Social Media Marketing Archives

The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools for Businesses

September 20, 2020September 17, 2020 by Keyhole

When managing a social media presence for your brand or your client, there’s an entire library of tools you’re going to need, from content creation tools and social media monitoring tools to social media scheduling tools and more.

But with so many options, how do you determine the best tools for your needs and your brand?

To help you find the perfect social media scheduling tool for your brand, we’ve put together a list of the 11 best tools we recommend using for scheduling out and automatically posting your social media content.

Jump Links:

Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?

The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools
1. Sprout Social
2. Buffer
3. Agorapulse
4. HeyOrca
5. MeetEdgar
6. Oktopost
7. Later
8. CoSchedule
9. Planable
10. Sked Social
11. Hootsuite
BONUS: Keyhole

Why Do You Need a Social Media Scheduling Tool?

Do you want your entire job to consist of sitting at your computer or on your smartphone, creating and posting new content to social media?

Let me answer that for you – no, you don’t! There are so many other tasks that a social media manager needs to attend to, and content creation can’t be the only one.

That’s why you need a social media scheduling tool to help you create and schedule content in batches, so that you can also focus on monitoring, analytics, customer service and more.

Not only that, but social media schedulers are helpful tools for planning out your social media content and ensuring your content calendar is filled with content that helps your bottom line. Create patterns and themes and keep everything in check, all with your scheduling tool.

Improve efficiency in your day-to-day tasks by taking advantage of a social media scheduler and improving your social media management processes.

The 11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools

Now that you know how important social media scheduling tools are for your social media content curation, it’s time to dive into the real reason you’re here – learning more about our top 11 best social media schedulers for social teams and managers.

Each of these tools offers a different set of features at different price points so that you can pinpoint the right option for you.

1. Sprout Social

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a well known social media management tool, and that includes their social media scheduler.

While their price point is a bit more enterprise, their plethora of features does help even it out.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Sprout Social Pricing

Sprout Social offers a social media scheduling calendar that also includes a tool that helps users to find optimal posting times for platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube.

Users also gain access to social listening and monitoring tools, social media team collaboration, community management and more.

Sprout offers a free trial for new users so they can take the software for a test run and see if its processes and interface are the right choice for their brand.

Pricing: Sprout Social’s plans start at $99 per user per month.

2. Buffer

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that has been around for years, starting as a small publishing tool with daily curated content suggestions, but adding on more and more facets to their brand until they became a full-scale social media software.

Users are able to use Buffer for scheduling and analyzing content, planning out Instagram stories, creating a shoppable feed, adding tags to your posts and more.

Buffer offers two different options at different monthly plans – Buffer Publish and Buffer Analyze – or the ability to sign up for both for $85/month.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Buffer Pricing

Based on your needs, you can take a look at their pricing options and even get a 14-day free trial to check out their pro options.

For smaller brands or public figures, Buffer also offers a completely free plan with 3 social accounts and 10 scheduled posts per account.

Pricing: Buffer’s plans start at $15 per month.

3. Agorapulse

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - AgoraPulse

Another useful social media scheduler is Agorapulse, offering features that allow users to schedule content, pull social media reports, interact with followers and more.

Agorapulse is also really helpful for teams, allowing users to create content, send it through the pipeline and give team leads the chance to approve or reject content before it’s published on a brand page.

Starting at $79/mo after a free trial, Agorapulse also gives your brand the power to monitor various hashtags and conversations directly through your social management platform.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - AgoraPulse Pricing

Browse their plan options to see if you can find one that fits your budget and your social media scheduling needs.

Pricing: Agorapulse’s plans start at $79 per month.

4. HeyOrca

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - HeyOrca

HeyOrca is a great tool for managing, planning and scheduling your social media content all in one place. You get access to an easy-to-use social media calendar that also shows you mockup previews of your social content before it goes live.

This tool is more heavily focused on your social media content calendar, showcasing where you’ve scheduled content, what types of content and for what days.

In fact, their pricing model also follows this same focus, requiring that users pay per social media calendar with unlimited accounts, users, and post previews.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - HeyOrca Pricing

This is a great way to get a feel for your posting patterns and ensure you’re sharing the best content at the most ideal times.

Pricing: HeyOrca’s plans start at $99 per month.

5. MeetEdgar

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar brands itself as a social media automation and scheduling tool that helps businesses spend less time doing mundane social media tasks by automating them.

This includes tasks like writing captions based on quotes in your articles, regularly reposting old scheduled posts, and automatically importing newly published content that needs to be shared on social media.

While users will help MeetEdgar get set up on all of these tasks, it can certainly help a one man show do more for a brand by automating several content creation jobs.

Because MeetEdgar’s features are ideal for freelancers and solopreneurs, their pricing matches their target customer with plans starting at only $19/month.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - MeetEdgar Pricing

If you want to have more of a hand on your social media content, this may not be the best tool for you, but if you’re looking for something that can really make social media content creation easy and automatic, MeetEdgar can be a great option.

Pricing: MeetEdgar’s plans start at $19 per month for Edgar Lite and go up to $49 per month for the full service.

6. Oktopost

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - OktoPost

Oktopost is a social media scheduling tool that focuses more on the B2B industry, helping big businesses to manage their online presence in a way that really engages their audience.

Not only does Oktopost integrate with tons of great B2B CRMs and other tools, it offers features like social media publishing, listening, analytics and even social governance for managing global teams.

Oktopost’s social media publishing calendar gives you a great overview of all of the social content you have scheduled over the month so you can easily rearrange, edit, remove, or manually publish your content.

Their website offers tons of information about their various features, but in order to learn more about their plans and pricing, you’ll have to book a demo.

However, with a tool aimed specifically at B2B customers, it can be worth it for those businesses to find a social media management platform that’s so industry specific.

Pricing: Oktopost requires potential users to book a demo to learn more about pricing options.

7. Later

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Later

Later focuses more on Instagram publishing than any other platform, although their tool does allow users to connect Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest accounts as well.

Their Instagram features include previewing your grid, placing a link in your bio to lead to your website, blog posts, and product pages, finding and sharing user-generated content, and working with Instagram influencers.

Being a very visual platform, Later’s Pinterest scheduling and planning is a great add-on to this tool.

If your brand focuses heavily on imagery, Later might be the perfect social media scheduler for you, with incredibly affordable plan prices.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Later Pricing

Choose a free forever plan for basic account management or check out one of their higher tier plans for more features and users.

Pricing: Later offers a free forever plan, but premium plans start at $12.50 per month, paid annually.

8. CoSchedule

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - CoSchedule

CoSchedule is more than just a social media scheduling tool – it’s also a great tool for scheduling out your blog’s editorial calendar, integrating with WordPress and automatically publishing both social media and blog content.

This is great for brands and social media teams who are looking to reduce the number of tools they’re using and manage both social and content marketing all from one place.

Plans start at $14/month per user for the blog calendar and increase from there, based on the features you need for your brand.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - CoSchedule Pricing

Create blog content and social media content at the same time, making your job as social media manager much more seamless.

Pricing: CoSchedule’s plans start at $14 per user per month.

9. Planable

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Planable

Planable is another great social media scheduling tool that lets you get a sneak peek at exactly what your social post will look like once it’s been publishing on the platform of your choice.

Not only that, but your team can easily make comments on the posts asking for various edits to copy, visuals, and more before approving them to be scheduled and automatically posted.

Plan your content from beginning to end with Planable’s social media management tool and create tags based on the content category or campaign of the content you’re sharing.

Planable gives you a chance to try the platform free for your first 50 posts, then brands are able to choose from a selection of affordable subscriptions when signing up for the service.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Planable Pricing

Easily collaborate with your social media team on content creation by taking advantage of Planable’s social media scheduling platform.

Pricing: Planable offers a free plan for users, but premium plans start at $33 per month.

10. Sked Social

Our tenth best social media scheduler is Sked Social, another tool that focuses heavily on helping brands with their Instagram content.

Like Later, though, their platform still does work across a variety of platforms, so users can schedule to Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter all from the same tool.

Sked Social’s Instagram management features include scheduling and auto-posting Instagram stories, analytics, adding a link in user bios, and a visual Instagram planner. This makes it easy for social media managers to get a glimpse at what their Instagram feed will look like pre-publication.

Interested users are able to take advantage of a 7-day free trial to see what the software is all about, with the lowest plan starting at $25/month.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Sked Social Pricing

With a focus on media brands, eCommerce shops, retail brands, and freelancers, Sked Social could be a great option if your business fits in one of those industries.

Pricing: Sked Social offers a 7-day free trial, then plans start at $25 per month.

11. Hootsuite

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Hootsuite

Hootsui t e, the last social media scheduler on our list, has also been in the social media marketing landscape for years, evolving and adapting to fit the needs of social media teams across the board.

Users can view monthly calendars to help schedule out content and ensure they’re sharing posts on the most optimal days and times. Hootsuite also gives managers access to direct messages from social media in their dashboard to manage customer communication all in one place.

With more collaborative tools, social media teams can take advantage of the opportunity to work together on social content, even when working from home, all around the world. Team leads can assign various tasks to team members and approve content before it’s live.

Hootsuite users can also create streams in their dashboards to get a quick view at recent notifications, user feeds, and more for easy community management.

Plans start at $39/month for a professional plan with 10 social accounts for a single user, after a 30-day trial that lets potential customers get an idea of what to expect from the platform and if it’s the right tool for them.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Hootsuite Pricing

Plan prices increase quickly based on your business needs, but the collaboration and features that come with it could be well worth it depending on how your team runs social media.

Pricing: Hootsuite’s plans start at $39 per month after a 30-day free trial.

BONUS: Keyhole

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Keyhole

While Keyhole isn’t necessarily a social media scheduling tool, it fits perfectly as a complementary analytics tool that can help you measure your social media success.

Once you’ve scheduled out your content using your social media scheduler, you can easily track performance, pull detailed reports, monitor accounts and more with Keyhole.

Keyhole is also the perfect tool for tracking how your hashtag choices perform so you can determine if you’re using the best options for your content or if you could increase your reach with different hashtags.

You can also pull real-time data from your social media platforms to easily track conversations and user behavior.

Plans start at $49/month depending on the features you need for your business and the amount of posts you need to measure and report on each month.

11 Best Social Media Scheduling Tools - Keyhole - Keyhole Pricing

Start with a free trial to test run Keyhole’s software before diving in with a full account for your brand and your social media team.

Pricing: Keyhole’s plans start at $49/mo after a free trial. View more pricing options here.

Start Scheduling and Measuring Your Social Content

It’s not enough to just create and send social media content out into the world. You want to make sure the content you’re creating is helping your business’s bottom line.

By using analyzing and reporting tools, you can be sure you’re creating the best content for your brand and for your audience, all while generating the best ROI possible.

The Free Social Media Reporting Template for Marketers

September 17, 2020September 15, 2020 by Keyhole

Unless you have a data-driven social media reporting strategy, posting on social can feel like a black hole.

But whether you’re running social for your employer, as a marketing agency, or as a freelancer, you will be asked to report on the results of your campaigns.

Figuring out what’s working and what’s not is challenging enough on its own. Having to communicate and prove that value to other people is an even bigger challenge.

We’ve made your life easier by creating a free social media reporting template.

This free-to-download resource makes it simple to:

Summarize your social strategy
Highlight your wins
Communicate key metrics
Focus on next steps

But before you start building out your report, we’ll share some tips on how to make social media reports that really get your point across.

Jump Links:

Before You Start: 8 Social Media Reporting Tips

What’s in Our Social Media Reporting Template?

Get Started On Your Social Media Report

Download our Social Media Reporting Template

Before You Start: 8 Social Media Reporting Tips

What data you choose to put in your report is obviously important (and we’ll get to that), but how you present your social media data is going to make or break your social media reporting strategy.

Here’s the thing: people are emotional creatures.

We see what we want to see and hear what we want to hear—especially when it comes to data. So the more you can effectively and accurately frame the data you’re presenting, the more everyone will get out of your report (yourself included).

Ultimately, the goal of a social media report is to assess your successes and failures, communicate the results effectively to key stakeholders, and then make smart, data-driven choices for what comes next.

Here are eight tips for creating a showstopper report.

1. Define Clear Goals & KPIs

Goals matter because they hold you accountable, guide your decision making, and keep your social strategy focused on outcomes.

Start by clearly defining your goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for your social media campaigns. These goals should be quantifiable and easily measurable, and they should align with your overall marketing and company objectives.

For example, if your high-level marketing goal is to grow brand awareness, your social goal may be to increase impressions by 20% over last quarter. Or if your goal is to build an audience, you may set a goal of earning 1,000 new followers this month.

The key here is to determine which social media metrics will help you measure your success. For example, common social KPIs include:

Brand awareness: Impressions, views, and clicks
Engagement: Likes, shares, comments, and engagement rate
Building an audience: Fan or follower count
Website traffic: Clicks and page views
Leads and sales: Form submissions, revenue generated

When creating your report, stay relentlessly focused on these goals and KPIs. If a piece of data doesn’t explain how you got closer (or further) from your company or campaign goals, consider removing it.

Not only will this impress your key stakeholders that you’re aligned with the business’s goals, it will also help you stay focused on the desired outcome, allowing you to make smarter decisions.

2. Determine Your Audience

Speaking of stakeholders, you also have to figure out who this report is for.

Is this a report you’re putting together for your data-savvy marketing team? Will it be presented to a manager who may be less familiar with social media analytics? Or are you just creating this report for yourself?

Determining your reporting audience will help you determine what elements to focus on and the level of detail to include.

For example, if you’re presenting to a marketing team, you may want to focus more on tactics and new things you learned.

But if you’re presenting to a business higher-up, you may want to skip the fine details and stay focused on how you’ve supported the company’s business goals.

3. Determine Your Reporting Frequency

What time frame are you going to use for your reports?

You can choose to report on your social media metrics weekly, monthly, quarterly, or a combination of any of the above.

Your reporting frequency will affect how much time you spend on the report and the level of detail you include.

Short-term, weekly reports tend to focus more on quickly getting across the key metrics and top-performing content. But because they’re over a smaller time frame, it’s harder to make meaningful takeaways.

Long-term, quarterly reports offer a larger sample size for true data analysis and meaningful takeaways, but take longer to put together and typically require a full presentation.

Overall, it’s good to have a balance of short-term and long-term reporting. For example, a quick weekly report for the marketing team and a quarterly report for leadership.

4. Add Context to Your Data

You should provide as much context as possible when presenting your social media data. Most data points are fairly meaningless on their own unless there’s an explanation or comparison.

For example, instead of presenting raw impression numbers of your Facebook posts, it’s much more meaningful to compare those numbers to your previous week, previous year, your competitors, or your benchmark data.

Or if there’s a sudden spike in followers on a certain day, add an explanation of why that happened. This will be especially helpful in your quarterly reports where your audience may have not looked at any social metrics for three months.

5. Say What You Did and What You’ll Do Next

Too many social media reports leave out what you actually did. Focusing only on the results takes away from what earned you those results.

In your report, summarize your strategy, what content you posted, and what may have changed since your last report.

Use plenty of examples where you can, and include what you plan on doing next based on what you’ve learned from this report.

6. Keep it Visual

Your audience’s eyes may start to glaze over if you just present slide after slide of data tables.

Try to make your report as visually appealing as possible. Here are some easy ways to make your report stand out:

Use screenshots of graphs, top-performing content, and stand-out comments
Stay on-brand with your company’s colours and fonts
Don’t visually overload a page or slide with tons of text or stats
Use lots of whitespace

It’s recommended that you create your report in slideshow or PDF format rather than in a spreadsheet—our template makes that easy!

For an easy way to instantly create beautiful charts and graphs of your data, try a free trial of Keyhole.

Keyhole - Social Media Reporting Template - Company Branding

7. Stay Objective and Analytical

If you’re new to presenting data, it’s tempting to manipulate the data to prove a point, or to try to see things in the data that aren’t there. But it’s crucial to be as objective as possible when analyzing your social media metrics.

For example, if your impression count was 1% higher than normal, you don’t have to “sell” it as a rising trend.

Avoid drawing conclusions or making dramatic changes in your strategy due to small sample sizes. Week-over-week data fluctuations are totally normal.

Remember: your goal is to learn from the data, not to make the data work for you.

8. Present Before You Email (If Possible!)

Lastly, your social media report is going to have a far greater effect if you present the data before you email it.

When you present the data—either in person or over a video call—you control the messaging and the pacing. You can also more easily field questions and key into what generates interest from the stakeholders.

When you email the data, it greatly increases the odds of the person on the other end just skimming through the data or just skip out on reading it altogether.

If you view data reporting as a nuisance, that may sound like a blessing, but we highly recommend using your social media reporting to prove your value to your client or your boss.

Therefore, it’s best to present the data and then send an email copy after the fact.

Now that we know how to create a compelling social media report, it’s time to build one!

Download our social media reporting template now.

What’s in Our Social Media Reporting Template?

Before we break down everything that’s in our free social media reporting template, a quick disclaimer:

There is no one-size-fits-all social media report that works for every marketer. As we mentioned above, reports will vary based on your goals, audience, and reporting timeframe. You should liberally edit and add to our report as needed.

That said, we’ve built our reporting template to be as flexible as possible to any social media manager’s needs. Here’s what’s included:

1. Start With a Strong Introduction

After a top-notch title page, start your report with a clear introduction.

In your introduction, include:

Your high-level goals
Your KPIs or success metrics
Your current social strategy and what channels you’re using
Your tactics and progress
The reporting timeframe (weekly, monthly, quarterly)

If you’re reporting quarterly, you may want to quickly recap your major takeaways from the last report to refresh everyone’s mind.

If your report is long, you may want to include an agenda or table of contents.

2. Summarize Your Success

Don’t bury the major takeaways at the end of your report. After the introduction, jump right into your overall campaign performance and summarize your performance on your major KPIs.

For example, this could be:

Total posts
Total reach or engagement
Total followers won or lost
Website visits or leads

This is a good opportunity to combine metrics across platforms. For example, totalling all of your new followers or fans across every platform.

Keyhole - Social Media Reporting Template - How to access engagement metrics

3. Walk Through Your Key Social Media Metrics

Next, you should go through your social media performance, platform by platform.

As we mentioned above, don’t just dump a ton of data on your audience. Provide as much context as possible by comparing these metrics to your previous reporting period (or the previous calendar year if that’s more relevant).

The exact data you include will depend on your goals, but here are the most common metrics to report on by platform:

Instagram

Your Instagram Analytics can be accessed through Keyhole, or you can view your Insights on the Instagram app.

Key Instagram metrics include:

Number of posts/stories
Story/video views
Impressions
Total engagements/engagement rate
Followers gained/lost
Bio link clicks

You should also include a screenshot and link to your top-performing post or video, including key comments or engagements.

Facebook

If you don’t access your Facebook Analytics through Keyhole, you can access your page’s stats directly through Facebook.

Key Facebook metrics include:

Number of posts/stories
Page/video views
Page impressions
Total engagements/engagement rate
Followers gained/lost
Link clicks

Again, include a screenshot of your top post!

Keyhole - Social Media Reporting Template - top engaging post

Twitter

You can conveniently access your Twitter Analytics on Keyhole, otherwise they can be accessed directly from Twitter.

Key Twitter metrics include:

Number of posts
Likes
Retweets
Total engagements/engagement rate
Followers gained/lost
Link clicks

Other Platforms

You should continue this for every platform you’re actively posting on, including:

Youtube
LinkedIn
Pinterest
Snapchat
TikTok

If you’re reporting on a platform for the first time, be sure to explain why you’ve adopted this platform and what you hope to gain out of it.

4. Review Your Social Listening Findings

Beyond what you’ve posted, you should also report on what people are posting about you.

Here you can summarize:

Hashtag analytics: posts, users, engagement, reach, and impressions
Brand mentions: Notable mentions, number of mentions, % of mentions responded to
Sentiment analysis: positive vs. negative mentions

5. Evaluate Your Influencers

If you’re working with influencers, you should also give an overview of the overall program success.

Here, you can collapse all of your influencers into one report and/or break them down one by one.

You can use Keyhole’s influencer analytics to compare influencers by:

Engagement
Reach
Impressions
Followers

You can also take this opportunity to highlight any new potential influencers you’ve identified that you may want to work with next.

6. Other Key Categories and Highlights

Here’s where you can get creative. Reflect on your goals and consider if you want to add reporting on any of these categories:

New influential follows
Trending content in your industry
Competitor activity or results
Channel-to-channel comparisons
Customer service response time
Video performance
Social’s impact on website performance
Audience demographics

For example, with respect to audience demographics, you may have a goal of increasing the number of followers in a specific country as you try to enter a new market.

7. Summarize Your Takeaways

Here’s what it all comes together. Based on all the social data you analyzed, summarize some notable takeaways from the reporting period. These should be more observation-focused than KPI-focused.

What stood out in the report? Why do you think it happened? How should you apply this knowledge moving forward?

For example:

Takeaway 1 – We’re investing a lot of time on Twitter but we’re not seeing as high engagement as we do on Instagram. We should consider shifting more of our time to Instagram.
Takeaway 2 – Our competitor is receiving a lot of traction on their weekly video series. Should we consider shifting to video?
Takeaway 3 – We gain more followers when we post on trending hashtags, but receive more clicks on our links on branded content. Our strategy should continue to feature a mix of both.
Takeaway 4 – We receive the most traction on Facebook when we post in the morning.

8. List Your Next Steps

Finalize your report with your future-facing strategy.

What needs to be adjusted going forward? What new tactics are you going to try? What led you to this conclusion?

For example:

Next Step 1 – Test a weekly video series for two months to increase our reach.
Next Step 2 – Include more original photography to increase engagement.
Next Step 3 – Reduce our Facebook posts to once per day with a focus on higher-quality content.

And that’s it! Remember to leave room for questions if you’re presenting in a meeting.

Get Started On Your Social Media Report

If you haven’t already, download our free social media reporting template now.

Our report will make it easier to summarize your key findings, impress key stakeholders, and make smarter decisions moving forward.

If you want to make creating social media reports even easier, you should give Keyhole a try. Our social media reporting features make it easy to track data on the fly, prove your campaign impact, and easily make beautiful, branded reports.

Start your free trial of Keyhole today.

Download our Social Media Reporting Template

The Essential Guide to Social Media Icons for Marketers

September 16, 2020September 8, 2020 by Keyhole

Have you ever come across a website that doesn’t have any social media icons? Chances are, you haven’t. These social media icons point website visitors to the brand’s social media pages so they can connect with them through multiple channels.

And now with social media playing such a huge role in our everyday lives, you can now see these icons virtually anywhere – from marketing material to business cards.

But before you start plastering on any social media icon that looks good to you, there are a few things you need to consider. Among these is legality, because these social media icons are still registered trademarks.

This post gives you an in-depth look at how social media icons can help with your branding and marketing efforts, how you can legally use them, and more. Let’s get started.

Jump Links:

Uses of Social Media Icons in Branding and Marketing

Brand Guidelines on Social Media Icons
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
LinkedIn

Playing with Instagram Highlight Icons

Where to Source Free Social Media Icons

Uses of Social Media Icons in Branding and Marketing

First, let’s take a look at the potential of these social media icons and just to what extent you can use them for your business. These icons play a critical role in social media branding, as they help direct your target audience towards your brand’s social media pages.

In other words, you direct the attention to your brand’s social media and bring in new followers.

The best part is that you can use social media icons for both online and offline marketing. Here’s a quick look at the different use cases of social media icons in branding and marketing:

Adding Them to Your Website

Display social media icons on your website and help visitors discover new ways to connect with your brand.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking

Encouraging Content Shares with Social Share Buttons

Icons make it easier to add social share buttons to your content and encourage more content shares. Each button will have an icon of the relevant social media platform, so your audience knows exactly where they can share the piece of content.

These buttons allow people to easily share the content on social media with just a few clicks rather than having to open a new tab on their browser and pasting the content URL manually.

This makes them much more likely to share, further boosting your visibility and enhancing your overall content strategy.

On your blog, you can just add social share buttons at the end of each piece or on the left-hand panel. On YouTube, you can also use the annotations feature to add a clickable social media icon encouraging people to follow you.

Including Them in Your Newsletters and Email Signatures

Provide your email recipients with other ways to connect with you by including social media icons in your email signature. This could be a great option for brand representatives that work directly with customers and vendors alike.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Signature

For brand newsletters, you can add social media icons linking to your brand’s social media pages.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Social Media Page

Using Them in Your Print Collateral

The uses of social media icons aren’t just limited to online use; you can even use them in your print collateral such as business cards, print ads, and brochures. Adding icons in place of text where possible will help the design look great because you get to save some space and minimize clutter.

Since you can’t hyperlink on paper, you’ll have to include the URL or handle that will direct people to your social media page. For example – facebook.com/keyholeco or @keyhole.co.

Brand Guidelines on Social Media Icons

As mentioned earlier, social media icons are still registered trademarks so there are restrictions on how you can modify them. That means you can’t use a pink and orange icon pack just because those colours align with your brand’s visual identity. You also need to keep the brand guidelines in mind for each social media icon:

Facebook

Key brand guidelines for Facebook:

Make sure the “f” logo is in Facebook blue or white. If this isn’t possible due to technical limitations, stick to black and white.
Do not deconstruct or modify the “f” logo in any way by changing the colour, design, or scale.
The icon should be similar in size to neighboring icons.
Avoid animating or representing the logo in physical form.

Instagram

Key brand guidelines for Instagram:

Only use the icons provided in the Brand Resource Center. You can either get a multicolour or a black and white version of the Instagram glyph.
Although Instagram recommends that you show the glyph in either black or white, you have the freedom to change it to any solid color. But you may not change other aspects of the design.
Always maintain the icon’s set proportions and make sure it’s never smaller than 29×29 pixels.
Maintain a clear space around the glyph that’s at least one-half of its size so it doesn’t compete with other visual or text elements.

Twitter

Key brand guidelines for Twitter:

You may only show the icon in Twitter blue or white. In case of printing limitations, you may get permission from Twitter to display the icon in black.
Do not modify the colour in any way such as using a different colour, adding gradient and other special effects, or filling it with patterns.
Do not make any modifications to the icon such as changing its orientation, skewing, rotating, or stretching it, adding other elements, etc.
While Twitter recommends using the icon without a container, you have permission to use it with a circle, a square, or a square with rounded edges.
Do not animate or anthropomorphize the logo.

Key brand guidelines for LinkedIn:

Always display the LinkedIn icon on a solid white background. If that’s not possible, you may use a solid, light background instead.
The icon should always be displayed in colour through digital mediums. In case of technical and printing limitations, you may use the icon in solid black.
Do not make any modifications to the icon provided by LinkedIn. You may not change any aspect of the icon including its colour, shape, and proportions. So you can’t alter, distort, or remove any design element.
The icon should be at least 21px tall on screen or 0.25” tall in print applications.

Playing with Instagram Highlight Icons

With all these brand guidelines to keep in mind, you have limited space to play around with the official icons for social media platforms. The last thing you want to do is stir up some legal issues because you decided to use some modified social media icons on your website.

And if you’ve seen some of the free icon packs available online, you might have noticed that a lot of them don’t meet these guidelines.

On the bright side, you do have other options to channel your creativity and showcase your brand personality through social media. For instance, you have the freedom to play around as much as you want with the icons for your Instagram Highlight covers.

Uploading icons on your Instagram Highlight covers will allow you to follow a uniform theme on your Instagram page. This makes it easier to maintain your Feed aesthetic and brand visual identity.

Here’s how your Highlights will look without a themed cover. It’s not necessarily bad, but it can get a bit messy, especially if you want to maintain a consistent aesthetic for your Feed. These random images will, without a doubt, be an eyesore compared to the rest of your Feed.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight covers

Here’s how your Highlight covers will look if you use icons that follow a specific theme. You can see the massive difference in visual appeal between the two. And each cover has an icon that’s relevant to the Highlight category. For instance, Highlights for “Gift Thrift” have an icon representing a gift and “Contact Us” has an icon representing a waving hand.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight covers example

Where to Source Free Social Media Icons

As mentioned above, you need to follow specific brand guidelines when using social media icons for your business. And that puts limitations on colors, shapes, and overall aesthetic. So although there are plenty of free social media icons available online, the safest bet is to download them directly from the brand.

Here are the top sources to download official social media icons for free so you can use them legally:

1. Facebook Brand Resource Center

Get the permitted Facebook logo directly from the company’s Brand Resource Center.

2. Instagram Brand Resource Center

Get the official Instagram glyph icons directly from the company’s Brand Resource Center.

3. Twitter Brand Resources

The official Twitter icon is available for free download from the company’s Brand Resources.

4. LinkedIn Brand Guidelines Page

The LinkedIn Brand Guidelines page lets you download the official social media icons for free.

As for the icons on your Instagram Highlight covers, you’ll find several places to download them for free. You can also create your own using multimedia content creation tools such as Canva and Visme. Check out the top icon packs you can download for free:

1. 20 Instagram Highlight Icons by Denis

Artist Denis shares a set of icons representing items that can fit into different categories. It maintains a consistent and minimal black and white sketch design with a pale blue background.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 1

Check out the icon set here.

2. Floral Instagram Highlights

This icon pack from freepik follows a fall colour scheme, implementing earthy shades of brown, cream, grey, and green. A minimal floral sketch represents each icon.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 2

Check out the icon set here.

3. Instagram Highlights Stories Food Icon Pack

Food bloggers, chefs, and restaurateurs alike will love this icon pack representing different food items such as donuts, burgers, corndogs, fries, and more.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 3

Check out the icon set here.

4. Free Instagram Stories Highlight Icons from Later

Later offers a set of free Instagram Highlight icons that you can customize to fit your brand’s visual identity. The icon pack comes with minimalist graphical elements that can fit into various categories.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 4

Check out the icon set here.

5. Gray Instagram Highlight Covers by Cappuccino and Fashion

Mommy style blogger Madeline shares a set of icons for your Instagram Highlight covers in a minimalist, grey theme. This comes with 20+ icons that can fit into a variety of categories.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 5

Check out the icon set here.

6. Minimal Highlights Covers in Green

If grey isn’t your colour, you can also opt for this minimalist icon pack in cool and earthy green. The graphics represent various objects and themes to fit into multiple categories.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 6

Check out the icon set here.

7. Instagram Highlights Stories Shopping Icon Pack

For retailers, this solid black shopping icon pack might be just what you need for your Instagram Highlights. You have icons representing various objects such as wallets, shopping carts, customer representatives, and more.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 7

Check out the icon set here.

8. Blue Splash Covers

If you like something more colourful, you might also like this blue splash icon pack. It includes several basic white icons with a splash of blue in the background.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 8

Check out the icon set here.

9. Instagram Highlights Stories Travel Icon Pack

For Instagram influencers who travel frequently and for travel-related businesses alike, this travel icon pack would make the perfect Instagram Highlight covers. It includes cartoonish and brightly coloured icons representing travel-related items such as trains, planes, palm trees, mountains, and more.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 9

Check out the icon set here.

10. 60 Instagram Highlight Icons by Denis

Designer, Denis offers another set of free Instagram Highlight icons representing a wide variety of categories. This pack maintains a minima light blue and white theme with simple black outlines.

Social Media Icons - Keyhole - Hashtag Tracking - Instagram highlight cover set 10

Check out the icon set here.

Best Practices on Using Social Media Icons

Now that you’re armed with the essential brand guidelines and free download resources, you’re just about ready to start making the most of social media icons. But before that, make sure you follow the best practices below:

1. Maintain Uniform Space and Size

Make sure that all the social media icons you use are of the same size. And don’t forget to evenly space them out so that they don’t compete with each other. This not only follows the brand guidelines of different social media platforms but also looks great design-wise.

2. Minimize Clutter

Don’t clutter up the space with too many icons or you could end up overwhelming your audience. Instead, pick out up to five icons leading to your brand’s most important social media pages.

3. Make Sure Your Brand is the Main Focus

Avoid making them larger than your own brand logo. Your brand should be the main focus, and any social media icon larger than your official logo will overshadow it.

4. Place Icons Strategically

Although your social media icons shouldn’t be the main focus of the page, they should still be prominently visible if you want to attract new followers. Most companies place them at the bottom of the page, so you can follow the same tactic. But don’t make them too small that everyone misses them when they visit your site.

Gearing for Social Media Growth

Social media icons may play only a small role in your overall branding and marketing strategy. But the smallest things can make all the difference between a well-established social media marketing strategy and a developing one. And social media icons help you paint a complete and professional picture in the eyes of your audience.

In addition, you can strengthen your social media strategy by routinely tracking your performance and looking for optimization opportunities.

The Keyhole Social Media Account Analytics tool comes with robust features to help you with this. It provides you with a complete breakdown of your follower demographics and offers suggestions to improve your strategy such as optimal post length and best time to post.

So make the most of your analytics insights and the tips we’ve provided here to build a powerful social branding and marketing strategy for your business. And don’t forget to sign up for a Keyhole free trial to strengthen your efforts.

Instagram Reels vs TikTok: What You Need to Know

August 29, 2020August 29, 2020 by Keyhole

If there’s any type of social media buzz on the Internet right now, then it’s probably about Instagram Reels (IG Reels) – TikTok’s newest video rival. And as the US announces a potential ban on TikTok it looks like an opportunity for IG Reels to really gain traction.

Instagram Reels vs TikTok - Key Differences and What You Need to Know

What’s more, it seems people have questions. A lot of them:

Is Instagram Reels going to be popular?
How do you use it?
When will it roll out in other countries (right now Reels is available in bigger markets including the US, Mexico, India, Brazil, the U.K., Australia, Spain, France, Germany, Japan, Argentina and a few others.)
Is IG Reels going to replace TikTok?

Let’s find out!

Jump Links:

What is Instagram Reels?
How to Create Instagram Reels
Instagram Reels vs TikTok
What Do Influencers Have to Say?

What is Instagram Reels?

Instagram Reels is a relatively new Instagram video feature, which allows users to make short, 15-second videos. Just like TikTok, IG Reels allows you to use your original video sound or add pre-existing sound clips.

We must note, although Reels might look like a TikTok replica – the feature integrates quite well with already existing Instagram editing tools and filters.

The videos can be filmed directly with the IG Reels camera or you can upload them from your camera roll instead.

If you have a private Instagram account, only your followers can access your Reels. If you have a public one, then anyone can see them (just like the privacy settings on other Instagram posts).

In case you’re absolutely new to Instagram Reels, you can recognize IG Reels by looking for an icon in the lower-left corner of the video when you scroll through your Insta feed (or if you’re looking at someone’s profile, you’ll notice the icon in the upper-right corner).

Chances are you’ve already been “exposed” to an IG Reels video already, even if you haven’t paid much attention!

IG Reels can be uploaded to Instagram Stories, or you can find them shared on the feed as an addition to a Reels gallery of users’ profiles.

They appear frequently on the Explore page too – and from what we’ve seen so far, they’re the best of Instagram’s trending culture! They typically appear as one of the first pieces of content that a user will see on their Explore page.

Fun fact: if one of your IG Reels ends up being featured on the Explore page, you’ll receive a special notification to let you know.

Instagram Reels Facts and Stats

It could be tricky to talk about statistics and analytics when it comes to a relatively new tool, but the stats we have so far illustrate the impact Instagram Reels has on the Instagram community and the overall response to it in general.

So, here are some empowering IG Reels stats you need to know:

IG Reels was initially released in Brazil, and Brazil’s Instagram users are said to typically increase by 1% each month.
Instagram downloads increased 11.4% in India after IG Reels was introduced in July 2020.
20 of the NBA’s 30 teams are using Instagram Reels.
NBA franchises are allegedly getting 22% higher engagement with Instagram Reels as compared to Instagram stories or Instagram posts.
IG Reels is available in 50 countries as of August 5, 2020.
Brands are already taking advantage of using IG Reels as a new content distribution method; Louis Vuitton averages 7M views on each Reel, Sephora France gets more than 453K views, while Red Bull France has several viral Reels with more than 2.4M views on their most popular one.

Overall, Instagram Reels is a refreshing addition to an already feature-rich app, or as Instagram puts it:

Reels gives people new ways to express themselves, discover more of what they love on Instagram, and help anyone with the ambition of becoming a creator take center stage.

Now you know what Reels are and why you should try it.

How to Create Instagram Reels

If you’re already on Instagram, then we guarantee you’ll know how to use IG Reels. But just in case, let’s quickly walk you through the process.

The first step is to select Reels at the bottom of your Instagram camera.

Once you do so, various editing tools will pop up on the left side of your screen to help you create a more interesting and fun Reel such as:

Audio
Align
Timer and Countdown
Augmented Reality (AR) Effects
Speed

You can record a Reel by pressing and holding the capture button (just like a normal IG video).

As you record, you’ll notice a progress indicator at the top of your screen so that you know where you stand with your video – remember, Instagram Reels are up to 15 seconds long. They differ from TikTok videos as the maximum limit is different.

Once you’re done filming, you’ll spot two arrows on either side of the shutter button (the left one serves to replay the clip you’ve just finished filming).

In case you want to delete the clip, all you need to do is tap the trash can icon and then select Discard.

CNET have recently published a step by step guide to creating your first IG Reels video – you can read it here: IG tutorial: How to use the TikTok competitor.

Instagram Reels vs TikTok

The fact everybody associates and compares Instagram Reels to a TikTok video isn’t a mere coincidence.

It’s obvious that Instagram Reels has the same premise as TikTok – to provide video entertainment for a wide range of users, which in essence – is more or less the purpose behind each social media tool.

To read more about other social media tools, don’t hesitate to check our guide on 20 Social Media Tools: Automation to Save Time and Outperform Competitors.

Now, the content we see posted on both IG Reels and TikTok is as follows: lip-synching, pranks, dance competitions, various tutorials, and authentic looking music videos.

TikTok and Instagram Reels also have similar video creation tools and features.

So, while the foundational basis of the two tools is the same, a TikTok video and an Instagram Reels video differ in many aspects.

Let’s see what they are.

First, TikTok is a separate, stand-alone platform, and Instagram Reels is a new feature within a pre-existing app.

In terms of length, a TikTok video has a 1-minute limit, while IG Reels has only a 15-second video option.

When you create your videos, they’re all saved on TikTok – on Instagram Reels, you can decide to share on your story only, and they will last for only 24 hours.

Alternatively, you can post your Instagram Reel onto your feed, where it will live permanently unless deleted or archived.

One key difference is the purpose of each platform.

While TikTok video is still used purely for entertainment, Instagram has a proven track record of helping businesses to promote products and raise brand awareness.

IG Reels is advantageous in this aspect. We’re sure TikTok will get there eventually – especially since the platform has started producing its own stars.

Another thing that really sets these two platforms apart is the choice of music and audio – at the time this article was written, a TikTok video allows for a much wider range of songs, whereas with Instagram Reels, there are speculations that Reels may be launching licensed music for use very soon.

Finally, Instagram Reels knows TikTok has set the bar high.

Just consider the following 2020 TikTok stats:

TikTok is the 4th most downloaded free iPhone app in 2019 (and the 2nd from all apps downloaded in 2019 both on Google Play and Apple App Store).
It’s currently available in 154 countries and in 39 languages.
TikTok is said to have the highest follower engagement rates across 100,000 user profiles.
It has 800 million active users worldwide.
It has been installed over 1.9 billion times globally (having 113 million downloads in February 2020 alone).
20% of all TikTok revenue comes from the USA.
9 Out of 10 TikTok users use the app several times daily.

While it may be hard for IG to beat these stats, taking into consideration Instagram’s popularity – it’s far from impossible.

If anything, it will most certainly be a social media challenge to do it.

What Do Influencers Have to Say?

Now let’s consider another perspective.

Instead of seeing Instagram Reels only as a TikTok alternative, a TikTok Clone, or a TikTok Copycat, influencers offer a refreshing perspective: many are planning to try and explore IG, while remaining active on TikTok as well.

So, how about using both?

Is it possible for two king candidates to share the same video throne?

For example, Amanda Cerny, a well-known comedian and actor who got her breakthrough on Vine and YouTube, has stated: “Just as brands shouldn’t advertise on only one platform, I can’t put all of my eggs in one basket either”.

She then added, “Different strokes for different folks! A fan in India may be on Instagram Reels, while a fan in Brazil may be on TikTok. […] I want to spread the smiles globally and not limit myself to one platform.”

We dare say videos have been around far before TikTok or IG Reels – what they did differently is they revolutionized the way we look at videos by adding a playful approach to it.

Check out our previous articles to learn more about How to Become an Instagram Influencer: 13 Steps for Beginners and What Type of Influencer is Best for My Campaign?

What’s Next?

To sum up, Instagram Reels is another way for brands to get in touch with their Instagram audience and engage in playful campaigns.

It can definitely transform your social media presence for the better. Now, if it’s here to stay or not depends on whether it finds its own IG Reels community.

Although currently the only analytics available for it are likes, comments and view counts, this will definitely be further developed in the future.

That said, we at Keyhole have the necessary tools to help you dive deep into your Instagram Reels experience, and make the most of it with our Instagram Analytics.

Are you ready to try it?

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword + hashtag analytics and social media analytics across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free here.

How to Create a Facebook Business Page: Step-by-Step Guide

August 28, 2020 by Keyhole

How to create a facebook business page - facebook analytics - Keyhole

Benefits of Creating a Facebook Business Page

While each platform has its own perks, we’re focusing here on the benefits of creating and managing a Facebook business page. There are several reasons why your business should have a presence on the social media giant Facebook.

Ready to learn more?

Jump Links:

Benefits of Creating a Facebook Business Page

How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Steps
1. Access the Facebook Business Page Creator
2. Input Your Business Information
3. Upload Profile and Cover Photos
4. Finish Setting Up Your Facebook Business Page
5. Start Sharing Marketing Content

1. Market to a Platform With Over 2 Billion Monthly Active Users

I wasn’t being facetious when I called Facebook the social media giant. With a quarter of the entire world’s population active on this social network, your business is sure to find a massive segment of its audience available to market to.

All you have to do is start growing your Facebook followers and creating content that compels your audience to take action and become customers.

2. Access Hyper-Targeted Advertising Options

Facebook’s advertising options allow you to really hone in on a very specific audience, all due to the data and information its users are already providing the platform and the actions they take on it.

This means you can create ads based on location, gender, interests, online behavior and more, to create the perfect audience for your ads.

3. Gather Insights on Your Audience

Facebook analytics allows you to gather insights on your audience demographics as well as calculate which types of posts resonate best with those who like your page.

You want to use this information wisely and allow it to help guide your overall Facebook marketing strategy so that you create the most engaging and useful content for your audience.

If you’re not totally sure how to get the most out of Facebook insights, check out these analytics tools to help you out.

4. Manage an Online Community Through a Facebook Group

If you’re looking to build an online brand community, creating a Facebook group for your audience to join is a great way to get one started. You can then promote your Facebook group on your page, on your website and across other social media platforms.

And while you can still manage a Facebook group as a private user – Facebook only recently started allowing business pages to manage groups – doing so as your Facebook business page helps to strengthen your brand.

Building a community around your business is a great way to create and gather loyal customers who can help with user-generated content, customer feedback and more.

5. Generate More Traffic and Sales

There are several different ways that you can generate traffic and sales through your Facebook business page, from the content you share to the ways you utilize the features available to you.

First, be sure to regularly share blog posts, landing pages and sales pages to your Facebook business page as a part of your content strategy. While these don’t tend to garner as much attention and engagement as other types of posts, they’re still an essential part of your strategy.

Other ways to generate more traffic and sales revolve around some of the features that Facebook provides its users.

One of the best ways to get your Facebook page visitors to take action is by adding a link to your website to the button directly below your cover photo.

You can choose from a selection of call-to-action phrases on your button and input the link that you want visitors to head to on your website.

Page owners can also showcase products and services on their Facebook with direct links to that product or service’s landing page, further increasing traffic and leading to more sales.

6. Easily Reach a Mobile-Only Audience

79% of Facebook users access the platform only from their mobile devices. Because Facebook’s app is automatically mobile responsive, having a presence on this social media site helps you to reach a wider audience of mobile-only users.

Of course it’s recommended to have a mobile responsive website anyways, especially if you plan on sending your mobile-only Facebook audience to a blog post or webpage, but reaching them on Facebook first is a great way to increase your customer base.

7. Set Up Chatbots via Facebook Messenger

Put together an automated response system with your Facebook page’s messenger so that users can get information about your business, products and services at any time of day without your customer service or social media team needing to be available to respond.

Facebook messenger bots can do anything from share blog content to provide product/service information to send users to sales pages and more.

This can be a great strategy for improving your brand’s customer service even more, without needing any more manpower on your end.

8. Analyze competitor strategies.

You can easily head over to your competitor’s Facebook business pages to see what kinds of content they’re sharing and get some insight into their posting strategy.

Facebook insights also allows you to set up different Pages to Watch, giving you even more insight into how their follower growth is going and how engaged their audience is.

And even better, you can also scroll down to the Page Transparency section of their business page and get a full scope of the ads they’re running.

How to Create a Facebook Business Page in 5 Steps

Every Facebook user knows how often this platform updates their interface and how things work.

But we have no reason to complain, because with every major platform update Facebook does, the easier and easier it gets to create and set up your Facebook business page.

Let’s dive into how you can create your own Facebook business page in just 5 simple steps.

Step 1: Access the Facebook Business Page Creator

There are a couple of ways that you can get here. The easiest one would simply be to type in or click on the link https://www.facebook.com/pages/create and head straight to the page creator.

Or, if you decide you want to walk through this process later, you can also access it directly through your Facebook feed. Simply move your mouse over to the plus sign (+) in your Facebook navigation, then choose Page from the dropdown menu.

This step will take you to the exact same creation page, and we can move right on to step two.

Step 2: Input Your Business Information

After you head to the link mentioned above or click to create a page from your Facebook feed, you’ll be taken to this page.

In this step, you need to insert just three things before you can move forward.

First, you need to input your Page name. This will most likely just be your business name. We’re not at the step yet where you’ll be establishing your Facebook business page’s URL, so don’t worry about your name being taken.

The next step is to select a Category for your Facebook page. This can range from your industry to a more specific type of business, so start typing something more specific to see if it pops up.

If not, you can always get broader from there, and you can also input multiple categories if you cover a variety of products and services.

And finally, you’ll need to input a Description about your business. You have just 255 characters for your business description, so be sure to put together a really concise summary about what your business does and who it services.

As you insert this information, you’ll see a preview of your page information on the right side. Once you’re satisfied, click Create Page.

Step 3: Upload Profile and Cover Photos

The next step will keep you on a similar screen, but adds in a couple more fields to help customize your Facebook business page – uploading profile and cover photos.

Your Facebook Profile Photo should be a square photo while still ensuring that nothing important will get cut off from the edges as it’s cropped into a circle on your profile.

While your profile photo is displayed at 170x170px, you want to upload a high-resolution image that’s at least 400x400px to ensure that it doesn’t lose image quality.

For most brands, your profile photo should simply be a high-resolution image of your logo. Public figures and solopreneurs might opt, instead, to have the profile photo be a professional headshot of themselves, but this is for very specific instances.

Your Facebook Cover Photo optimal dimensions are 820x360px, so you want to ensure you create a graphic that falls in line with that sizing.

Your profile appears slightly differently on mobile phones, however, so you want to be sure that all important design elements fall within the middle 640px so they don’t get cut off.

Facebook cover photos can be used in a variety of different ways, from showcasing products or services to serving as a call-to-action and more.

Once you’ve uploaded these two photos, click Save at the bottom to be taken to your brand new Facebook business page.

Step 4: Finish Setting Up Your Facebook Business Page

Now you get a glimpse of what your Facebook business page will look like in its final form. However, there’s still a good bit of information you need to add before it’s ready to start marketing.

Facebook business pages have the ability to provide tons of information about your business and its offerings to potential customers, so you want to be sure to set it up completely and fill out all necessary information.

Since social media for local businesses can have a bit of a different strategy, be sure to input any essential location info so your customers can easily find you.

Other than that, here are a few things you need to be sure you complete before finalizing your Facebook business page.

Create a username.

This is where you dictate the URL that your Facebook business page will have. It’s ideal to have this match your business name so that customers can easily find you, but if that’s already taken, you may need to play with other variations.

Add a Button

We mentioned this a bit earlier in one of the benefits to creating a Facebook business page, so you definitely want to make sure you set this up properly.

There are 14 different actions that you can choose from that you want your audience to take, and you can change them up regularly based on what your business is promoting.

Select the action that makes the most sense for your business and insert the link/email address/phone number/etc. that you want this button to take your page visitors to.

Insert Any Remaining Business Information

In the left sidebar, scroll down to Edit Page Info to access any remaining information you might need to provide your customers, like contact information, location, hours, etc.

If there’s something you want your potential customers to know, this is the place to add it in, especially before you start promoting and marketing your business page.

Add Products or Services

If you have a service-based business, you can add information that describes your service offerings right on your Facebook business page, giving your audience a sneak peek of exactly what they can expect from you.

And if you sell products, you can connect your online shop to products listed on Facebook, showcasing exactly what you offer and even allowing people to make purchases directly from Facebook.

Post Events and Job Openings

Your Facebook business page does everything, and if there’s anything you need to promote, this is the place to do it. Post any upcoming events, either in person or virtual, or any job openings your company might be hiring for.

Step 5: Start Sharing Marketing Content.

It’s now time to create your Facebook business page’s very first post.

Be sure to put together a solid Facebook marketing strategy so you know what content your audience wants to see and what content is in your business’s best interests to share.

Share marketing content regularly and engage with your audience to start seeing results and a growth in likes and interaction.

Create Your Facebook Business Page Today

Ready to dive in? Head over to Facebook and start creating your brand new business page today. Share stellar content and keep an eye on your Facebook Analytics to see what sticks with your audience.

How to Become an Instagram Influencer: 13 Tips for Beginners

August 18, 2020 by Keyhole

Instagram influencers get paid to channel their creativity and post beautiful photos. Not to mention the free goodies and extra perks that come with holding an influential status on social media.

With all this considered, it’s no surprise that you want to join the ranks of famous Instagram influencers and start making money as a creator.

Before you dive in, however, keep in mind that becoming a social media influencer isn’t as easy as it looks from a distance. It involves months of hard work and consistency, so you have to be willing to commit.

This post gives you a detailed guide on how to become an influencer and monetize your influence on Instagram.

To simplify the process for you, we’ve divided the guide into three sections – prepping your account, growing your influence, and working with brands. Although the steps focus on Instagram, note that many of them can apply to other social platforms as well.

With that, let’s find out how you can start your journey to becoming Instagram famous.

Jump Links:

Prepping Your Account
1. Choose a Niche That’s Right for You
2. Decide on Your Ideal Audience
3. Have a Creator or Business Profile
4. Write a Compelling Bio
5. Have a Profile Picture That Represents You
6. Decide on a Feed Aesthetic and Stick to It

Growing Your Influence
7. Keep Your Feed Fresh
8. Prioritize Quality
9. Make the Most of Hashtags
10. Focus on Meaningful Engagement

Working with Brands
11. Decide on Your Rates
12. Have a Media Kit Ready
13. Find Brands to Work With

Prepping Your Account

1. Choose a Niche That’s Right for You

Becoming an Instagram influencer, or any social media influencer for the matter, requires finding a niche to focus on. To maintain authenticity, make sure you choose a niche that aligns with your interests and expertise.

In other words, it has to be something that you know a lot about and can discuss for hours without getting bored.

This is crucial if you want to eventually become an authority figure on a certain topic. The more passionate and knowledgeable you are on the topic, the more people will see you as a trustworthy source of information on said topic.

Plus, brands narrow down on ideal influencers based on relevance so choosing a niche can connect you with the right brand partners.

For example, Izzy (@infusedwithtea) is extremely passionate about baking and plant-based tea. So she regularly posts plant-based recipes along with eye-catching photos of her finished creations.

Instagram Influencers - Choosing a Niche

2. Decide on Your Ideal Audience

After deciding on your niche, think about the kind of people who would be interested in it. This makes it easier to understand your audience and find effective ways to connect with them. So you can decide on a content strategy and a personal brand voice that resonates best with them.

For example, Signe Hansen (@useless_dk) is a stylist and jewelry designer who promotes sustainable living and minimalism. She mainly targets women who love to look good but want to maintain a sustainable lifestyle. So her posts mainly consist of tips to style certain pieces of clothing in several different ways.

3. Have a Creator or Business Profile

If you’re going to get serious about becoming a social media influencer, you have to get serious about your analytics too. To better learn how to grow your influence, you need to keep track of your audience demographic and how people are interacting with your content. So it’s crucial that you switch from a personal Instagram profile to a Creator or Business Account.

Instagram previously had only Business Accounts for influencers who wanted to analyze their performance on the platform. This allows you to:

Access Instagram Analytics to get data about your posts and followers
Add links to your Stories
Promote your posts as ads

However, it doesn’t let you go private on Instagram. Plus, since it isn’t specifically for content creators, it lacks a few features that would be of use to Instagram influencers.

It then introduced Creator Accounts that would allow Instagram influencers to access several exclusive features for content creation. With an Instagram Creator Account, you can:

Access the Instagram Creator Studio through desktop
Get creator-specific analytics insights such as engagement stats and follow/unfollow rates
Tag products featured in your Feed post
Filter your inbox to prioritize important messages

Keep in mind that you won’t have the option to connect your Instagram Creator Account with third-party tools. So this might not be a good choice if you plan on using analytics and scheduling tools from a third party. Otherwise, you can test it out and see if it meets your needs.

Check out our previous post to learn all about setting up an Instagram Creator Account.

4. Write a Compelling Bio

What’s the first thing you look at when you need to know what a particular Instagram account is about? Chances are, even before you scroll through the posts in their Feed, you’ll probably look at their bio.

Your bio gives people a summary of what your content is about and whether or not it’s relevant to their interests. So it’s the first thing that prospective followers (and prospective brand partners too) will look at to see what you typically post about.

That’s why it’s crucial to write a compelling bio if you want to become an Instagram influencer. Make sure it accurately describes what your account is all about.

Use keywords and phrases relevant to your niche for this, but don’t clutter the space too much as it can get difficult to read. Keep the information easy to scan and understand with a list format and/or non-text elements separating different sections.

For Instagram influencers, it also helps to include your contact info where businesses can reach out to your for enquiries. If you run a blog or have a project that you want others to see, don’t forget to include the link for that. In addition, make sure you use a voice that reflects your identity.

Check out the following bio from Jessica Clifton (@impactforgood), for example. She structures the information in a list format and uses emojis here and there. She’s also added her contact info and relevant links for potential brand partners.

Instagram Influencers - Influencer Instagram Bio

5. Have a Profile Picture That Represents You

Your profile picture is the first thing that can give people a glimpse of your account and content even before they visit your profile page. In fact, it could be the very thing that compels them to click on your username and check out your Feed. So it should be able to instantly captivate people and draw them in while also telling them a bit about you.

For example, a travel influencer could have a profile picture of them in a picturesque location, a food influencer could have a picture of them cooking or eating, and so on.

Meg (@meg.ikarp), an influential artist uses a self-portrait in her personal art style as her profile picture. This accurately represents what she does and what her personality is like.

Instagram Influencers - Influencer Personality

6. Decide on a Feed Aesthetic and Stick to It

How your feed looks as a whole leaves a lasting impression on your audience. An impressive-looking feed that feels cohesive will instantly draw in people. It’ll also show them that you’re serious about producing high-quality content so you’re worth following.

So one of the first things you have to do as a social media influencer is to decide on an aesthetic for your feed and consistently maintain it. Choose an aesthetic that fits your personality and reflects the mood you want to portray through your content.

For example, someone who wants to promote sustainable living and minimalist lifestyle will probably want a feed that looks clean, simple, and refreshing.

To maintain a consistent aesthetic in your feed, plan each photo ahead of time with your Feed in mind. In addition, try taking photos in similar lighting and use the same filters and presets when editing them.

For example, check out how Sam Ushiro (@aww.sam) consistently posts photos with bright and popping colors to give her Feed a sunny and playful aesthetic.

Growing Your Influence

7. Keep Your Feed Fresh

One of the best ways to grow your influence is by posting consistently and providing your followers with fresh content to engage with. Although there’s plenty of debate about the ideal posting frequency, try to post at least once a day. Even if that’s not viable for you, at least aim to provide your followers with a certain number of posts every week.

According to a study published on Social Media Today, posting more often on Instagram can decrease your engagement per post.

However, it increases your overall engagement, which can be crucial for gaining more visibility and attracting new followers. The study found that doubling your post rate per day gives you 1.6X more engagement.

8. Prioritize Quality

Although posting frequency is important, don’t sacrifice quality for the sake of posting more often. Quality should still come first because that’s the exact reason why people are following you instead of other Instagram influencers in your niche.

When we talk about quality, however, keep in mind that it isn’t just about posting high-resolution photographs (although that’s still essential). Rather, it’s more about publishing content that would be of value to your followers and your target audience.

Does it serve any purpose? Does it teach them something or entertain them? In other words, does your audience gain anything from your content?

For example, fashion influencers like Autum Rainn (@autumrainn) create content to provide their audience with style inspiration and fashion tips.

Instagram Influencers - How to Become an Instagram Influencer - Influencer Engagement - Relevant Hashtags - Content Creation

9. Make the Most of Hashtags

When it comes to Instagram, nothing drives content discovery better than hashtags do. If someone clicks on or searches for a certain hashtag, they’ll discover posts that use the hashtag in the caption or comments. This helps people find the content they’re interested in and connect them with relevant content creators.

In fact, John Koch of Tomoson conducted an experiment with hashtags on Instagram and found that they increased content visibility by 4,473%.

So if you want to grow your Instagram following, make sure you use highly relevant and popular hashtags to boost content visibility and eventually attract potential followers.

Instagram provides you with hashtag suggestions when you type in a related hashtag in the search bar. In addition to this, you can also use tools like Keyword Tool and Hashtagify to discover highly popular and trending hashtags related to your niche.

For example, see how health food influencer, Carissa Stanton (@broccyourbody) uses several relevant hashtags in her post. The post provides a recipe for a poke bowl and includes hashtags like #pokebowls, #diypokebowl, and #healthyrecipes. It received almost 10,000 likes.

Instagram Influencers - How to Become an Instagram Influencer - Influencer Engagement - Relevant Hashtags

10. Focus on Meaningful Engagement

While there are shortcuts to growing your following and increasing your engagement, those options are often unsustainable. They bring you followers and drive engagement, but only for a limited period of time. So it’s not a viable option when you want to build sustainable influence and become a successful Instagram influencer.

That’s why it’s crucial that you focus on attracting meaningful engagement right from the start. Avoid buying likes and followers, for a start, and don’t depend too much on contests.

Although running a contest can help you gain new followers, you don’t want people following you just because they want to win free stuff. So save this option only to occasionally reward your loyal followers or even to give your brand partnerships some traction.

Instead, focus on providing high-quality content consistently. Even if you don’t add to your Feed on a regular basis, interact with your followers through Stories. Use Instagram Stories to ask them questions or answer theirs, conduct polls, give them a glimpse of what your daily life looks like, and more.

You can even use the Keyhole Social Media Account Analytics to monitor your post performance and follower engagement. This will provide you with valuable insights and recommendations on how to drive better engagement with your posts. This tool analyzes your post data and suggests the best time to post, optimal post length, and more.

Instagram Influencers - How to Become an Instagram Influencer - Keyhole - Social Media Analytics

In addition, create more opportunities for engagement. Write captions that make people want to engage with your posts and comment on them. Share personal stories they can relate with and ask questions that they’d want to answer.

More importantly, don’t forget to return the favour and actively engage with people who engage with you. That means answering their questions or at the least, liking their comments. See how Joey (@shethespy) interacts with her followers and answers their questions.

Instagram Influencers - How to Become an Instagram Influencer - Influencer Engagement

Working with Brands

11. Decide on Your Rates

One of the trickiest parts about becoming a social media influencer is the part where you decide on how much to charge. It’s crucial that you have a clear idea of what a reasonable rate looks like considering factors like your follower count, engagement rate, niche, and content quality.

You can’t just expect brands to pay you $250 per Instagram post if you only have a few thousand followers who hardly engage with your posts. At the same time, you might want to reassess your value if you’re only charging $50 per post while having 500,000 followers who actively engage with your content.

Deciding on a reasonable rate helps you set a baseline for your worth as a content creator. Plus, it also helps you connect with brands that are the right fit for you because influencer pricing is often an essential criterion in their search.

If you’re not too sure how much is a reasonable rate, consider using the Instagram Money Calculator from Influencer Marketing Hub. This takes into account factors like followers, engagement rate, and average likes per post to give you an estimate of how much you should earn per post.

Instagram Influencers - How to Become an Instagram Influencer - IG Money Calculator

12. Have a Media Kit Ready

If you’re serious about becoming a social media influencer, you also need to prepare a media kit that will help prospective clients learn more about you. This is a digital portfolio that showcases your personal brand, work, and achievements. In other words, it’s the pitch that helps convince prospective clients to work with you.

Instead of creating different media kits for different social networks, you just need to create one that contains info about your stats across all platforms. It should include the following key details:

A bio that highlights your name, location, personality, interests, and other pursuits
A high-quality photo of yourself
Your contact info
Detailed follower and engagement stats across various social networks
A breakdown of your audience demographics
Previous campaigns you’ve worked on as well as testimonials from past clients

Try compiling all this info into an attractive visual presentation so that you stand out from the rest. Don’t forget to use color palettes, fonts, and images that fit your personal brand identity.

13. Find Brands to Work With

Next comes the part where you find brands to partner with. You can either reach out to brands directly or even join influencer marketing networks that can connect you with the right campaigns.

Make sure you’re picky about your partnerships no matter how desperate you might be to find work. Ideally, you should only work with brands whose values align with yours so that you can keep maintaining authenticity and credibility with your audience.

Maintaining Your Influence

As difficult as it is to build and grow your influence on Instagram, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get to keep it forever. So you need to consistently work towards maintaining the influence that you’ve built over the months and years.

For this, you should continuously measure your performance to see what works and what doesn’t. This will allow you to keep growing and adapting your content strategy based on what people want to see at that particular time. In addition, it makes it easier to provide your brand partners with visible results from the campaign so they can measure their influencer marketing ROI accurately.

Don’t forget to keep up with the trends and join in on trending and important conversations within your niche. Most importantly, keep interacting with your followers to engage them and build a loyal community.

Related Articles:

The Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

What Type of Influencer is Best for My Campaign?

To get a complete look at your social and performance data, sign up for a free Keyhole trial today.

The Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

July 29, 2020July 29, 2020 by Keyhole

Edited on July 2020.

You need social media monitoring tools for three main reasons:

To get quality audience data.
To take relevant actions, based on the data collected, to keep or build a good reputation and drive ROI.
To save time, as all your social media analytics are available to you in one platform.

But it begs the question: which social media monitoring tool is the best for your brand?

It can be tough to pick one — with so many enticing promises from each solution.

What you need is a resource that provides you with quality insights about each tool.

Well, look no further; here’s a guide showing you the top 25 best social media monitoring tools that are worth considering:

Jump Links:

1. Keyhole
2. BrandWatch
3. Buzzsumo
4. Glean.info
5. Digimind
6. Google Alert
7. Hootsuite
8. Falcon.io
9. Meltwater
10. Sprinklr
11. Mention
12. NetBase
13. Nuvi
14. SharedCount
15. Social Mention
16. Brand24#brand24
17. TalkWalker
18. Awario
19. ZoomSphere
20. Sprout Social
21. Followerwonk
22. Iconosquare
23. Audiense
24. Tailwind
25. Union Metrics

1. Keyhole

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

Brands like Google, Alibaba, L’Oreal, H&M, and Mashable, trust Keyhole’s analytics. Keyhole is a hashtag analytics solution allowing you to track hashtag (campaign) performance and monitor relevant conversations online.

Keyhole’s social analytics dashboard gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like; you don’t have to look too deep before seeing basic analytics like total impressions, total engagements and total link clicks.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Social Analytics Dashboard

Looking for a tool that allows you to tap into your customers’ minds, give insights, and turn raw data into actionable insights that inform your strategy and accelerate critical decision-making? Then Keyhole might be exactly what you need.

It provides you with the following key features:

24/7 monitoring of the performance of keywords, URLs, topics, hashtags, @mentions, and more around your brand, audience, and industry.
Access to the best and most relevant influencers for your brand and exclusive information about their engagement rates, reach, etc.
A stunning, in-depth visual representation of your brand’s social performance.
Broad, historical, and deep real-time views of global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market across all major social platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube) – all in the same spot.
A social analytics platform to monitor sentiments around your brand and oversee your overall brand health.

Best of all?

Not only does the tool allow you to track mentions/ customer conversations across social media, blogs and forums and oversee your overall brand health, but it also equips you with in-depth competitor insights. With Keyhole, you’ll get all the data you need to understand your customers AND compare your brand accounts and campaigns against your major competitors.

Plus, in-depth competitor benchmarking and insights are available in all plans. Keyhole helps you easily compare your brand accounts and campaigns against that of major competitors.

Plus, you can also track mentions of any brand or keyword across news, blogs and forums.

Neil Patel describes it this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”

Pros: The data reports are comprehensive, but also simple and easy to understand. It’s an affordable tool that keeps everyone in the know about ongoing conversations, brand health, and competitor performance.

Price: Starts at $49 USD per month. You can view various plans and pricing here.

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2. BrandWatch

BrandWatch is a social listening & analytics tool that helps you dig out relevant data from blogs, forums, and even social and news/review sites. Basically, this tool tells you what/how your customers talk about your brand online.

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Brandwatch

You can use BrandWatch to get an overview of your brand mentions’ volume and compare it with that of several competitors, monitor brand sentiment in real time, and find out who your audience (demographic) is, as well as what topics they are mostly interested in.

It also provides a data visualization tool that lets you bring your data to life; your data can be represented in the form of graphs that make hard stats and numbers easily understandable for every team member.

Pros: A flexible, highly customizable social listening tool. The data visualization feature makes data easily understandable and shareable.

Cons: The sentiment analysis is not always accurate.

Price: Varies based on mentions per month and historical data access.

3. Buzzsumo

Want to know what’s drawing your audience’s attention? Then you need Buzzsumo.

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Buzzsumo

BuzzSumo helps you take the guesswork out of your content strategy, allowing you to see exactly what kind of content and which topics are stirring up interest and are getting the most shares in your industry.

You can use BuzzSumo to benchmark your stats, understand your audience’s interests, pinpoint the right influencers that can spread the word about your content and get more media coverage.

Pros: Great for identifying trending topics, influencers and most effective channels, informing your content strategy.

Cons: Expensive compared to alternative tools.

Price: $99 – $499 USD per month.

4. Glean.info

Glean.info is a market intelligence & social media monitoring tool that gets you audience data from social media sites, online news, blogs, message boards, forums, and photo/video sharing sites.

Similar to Keyhole and BrandWatch, this tool also lets you see your share of voice on social — the percent of your brand’s mentions against that of your competitor’s.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Gleaninfo

Here’s what’s even more interesting: Glean.info alerts you when your brand gets mentioned on a fake news site.

They monitor all new posts on 2000 fake news sites and alert you as soon as your brand gets mentioned; this helps you handle bad press before things get out of hand.

Pros: Integrated access to social media insights. Customizable alerting system.

Cons: Fairly expensive, so may not be accessible for everyone.

Price: Varies based on the number of services you need and keywords you want to track. The price for one service starts at $299 USD per month.

5. Digimind

Digimind is an intelligence software that provides a beautiful visual representation of your brand’s social performance.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Digimind

This tool also allows you to monitor your own social media posts and run competitive analysis — checking how your brand and/or product stacks up against industry rivals. You’re also able to access your data via Digimind’s mobile app.

Pros: Monitors thousands of internet sources to collect brand intelligence.

Cons: Complex setup & high learning curve.

Price: To request a custom quote, contact Digimind directly..

6. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is super useful for you if you’re looking for a basic monitoring solution.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Google-Alerts

It scans through the web and tells you when your brand or product gets mentioned.

You can choose which sources you want to be receiving alerts for — whether blogs, news sites or forums —and the languages you want to get alerts for.

Pros: An easy and free to use mention tracking solution.

Cons: Only contains basic functionalities so may not be the most well rounded tool.

Price: Free.

7. Hootsuite

Hootsuite isn’t just a social media management software; this tool also provides social insights by monitoring relevant conversations on social media.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Hootsuite

It allows you to track key topics and brand mentions, analyze your performance on social media and measure your results against your competition to spot trends, patterns and optimize your social media presence.

With Hootsuite, you can separate conversions from your paid and owned media, and choose what to monitor by filtering out conversations by keyword, language and location.

Pros: Manage your entire presence on social platforms from one place.

Cons: Higher price than other alternatives. Lower-tiered packages do not include social listening, analytics and benchmarking.

Price: $19 USD – $599 USD per month.

8. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is an all-in-one social management tool that helps you plan your content calendar, manage your inbox across different platforms, create and schedule ads, and monitor your brand’s impact on social.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Falcon.io_

The platform was built to assist social media marketers with social listening, customer engagement, content marketing and audience management. Its social listening feature allows you to keep on top of online conversations and trends, track your campaigns and discover top influencers that are engaging with your brand.

Falcon.io supports all the major social media such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter, and makes their sentiment available in multiple languages

Pros: Intuitive user experience. Great social listening functionality.

Cons: High price for a basic package, the measurement & reporting module might not have the flexibility your business needs.

Price: Essentials available at $129 USD per month. Contact Falcon.io to inquire about their custom packages/pricing for larger organizations.

9. Meltwater

From tracking brand mentions to monitoring campaigns in real time, Meltwater gives you a rundown on critical conversations about your brand on social media.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Meltwater

Meltwater’s AI engine helps you listen to relevant social media conversations, and gather historical audience data to make more informed marketing decisions.

Moreover, the platform enables you to dig deeper into your audience insights to discover the exact communities and segments that are engaging in conversations related to your brand, and identify the most significant influencers among them.

Similar to other tools on this list, Meltwater offers a social media management functionality, enabling you to plan and schedule posts and engage with your audience via a centralized inbox.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Meltwater Dashboard

Pros: A great tool to identify media contacts and influencers in your industry.

Cons: Pricey. Very limited number of users for the cost you pay.

Price: Contact Meltwater for pricing.

10. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a powerful social media management tool that also provides a social listening feature.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprinklr

Sprinklr Modern Research helps you gain broad, historical and deep real-time views of global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market – all in the same spot.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprinklr Dashboard

Like many other similar tools, this software helps you benchmark your social media performance against that of your rivals. Even more, they also help you track likely crisis before they arise so you are able to make informed decisions.

Pros: Great for social listening and comment/message moderation across different social media profiles and inboxes.

Cons: Paid ads performance has to be manually added, as it doesn’t get automatically pulled and inserted into the reports. Advanced features can get pricey.

Price: Contact Sprinklr to request a custom quote.

11. Mention

Mention helps you monitor online conversations and track mentions of your brand, product, industry, or campaigns.

This keeps you abreast of important conversations around your business so you’re able to join in on these conversations when it matters the most.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Mention

Mention enables you to filter the conversations you want to monitor by language, source and date, and refine your alerts by adding or removing certain keywords.

You can then visualize your marketing data, and automate your reports to share the results with key stakeholders in your business, fast and with ease.

Pros: Easy to set up and use to find relevant conversations and brand mentions all over the web.

Cons: Tracking campaigns can be difficult to set up without extra support from a support rep. Limited functionality for lower-tier subscribers.

Price: Paid plans start at $25 per month.

12. NetBase

NetBase provides many customer experience features, including social media monitoring.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Netbase

NetBase uses a natural processing language engine to generate an accurate understanding of human language (customer data) at scale across 199 languages. Their NetBase LIVE Pulse solution gives you real time insight into trending topics, top terms/hashtags, allows you to set and track goals, integrate paid metrics, and more.

In NetBase’s own words: “You will gain a deep understanding of customer preferences, passions, and behaviors to drive your customer experience initiatives and make smarter, faster business decisions.”

Pros: Great tool for keeping on top of brand health and customer sentiment.

Cons: Steep learning curve. Training might be required.

Price: Contact NetBase to discuss a unique plan.

13. Nuvi

From social media publishing to monitoring, Nuvi takes care of it all for you.

Nuvi is a robust customer experience management solution – their Listen tool allows you to monitor more than just hashtags. This tool helps you monitor keywords, URLs, topics, social media handles and more, to spot trends and identify opportunities to increase your reach and build better experiences for your customers.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Nuvi

Nuvi also gets you audience data from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, VK, Stack Overflow and an ever-updating list of 3 million+ blogs and RSS feeds.

Pros: Relatively easy to use. Good sentiment analysis with accuracy of up to 80%.

Cons: Unable to collect and analyze historical data.

Price: Contact Nuvi to discuss a unique plan.

14. SharedCount

Much like Buzzsumo, SharedCount tracks popular content in your industry. Just insert a URL into the tool and it will show you how many shares the content has gotten so far.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sharedcount

You can also analyze URLs in bulk and export them as CSV files.

Pros: Provides an easy way to analyze the popularity of your content through URLs.

Cons: As of 2020, it only works with Facebook and Pinterest.

Price: Free — $40 USD per month.

15. Social Mention

Social Mention is a real-time social media analytics tool. It collects and compiles user-generated content (UGC) from the web into a single platform.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Socialmention

It collects and compiles user-generated content (UGC) from the web into a single platform. Let’s say we want to see the audience data around the #ArtificialIntelligence hashtag; Social Mention provides you with instant, data rich reports about what’s going on around your query as seen in the image below.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Socialmention Dashboard

It shows the ratio of positive to negative sentiments, the percent of reach, and the strength of your searched term on social media. It also shows the passion around your query; that is the likelihood that users will keep talking about your query repeatedly.

Pros: A social analytics tool that’s free to use. Helps to predict future engagement based on existing data.

Cons: Sentiment score is not always reliable.

Price: Free.

16. Brand24

Brand24 is another social listening tool, that makes brand reputation management simpler and easier. The tool lets you track mentions, and even gives you a visual representation of ongoing conversations about your brand using a Discussion Volume Chart.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Brand24

Like most of the top social listening tools, Brand24 allows you to dig deep into your reports to analyze sentiment and determine whether your brand was mentioned in a positive or negative context, as well as to identify key influencers in your industry. Plus, it makes it easy for you to join in on conversations across various channels, directly from the platform.

Pros: A user-friendly tool that simplifies social listening. Customized alerts for brand mentions make it easy to stay on top of online conversations about your brand.

Cons: It may be hard to accurately predict customer sentiment.

Price: Starting at $49 USD per month.

17. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social analytics platform enabling you to monitor brand sentiment and oversee your overall brand health.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Talkwalker

Their Conversation Clusters tool provides you with AI-based data that lets you find hidden connections between trending conversations, discover conversation drivers, and understand the core customer needs that start and move conversations in a particular direction.

Talkwaker also gives you a 360 view of your owned and earned social media content, including your brand, product or competitor mentions offline.

You can use the tool to detect emerging themes, identify market gaps and serve more relevant content and offers to your customers.

This lets you understand the best influencers for your specific brand or product. This tool also gives you a 360 view of your owned and earned social media content, including your brand, product or competitor mentions offline. All these help you account for what exactly comms bring to the table at your organization.

Pros: Real-time social monitoring and rich social insights.

Cons: Large amounts of data make it hard to master and prioritize what insights are important.

Price: Starts at $6000 per year.

18. Awario

Awario is a web monitoring tool that crawls 13 billion pages everyday to get important data about your audience. These insights include number of mentions, sentiment analysis, top influencers across different channels, and status/progress analytics.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Awario

It also offers a social media customer support service that lets you be there right when your customers need your help.

Providing you with an intelligent alert system, the tool lets you know as soon as an important conversation starts gaining traction.

This helps you prioritize customer support requests based on the impact they can have on your business.

Pros: Great for monitoring brand mentions and keeping track of online conversations. Possible to track unlinked brand mentions all over the web.

Cons: A steep learning curve.

Price: $29 — $299 USD per month.

19. ZoomSphere

ZoomSphere is an all in one social media management tool comprising a scheduler, workflow manager, social media analytics, reporting & benchmarking, Facebook leads manager, and mentions monitoring.

The tool provides over 150 different metrics related to all the major social networks — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn, and also provides you with competitor analysis so you can see how you rank compared to your competitors.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Zoomsphere

The tool allows you to collaborate with your team and set when and where to publish your social media posts.

Pros: Covers various social channels. Shows customer interaction history and helps you benchmark your performance.

Cons: The social listening feature doesn’t include sentiment analysis.

Price: Different pricing for each tool. Social Media Analytics costs $89 USD per month, Social Media & Web Monitoring – $149 USD per month. For more information on pricing, see https://www.zoomsphere.com/pricing..

20. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media monitoring tool, helping brands to better understand their audience and inform their social strategy with actionable insights.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprout Social

Their social dashboard feature gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like by showing basic analytics like total impressions, total engagements and total link clicks.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Sprout Social Dashboard

Sprout Social’s social listening feature gives you an overview of the keywords and hashtags your audience associate your brand or product with.

It also allows you to monitor sentiment and set up alerts for when critical conversations start gaining traction on social media.

Pros: Robust analytics. Allows you to respond to mentions/messages directly from the platform.

Cons: The standard licence doesn’t include the social listening feature.

Price: $99 — $249 USD per month.

Platform-Specific Tools

21. Followerwonk (Twitter)

FollowerWonk is a great social listening tool for brands that want to dig deeper into their Twitter audience data.

Followerwonk - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools

You can find out anything with this tool: from who your followers are, where they’re located and the times they mostly tweet – to the most relevant influencers in your industry or niche.

Their most used feature is the Twitter bio search. FollowerWonk provides you with Twitter profiles that are all valid, current and refreshed every 30 days.

Best of all? You’ll get all the info that interests you packed in amazing social graphs that allow you to immediately benchmark your Twitter performance and identify opportunities for improvement..

Pros: Allows you to analyze your presence & your competitors’ presence on Twitter. Helps you understand who your followers are, and enables you to find the most suitable influencers and estimate campaign reach, by providing you with information about how many of your influencers’ followers are active.

Cons: Supports only Twitter.

Price: Paid plans start at $29 USD per month.

22. Iconosquare (Instagram and Facebook)

Iconosquare is a social media management, analytics & scheduling platform for Facebook and Instagram.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Iconosquare

As most other social media management & listening tools, it gives you an overview of your stats and performance across Facebook and Instagram via a unified dashboard, helps you plan and moderate conversations across your different accounts, and enables you to schedule and publish content automatically without having to babysit your content promotion all the time.

Pros: Easy to use. Allows you to track certain feeds/hashtags and automate giveaway entries.

Cons: Works with Instagram only.

Price: Starts at $29 USD per month. Custom plans available.

23. Audiense Connect (Twitter)

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Audiense Connect

This is a tool from Audiense that provides you with detailed information about your Twitter audience. Audiense also provides a social insights platform.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Audiense Dashboard

From creating your own custom Twitter DM chatbots to tracking your performance on the platform, the Connect tool does a great job helping you understand your customers so you can give them the content they really want.

Pros: A good tool for companies that want to enhance their Twitter marketing through real-time audience insights.

Cons: The free plan comes with very limited features. It only supports Twitter and can get expensive compared to other platforms that support different social media platforms.

Price: Free plan available. Paid plans start at $79 USD per month.

24. Tailwind (Pinterest and Instagram)

Known as the number 1 Pinterest/Instagram social scheduling tool, apart from scheduling posts, Tailwind also allows you to discover content ideas, monitor conversations, amplify your reach, and analyze your performance on Pinterest and Instagram.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Tailwind

With Tailwind, you can discover content ideas, schedule posts, monitor conversations, amplify your reach, and analyze your performance on Pinterest and Instagram.

An interesting and unique feature is the Tailwind Tribes feature, which allows you to find and connect with like-minded people and content that helps you grow faster and “activate your community”.

You can also automatically optimize your posts to publish when your audience is most active on Pinterest and Instagram. More importantly, this tool provides rich analytics that help you monitor conversations and analyze your performance on Pinterest and Instagram.

Pros: Simple, user friendly interface. Low learning curve.

Cons: Platform-specific. The Instagram tool is still not as developed as the one for Pinterest.

Price: $9.99 USD per month per platform.

25. Union Metrics (Twitter)

Union Metrics is a social intelligence tool for Twitter that gives you insight into trending conversations, brand mentions, campaign performance, competitor data, and historical data to inform your decision-making.

Keyhole-Top-25-Social-Media-Monitoring-Tools-Union-Metrics

Union Metrics offer a couple of free tools, including the Twitter Snapshot, which allows you to generate quick reports on recent Twitter activity related to a topic/keyword of your interest. You’ll be able to measure the potential reach and impressions to gauge the virality of your posts.

Keyhole - Top 25 Social Media Monitoring Tools - Audiense Dashboard for Twitter

Used by over 300,000 marketers, the software helps you monitor posts about your product, brand or industry in real time so you’re getting the full gist of relevant stories as they unfold.

Pros: Clean, clear reports. Very easy to find top hashtags and contributors.

Cons: Doesn’t integrate with many platforms – it supports only Twitter.

Price: Starts at $49 USD per month.

The Final Verdict

With so many social media platforms available, it can be a nearly impossible task for marketers to measure their brand performance, without the help of third party tools that simplify social media management & listening.

Thankfully, there are a number of social media monitoring tools that automate the collection and analytics of audience insights and campaign performance, allowing you to keep track of trending topics, ongoing conversations, and respond to negative sentiment in a timely manner, before things get out of hand.

This list gives you the 25 best social media monitoring tools out there – all you need to do is pick the one that suits your marketing needs and budget.

Measuring Social Media ROI: Calculate Actionable Insights for Your Business

July 28, 2020 by Keyhole

Measuring social media ROI is crucial to proving that your social media marketing efforts are paying off.

As a marketer, demonstrating that your social media strategies are generating positive results is necessary to be able to safely secure your social media budget or earn a contract renewal.

And if you’re not seeing a positive ROI, that’s a hint to you that you should shift your social content strategy.

In this blog, we’ll cover the ins and outs of calculating social media ROI, including social analytics tools that will make your life easier.

Jump Links:

What is ROI (Return on Investment)?
What is Social Media ROI?

Why You Should Calculate Social Media ROI: 6 Benefits
How to Calculate Social Media ROI
1. Align Social Media Goals with Business Objectives
2. Set Quantifiable Targets for Each Goal
3. Identify the Relevant “Return” Metrics
4. Calculate Your Social Media Costs
5. Calculate Your Social Media ROI
6. How to Report on Social Media ROI

What is ROI (Return on Investment)?

ROI stands for Return On Investment.

ROI is a ratio of the net profitability or loss of an investment relative to the cost and effort put into it.

In simpler terms, it’s how much revenue you gained relative to your costs. The goal is to find the investment with the highest ROI.

The basic ROI formula is:

ROI = Net Return on Investment / Cost of Investment X 100%

Or, formulated in another way:
ROI = (Revenue – Costs) / Costs X 100%

Let’s go over a quick example:

Imagine you run a lemonade stand and you earn $30 of revenue in one hour. It cost you $20 for the ingredients and an hour of labor.

Plugging that into the formula:

ROI = (Revenue – Costs) / Costs X 100%

ROI = ($30 – $20) / $20 X 100%

= $10 / $20 X 100%

= 50%

In our example, we’ve earned an ROI of 50%. This means for every $1.00 we spend, we earn a profit of $0.50.

Compare that to a bake sale, where our revenue is $50 but our costs were $40. In that case, our $10 profit meant an ROI of only 25%, so were better off selling lemonade!

For more sophisticated ROI calculations, check out Investopedia’s ROI guide.

What is Social Media ROI?

ROI seems like a simple enough concept. How do we translate it into social media terms?

Social media ROI is the benefit you gain from a social media strategy relative to the costs of that strategy.

But when it comes to social media ROI, it isn’t as easy as calculating dollars in and dollars out.

There are some cases where calculating social media ROI is cut and dry. For example, for paid social media ad campaigns, you can track revenue from eCommerce sales relative to your ad spend and the cost of creating the ads.

But most cases are more nuanced.

How do you calculate the revenue earned from gaining a new Instagram follower? Or 100,000 views of your latest viral video? Not every social media action you take will be directly attributable to revenue.

That said, we can’t give up completely on calculating social media ROI, because we still have to compare the value of one strategy against another.

Therefore, we need a slightly looser definition of social media ROI that allows us to take longer-term or more indirect benefits into account.

That’s why we’ll use the slightly modified social media ROI formula:

Social media ROI = (Social media returns – Social media costs) /
Social media costs X 100%

For this formula, we’ll use success metrics other than revenue to calculate social media ROI.

The key is to choose metrics that align with your greater business goals like reach, engagement, followers, clicks, downloads, or newsletter sign-ups, and then compare them to your costs, like labor, training, tool subscriptions, or advertising budgets.

We’ll return to more detailed calculations and comparisons below.

Why You Should Calculate Social Media ROI: 6 Benefits

There are an infinite number of social media marketing strategies you could adopt.

Your goal as a marketer is to identify the strategies and tactics that will have the most gains relative to their cost.

And as much as you can manage it, those strategies should be backed by data.

By taking the time to think through how you’re going to measure ROI, how you’re going to track it as you go, and then how you’re going to report on it, you’ll be much better equipped to develop powerful social media strategies.

By calculating and tracking social media ROI, you will:

Plan more thorough strategies
More easily convince stakeholders of the value of your strategy
Show a measurable impact of your actions
Show that you’re conscious of costs and returns
Identify which strategies provide the most value
More easily identify when a strategy isn’t working

How to Calculate Social Media ROI

Here are the steps you need to take to measure your social media ROI.

1. Align Social Media Goals with Business Objectives

Admit it.

You’ve run a social media campaign before with your only goal being “growing awareness.”

It’s okay, we all have.

That may have been enough back when there were two or three viable social media platforms, or only a few tactics you could realistically take.

But now, there are so many platforms to deliver our message, so many different formats to communicate with our audience, and so many tools to track and measure our performance.

While this allows for greater potential and more creativity, it also necessitates clearer planning and goal setting.

It’s more crucial than ever before that you align your social media goals with your business goals.

Your business goals likely fall into categories like:

Grow brand awareness
Improve customer perception
Improve the customer experience
Grow revenue
Generate leads or win new customers
Retain more customers

Sit down with leadership and identify the goals that matter most.

2. Set Quantifiable Targets for Each Goal

Then, set specific, measurable targets for each goal.

At this stage, the goals may not even be tied to social media. What we’re doing at this stage is creating targets that we will eventually use to build our social media strategy and calculate ROI.

For example, if your objective is growing brand awareness, you could set goals like:

Grow social media followers by 10% within 6 months
Increase social share of voice by 20% by next year
Increase organic searches of our brand by 15% by next quarter

Or if your goal is generating more leads, your goals could be:

50 eBook downloads per month
20 new newsletter subscriptions per month
10 service inquiries per month

Or if your goal is improving the customer experience, your goals may be:

Improve customer satisfaction scores by 10%
Reduce average response time to 11 minutes
Improve customer sentiment by 5%

The key is to create goals that relate directly to your business goals that can then be leveraged to not only educate your social strategy, but also evaluate your strategy.

3. Identify the Relevant “Return” Metrics

At this step, we identify the business and social media metrics that are most closely correlated with our goals, or may lead to us achieving our goals.

If your goal is brand awareness or lead generation, you should track visibility metrics like:

Reach
Impressions
Followers

If you’re evaluating what type of content resonates most with your audience, you would interested in engagement metrics like:

Average engagement
Average engagement rate

If your target customer is a certain demographic, you may measure audience metrics like:

Countries
Languages
Gender
Keywords
Devices

You should of course also include business-related metrics like:

Social media conversions
Website traffic
Leads generated
Form submissions and sign-ups
eCommerce purchases
Revenue generated
Customer service ratings
Online reviews

Once you’ve listed out the metrics you want to track, you should re-evaluate them against your business goals and measurable objectives.

Make sure they are truly a measure of success that makes decision-making easier, and not just another data point. Sometimes, less is more.

For example, if your goal is lead generation and your campaign creates tons of reach and engagement, but no leads, would you still consider that a success? Perhaps reach and engagement aren’t worth tracking in that case. However, they may be a clue as to which content is best-suited for your audience.

Make sure you choose metrics that you do have the capacity of tracking and reporting on and actually integrating into your day-to-day or week-to-week workflow.

4. Calculate Your Social Media Costs

Cost is an often overlooked aspect of a social media campaign, but a key variable in the social media ROI equation.

Some of these expenses may be shared across campaigns, so be sure to allocate the relevant portion of the cost to your campaign.

Your potential social media costs may include:

Internal Employee Time

This is the most hidden cost of social media.

Research, planning, meeting, creating, publishing, reviewing—all of these steps take an enormous amount of time.

In some cases, an imperfect social strategy that takes half as much time to execute may end up providing more ROI than a perfectly polished campaign.

You should estimate and track the amount of time spent by each team member and associate that time with a cost.

And don’t forget to take individual hourly wages or salaries into account. You may be able to improve ROI by offloading tasks to freelancers or lower-cost employees.

Content Creation

Most social campaigns will require videos, blog posts, graphics, and copywriting for the actual posts.

Some of this cost will be accounted for in your internal employee time, but you may have also hired freelance writers, videographers, or graphic designers to create that content.

Tools, Software, and Platforms

If you’re investing heavily in social media and content creation, you likely have several tools or software subscriptions to make your life easier.

This may include:

Ad Spend

Most social media campaigns will include budgeting for boosting posts or running social ads. This cost should also be accounted for.

5. Calculate Your Social Media ROI

Now that you have your success metrics and your cost metrics, you’re ready to calculate your social media ROI.

But because your investments and returns aren’t all in dollars, it won’t be as easy as punching numbers into an equation.

However, you can still use a rough ROI calculating in your planning and reporting stages.

When planning, predict your returns based on the metrics you identified and evaluate them against the costs. How does this line up compared with other potential strategies?

In the reporting phase, lay out all of the actual gains relative to your costs. In most cases, the relative ROI will become clear.

6. How to Report on Social Media ROI

Now that you’ve chosen which metrics and costs you’re going to track, it’s time to track and report on them on a regular basis.

Keep in mind that you may have several audiences here. You may be reporting to your marketing team, decision-makers in your organization, or a client.

Here are a few recommended best practices when reporting social media ROI:

Include Business Objectives

At the beginning of your reports, include the key business objectives that you’re working towards.

This way, everyone will be on the same page when digesting the data included in your report.

Keep it Simple

Don’t overwhelm yourself or your audience with data or marketing jargon. Use simple language and report only on the key metrics that relate most closely to business goals.

Keep it Consistent

Choose a reporting period and keep it consistent. For example, present a report every two weeks, or on the first of each month.

This way, you and your audience will develop a comfortable cadence and become more comfortable discussing the results.

Understand and Communicate “The Why”

Data for the sake of data doesn’t help anyone make smarter decisions. When creating reports, make sure you can explain the why behind every data point, and back up why it was included.

Use Industry Benchmarking and Third Party Data

Some metrics will be fairly meaningless on their own, without some type of comparison or baseline.

By using benchmarking data or third-party research, you’ll be able to provide more context for your audience.

Automate Your Reporting

Your reports will only be useful if they are convenient. Make sure there isn’t a huge manual effort involved in pulling in the data from lots of different sources.

That will allow you to check your metrics as often as you need to.

Use a Social Media Analytics Tool

A social media tool like Keyhole can simplify your social media ROI tracking and reporting.

It keeps all your data on one easy-to-read dashboard and allows you to link in data from all your social platforms.

For more analytics reporting tips, check out Analytics Reporting for Marketers.

Start Tracking Your Social Media ROI

You now have all the necessary pieces to complete your social media ROI puzzle!

While tracking ROI isn’t always simple, knowing the impact of your choices will help you better advocate for your social media efforts.

To start tracking and reporting your social media ROI, start a free Keyhole trial today.

Related Articles:

How Do I Calculate ROI of an Influencer Marketing Campaign?

How Do I Calculate Social Media ROI?

How NBC Sports’ Nick Casanova made American Century Golf Championship a Success with a Master Stroke

July 27, 2020July 23, 2020 by Keyhole

Nick Casanova – the Director of Programming, Planning, and Scheduling at NBC Sports – was tasked to track the social performance of his company’s annual event despite little experience; using Keyhole, Nick found success across multiple KPIs

NBC Sports is part of NBCUniversal, a household name in the world of entertainment, broadcasting and production marketing. Headquartered in Manhattan, NBCUniversal runs a vast entertainment and news television network and has also established various internet-based businesses and world-renowned theme parks.

What is the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship Tournament?

The American Century Championship takes place every July at Edgewood Tahoe Golf Course in Lake Tahoe. Big time celebrities like Stephen Curry, Michael Jordan & Justin Timberlake have teed it up at the event in the past.

Less Support and More Responsibility

The NBC Sports programming and scheduling team was put in charge of managing the American Century Golf Tournament, in addition to their daily tasks.

“This event takes place during a busy part of our year, as a result, people are asked to assume tasks that may not be in their day to day job description. Over the years, American Century, our title sponsor, was outsourcing a group to track all the social buzz around the event. In 2017, they asked if we would be able to bring the job in house.”

With other departments tied up, the responsibilities piled up and the programming team was forced to track hashtags and keywords for them despite not having the proper experience or background.

Manually Tracking Hashtags and Keywords – A Difficult Task

“So, we had our interns just following the hashtag and trying to see what the chatter around the event was like. And we mostly focused on what we were getting from our handles,” said Nick.

The manual tracking of hashtags and keywords is a tedious and obsolete process. But, this wasn’t the only challenge NBCUniversal was faced with while tracking and tracing details to share with their main sponsor, American Century.

Tracking down thousands of impressions and hundreds of keywords was one thing, but analyzing the data to take away tangible, actionable insights was an even bigger challenge.

Not long after, Nick and his team realized that they wouldn’t be able to offer any in-depth social analytics or social media insights to their sponsors if they continued manually tracking everything.

“This raw and unstructured data wasn’t that handy to impress. This half-cooked bacon needed that final touch to become well-structured and easy to analyze.”

And that’s where Keyhole came in.

A Social Media Analytics Tool Tracking Hashtags and Keywords

NBCUniversal provides seminars that their employees can attend to learn about things outside of their business. It was in one of these seminars that Nick was first introduced to the digital world of Keyhole.

Nick wasn’t satisfied with the insights coming from manually tracking the conversation on social media. Keyhole’s advanced functionality and easy-to-use interface was the ultimate answer to his prayers.

One Quick and Easy Solution: Keyhole

Nick and his team got a powerful social media analytics tool in the shape of Keyhole.

This also helped the team discover what influencers and celebrities were already talking about the event.

“We didn’t just use it for the keyword impressions we usually have. We were tracking our handle, tracking the hashtags, and then, any other generic keyword that could be related to the event.”

Keyhole was a one stop shop for all of their pain points, addressing account tracking and hashtag tracking in one easy dashboard.

Establishing a Brand Name and proving ROI to Chief Sponsor

For some time, the American Century Celebrity Golf Championship, was just being referred to as a ‘Celebrity Golf’ event – completely overlooking the chief sponsor of the event, American Century.

“We’ve seen almost a 50% drop in people talking about the event just as ‘Celebrity Golf’, and they are more using the actual event name.”

Now, Nick can confidently tell their sponsors that NBCUniversal has increased impressions for the event while also decreasing the number of people who are talking about the event generically.

Proving ROI and showing that the event has been beneficial for American Century.

Reflecting on Keyhole and the results he achieved, Nick said: “The tool is super easy to use, and it just made our lives easier. I think what we’ve been able to provide to American Century is more reliable than what we were doing manually. With Keyhole, we have credible numbers that we’re able to share and create stories to help us strengthen the relationship that we have with them. And hopefully, extend our partnership with them way into the future.”

Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword and hashtag analytics for Twitter and Instagram. Get started for free and search your brand.

Top 29 Social Listening Tools for Marketers in 2020

July 22, 2020July 9, 2020 by Keyhole

List of the top social listening tools available to marketers in 2020.

There are tons of social listening tools out there and it’s hard to choose the one that’s right for your company.

If you’re looking for a social media listening tool in particular—one that can track what people are saying about your brand—then you’ve come to the right place.

To make your search for the right social listening tool easier, we’ve compiled a huge list of the best tools in the industry, including research on the pros and cons of each tool.

Here’s a full roundup of the top social listening tools for marketers and agencies, updated for 2020:

Looking for a specific tool? Jump ahead:

1. Keyhole
2. Hootsuite
3. HubSpot
4. Union Metrics
5. BuzzSumo
6. Sprout Social
7. Mention
8. Brand24
9. YouScan
10. Agorapulse
11. Brandwatch
12. BrandMentions
13. Meltwater
14. Sprinklr
15. TalkWalker
16. Mentionlytics
17. Digimind
18. Zoho
19. Falcon.io
20. Iconosquare
21. Awario
22. Nuvi
23. Sendible
24. Reputation.com
25. Socialbakers
26. Oktopost
27. Statusbrew
28. Sentione
29. Mediatoolkit

1. Keyhole

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Keyhole

Keyhole helps marketers measure the impacts of their marketing campaigns. Keyhole offers campaign monitoring, influencer tracking, brand mention monitoring, and powerful competitor research tools that make it easy to benchmark your campaigns against your competitors’.

Keyhole offers social media listening and analytics for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other online media sources all in one easy to use dashboard.

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Keyhole Social Media AnalyticsDashboard

Take it from Neil Patel: “This tool [Keyhole] does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”

You can also use Keyhole to conduct social listening and identify which online accounts or influencers are talking about you or your brand.

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Keyhole - Best Social Listening Tool

Using social listening, you can conduct in-depth sentiment analysis and understand how your audience feels about your brand, certain features, or if there’s anything noteworthy.

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Keyhole - Sentiment Analysis

Pro: Keyhole has an attractive, real-time analytics and mentions dashboard that can easily be exported to client-ready PDFs.

Pricing: Starts at $30 USD per month after a free trial. You can view all Keyhole pricing plans here.

2. Hootsuite

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the longest-standing and most popular social media management platforms. While it’s best-known for its social media publishing features, it does possess a suite of social listening features, branded as Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch.

Hootsuite has useful features to help you track brand mentions, identify thought leaders and influencers, and track brand sentiment.

Pro: Hootsuite has a robust set of end-to-end features for pretty much anything you would ever want to do on social media, from publishing, to advertising, to tracking.

Con: Hootsuite’s big feature set comes with a big price tag, and the social listening features are only available for their Business and Enterprise-level plans.

Pricing: Hootsuite’s social listening features are a paid add-on to their Business and Enterprise plans, starting at $599 USD.

3. HubSpot

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Hubspot

HubSpot is an all-in-one stack of marketing, sales, and service tools. HubSpot offers everything from a CRM, to a CMS, to a customer service platform.

As part of their marketing stack, HubSpot offers social media monitoring to create custom keyword monitoring streams, email alerts to track mentions, and analytics tools to compare performance across social channels.

Pro: If you prefer all of your tools in one place, HubSpot has nearly every marketing tool you could ever need.

Con: Because HubSpot does so many things, their social listening features aren’t as deep as some of the other tools on our list, and the

Pricing: HubSpot’s social listening features are included in their Professional and Enterprise plans, starting at $800 USD per month.

4. Union Metrics

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Union Metrics

Union Metrics is a social media analytics tool that offers social media metrics, keyword listening, campaign reporting, and competitive analysis.

Union Metrics offers standard listening features like real-time mention monitoring, sentiment analysis, and insights like best times to post.

Pro: Union Metrics has many easy-to-use analytics dashboards.

Con: Union Metrics’ more advanced social listening features like sentiment analysis aren’t unlocked until their top pricing tier.

Pricing: Union Metrics starts at $39 USD per month if paid annually.

5. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a popular content discovery tool, allowing marketers to track content that’s trending for certain topics or keywords.

Although not exactly a social listening tool in the sense of some of the other tools on our list, with BuzzSumo, you can track competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates.

Pro: BuzzSumo is extremely useful for tracking trending content and influencers.

Con: BuzzSumo doesn’t offer as much when it comes to tracking your social media accounts.

Pricing: BuzzSumo starts at $79 USD per month when paying yearly.

6. Sprout Social

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a full social media management platform, allowing you to track engagement, manage your publishing schedule, measure analytics, and perform social listening.

Sprout Social has tons of useful social listening features like audience demographic analysis, customer sentiment tracking, influencer identification, campaign analysis, and competitor comparisons.

Pro: Sprout Social offers an all-in-one social inbox to track Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn in one place.

Con: The Standard pricing tier has limited social listening features.

Pricing: Sprout Social pricing starts at $99 USD per user per month.

7. Mention

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Mention

As the name suggests, Mention lets you track all of your brand mentions online. Mention offers a variety of social listening and publishing tools to monitor online media, analyze your competition, and manage your brand.

Mention offers real-time mention tracking and detailed analytics on your industry competitors.

Pro: Mention provides daily recap emails with key info as well as alert emails when your mentions suddenly spike.

Con: Their pricing model limits the number of mentions you can track per month.

Pricing: Mention has a free model for up to 250 mentions. Their paid plans start at $25 USD per month.

8. Brand24

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Brand24

Brand24 offers brand mention tracking across social platforms, news sites and blogs, video sites, review platforms, and more.

Brand24 features include a mentions feed, a discussion volume chart, marketing analytics, influence score, sentiment analysis, alerts, and reporting features.

Pro: Brand24 has some extra bonuses like a Slack integration and a mobile app.

Con: Online reviews mention a sometimes-challenging user interface and a thinner feature set than similarly priced tools.

Pricing: Brand24 pricing starts at $49 USD per month.

9. YouScan

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Youscan

YouScan is another social media listening tool that offers monitoring of social media, blogs, forums, reviews, and other online media.

YouScan offers some unique AI-powered listening features like logo recognition and object and scene detection to help brands track pictures as well as brand mentions.

Pro: YouScan’s Visual Insights feature is a game-changer for brands that want to track when their products appear in a post.

Con: YouScan has a huge price tag, so it’s cost-prohibitive unless you’re a major global brand.

Pricing: YouScan pricing starts at $12,000 USD per year.

10. Agorapulse

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another full social media management platform, comparable to Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer.

On top of publishing and analytics tools, Agorapulse offers basic social media listening features like brand mention monitoring on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Pro: Agorapulse offers some unique collaboration features like the ability to label important posts or assign a post to a teammate.

Con: Because Agorapulse is a full social media management tool, its social media listening tracking features aren’t as robust as some of the dedicated tools.

Pricing: Agorapulse pricing starts at $79 USD per month when paid annually.

11. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is an AI-powered social media listening tool. It’s a well-established tool that allows you to benchmark competitors, track audience sentiment and demographics, and uncover influencers.

Brandwatch also offers many new listening features like image analysis, historical data, trending topic identification, and entity tagging to train AI.

Pro: Brandwatch always has some of the most innovative features in the social media monitoring space.

Con: Brandwatch is one of the priciest tools on the market.

Pricing: Brandwatch does not make its pricing available on its website, but according to PCMag, Brandwatch pricing starts at $1,000 USD per month.

12. BrandMentions

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Brandmentions

BrandMentions is another social media monitoring tool that offers standard features like brand monitoring, competitor tracking, sentiment analysis, and reputation management.

Pro: BrandMention also allows you to integrate website traffic monitoring into your analytics reports.

Con: In online reviews, some users report difficulty filtering down a large number of social media mentions.

Pricing: BrandMentions starts at $49 USD per month.

13. Meltwater

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Meltwater

Meltwater is a full marketing and social media suite offering social media monitoring, online media monitoring, social engagement reports, influencer management, newswire distribution, media relations tools, and more.

They allow social media monitoring for 15 different social networks, and offer tracking through a mobile app.

Pro: Meltwater is a powerful PR tool and offers a robust media database.

Con: Meltwater constantly adds new features, but they often require add-on pricing and can be overwhelming for users, according to online reviews.

Pricing: Meltwater doesn’t post pricing publicly, but according to Prowly, pricing starts at $4,000 USD per year.

14. Sprinklr

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management (CXM) platform. Sprinklr is quite different than many of the other tools on our list, as its bread and butter is allowing you to engage with customers and monitor their experience with your product or service.

That said, as part of its offering, Sprinklr allows you to perform audience profiling, identify influencers, benchmark against competitors, and measure custom metrics.

Pro: Sprinklr allows you to unify your customer experience management with your marketing activities.

Con: Sprinklr is an enterprise platform that isn’t suitable for small and medium businesses.

Pricing: Sprinklr does not make its pricing available online, but its pricing is reportedly modular based on which features you add.

15. TalkWalker

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Talkwalker

TalkWalker is primarily a social media listening tool, with standard features like mention tracking, report creation, and automated alerts.

TalkWalker also has more advanced features like brand image detection, a Virality Map, and other AI-powered features.

Pro: On top of standard social media and online mention tracking, Talkwalker also allows you to monitor TV and radio content.

Con: TalkWalker’s pricing is catered only to larger businesses.

Pricing: TalkWalker pricing starts at $9,600 USD per year.

16. Mentionlytics

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a fairly standard social media monitoring tool for business of all sizes. They also offer social intelligence and publishing tools.

Mentionlytics allows you to track mentions on social media, online news, and other online platforms. It also allows you to reply to tweets or posts in real-time. You can also monitor keywords and competitors to identify sales opportunities.

Pro: Mentionlytics has AI-powered features to help you identify fans, ambassadors, and even trolls.

Con: Users have reported an outdated UI design, but as of 2020 they have a new beta design in the works.

Pricing: Mentionlytics pricing starts at $39 USD per month.

17. Digimind

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Digimind

Digimind is a social intelligence tool offering solutions for brand reputation, competitive intelligence, consumer insights, influencer identification, trend tracking, and marketing campaign analysis.

Digimind’s social listening tools include geolocalization, automatic sentiment and translation, topic clustering, and “marked as read” capabilities.

Pro: Digimind’s Top Reputation module allow you to track what people are searching for when they research your brand.

Con: According to online reviews, the tool can be quite cumbersome for beginners.

Pricing: Digimind does not make its pricing publicly available. Contact to discuss.

18. Zoho

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Soho

Zoho is a cloud software suite with many SaaS applications for businesses. On top of social tools, they offer a CRM, email and document platforms, and financial tools.

Zoho’s social tools include publishing, monitoring, and reporting. Their listening tools allow you to monitor brand mentions in real time.

Pro: Zoho allows you to create your own monitoring dashboard.

Con: As Zoho isn’t a social platform at its core, the tool is fairly limited in features outside of mention tracking.

Pricing: Zoho’s pricing starts at $10 USD per month.

19. Falcon.io

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Falcon.io

Falcon.io is a full social media platform that allows you to publish content, create ad campaigns, engage with your audience, and monitor the web for insights.

Falcon.io’s social listening tools include trend tacking, sentiment analysis, audience demographics, and influencer identification.

Pro: Falcon.io has a custom audience tool that allows you to create an audience based on the profiles detected through your social listening campaigns.

Con: According to user reviews, there are no export capabilities for reports.

Pricing: Falcon.io starts at $129 USD per month.

20. Iconosquare

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Iconosquare

Iconosquare is an Instagram analytics, management, and scheduling platform for brands and agencies.

Iconosquare is one of the most powerful Instagram analytics tools, offering competitor analytics, hashtag analytics, promoted posts analytics, industry benchmarking, conversation tracking, scheduling, Excel and PDF reports, custom dashboard, and more.

Pro: Iconosquare offers some unique Instagram features, like tracking of individual comments, photo tags, and mentions and tracking of content types like photos, videos, and carousel images.

Con: Iconosquare only allows tracking for Instagram and Facebook, unlike most of the other tools on this list.

Pricing: Iconosquare starts at $29 USD per month.

21. Awario

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Awario

Awario is another popular brand monitoring tool. Awario tracks brand mentions and keywords in real time and offers additional features like sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, boolean search, white label reporting, and email alerts.

Pro: Awario has a social selling feature that tracks competitor complaints or recommendations for your product category, allowing you to identify leads on the fly.

Con: The abundance of information in Awario gives it a steep learning curve compared to its competitors.

Pricing: Awario starts at $29 USD ($49 CAD) per month.

22. Nuvi

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Nuvi

Nuvi is a customer experience and reputation management tool that includes social media publishing and listening tools.

Nuvi’s listening capabilities include keyword monitoring, influencer analytics, sentiment analysis, audience insights, and automated reporting.

Pro: Nuvi’s robust platform also includes content planning, publishing, creation, and collaboration tools.

Con: As social listening isn’t Nuvi’s main feature, it doesn’t offer much beyond the basics.

Pricing: Nuvi does not make its pricing publicly available online. Contact for pricing.

23. Sendible

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Sendible

Sendible is a social media management and tracking tool that includes features for planning, collaboration, engagement, and analytics.

Sendible’s listening capabilities include mention alerts and hashtag and keyword monitoring.

Pro: Sendible monitors Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Con: Sendible has a wide feature set, but its listening capabilities are fairly shallow.

Pricing: Sendible starts at $16 USD per month when paying yearly,

24. Reputation.com

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Reputation

As its name suggests, Reputation.com is a complete reputation management tool. Its capabilities include online review monitoring, business listing management, directory management, surveys, and social tools.

Their social listening tool includes mention tracking and sentiment analysis.

Pro: Reputation.com has a huge suite of reputation management tools.

Con: Reputation.com is less useful for those looking for social media insights.

Pricing: Reputation.com does not publish its pricing online.

25. Socialbakers

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Socialbakers

Socialbakers is a unified social media marketing platform that includes research and content strategy tools, social media management, measurement and reporting, customer care, influencer marketing, and listening tools.

Their social listening tool is powered by AI that automatically labels posts to help you spot trends. They also offer sentiment analysis and mention tracking across multiple channels.

Pro: Socialbakers offers helpful collaboration and approval flow capabilities.

Con: Socialbakers’ rich feature set comes with a rich price tag.

Pricing: Socialbakers starts at $200 USD per month when paid annually.

26. Oktopost

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Oktopost

Oktopost brands itself as the social media management platform for B2B enterprise. It features tools for social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions.

Oktopost’s social media listening tools include keyword, mention, and competitor tracking, primarily aimed at customer support.

Pro: Oktopost offers the unique ability to amplify your social posts through your employees’ social accounts.

Con: Oktopost is more focused on B2B promotion than social listening.

Pricing: Oktopost does not publish its pricing online.

27. Statusbrew

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a tool for social media management, marketing, monitoring, and customer care.

Statusbrew provides live mention and conversation tracking, advanced keyword queries, sentiment analysis, lead profile building.

Pro: Statusbrew integrates with Google Drive, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Dynamics 365, and other popular tools.

Con: Statusbrew is comparably more expensive than some of the similar listening tools on our list.

Pricing: Statusbrew starts at $99 USD per month when billed annually.

28. Sentione

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Sentione

Sentione is an AI-based social listening and conversational bot tool. Sentione provides tools for online data analytics, chatbots, voicebots, and other automation-powered customer service tools.

Sentione’s social listening capabilities include audience insights, comparative research, automated alerts, and AI-based anomaly detection.

Pro: Sentione’s social listening tool allows for unlimited keyword tracking.

Con: Sentione is quite a bit pricier than other listening tools.

Pricing: Sentione’s basic social listening plan starts at $299 USD per month.

29. Mediatoolkit

Social Media Tools - Social Listening Tools - Mediatoolkit

Mediatoolkit is our final brand monitoring tool. Mediatoolkit provides website and social media monitoring on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, forums, blogs, and review platforms like TripAdvisor.

Mediatoolkit offers deep search capabilities, including location and language filters. They also offer sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, and custom PDF reports.

Pro: Mediatoolkit offers mobile and Slack notifications.

Con: For a tool that only provides social tracking, its pricing is quite high.

Pricing: Mediatoolkit starts at $117 USD per month.

Start your Social Listening Analytics Journey

If you’ve made it this far, you’re either the world’s biggest fan of social listening tool, or like to weigh all your options before selecting a social listening tool.

To get insights about your brand within minutes, we recommend our social listening tool: Keyhole. Start your free trial now!

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