
There are a lot of elements to any social media strategy. Monitoring is one of the most important. When you’ve got a campaign live on Facebook, it’s essential to keep a close eye on it. This way, you can make sure that everything is going well and step in to optimize or adjust as needed.
What’s more, a good monitoring strategy will pull in lots of juicy data that you can use to analyze overall campaign performance and draw valuable insights about your audiences.
In order to get the best possible metrics and insights from Facebook monitoring, make sure that you pick the right social media monitoring tools.
Author Bio
Nick Brown is the founder & CEO of accelerate agency, the SaaS SEO agency. Nick has launched several successful online businesses, writes for Forbes, published a book and has grown accelerate from a UK-based agency to a company that now operates across US, APAC and EMEA. This is his LinkedIn.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. How do you monitor a Facebook page?
Facebook Insights allows you to monitor your Facebook page and traffic within the platform. To do this, log in to your Facebook account, click your profile photo, then click See all profiles. Select the page that you want to monitor and click the Insights tab in the left menu. From here, you can view relevant data about your page’s performance and audience.
2. What features should I look for in a social media monitoring tool?
This largely depends on your business and how you plan to use the tool. However, the most social media monitoring solutions should come equipped with social listening features, analytics capabilities, customizable dashboards and reports, trend identification, and content posting features.
3. Can I use Keyhole to monitor my Facebook page?
Yes. Keyhole is one of the most comprehensive social media monitoring platforms, as it includes things such as brand monitoring, influencer management, and campaign tracking. The latter, in particular, is what the solution really excels at. Plus, Keyhole is user-friendly and quick to master, which makes it a no-brainer for businesses that are short on time and resources.
