As you already know, social listening is one of the most important processes related to the building and maintaining of your NFPs online image. However, knowing that you should check carefully the social media for mentions of your brand and actually doing it are two very different things. Of course, you no-one could ever be able to follow all the social media platforms and check all the updates on them even if they had a team of a thousand people working on this. That’s why the use of Social Media Tools is essential and, fortunately, there are many of them out there, waiting to be tried. Below are some that you may find useful.

Social Listening for Twitter

It is a truth generally acknowledged that Twitter is one of the best and most preferred platforms for business aims. Perhaps that’s the reason why there are so many social listening tools devoted specifically to it. One of the best is TweetReach, popular for its simple and practical design and functioning.  You just determine what you want to follow, TweetReach checks Twitter for you and gives you a report with the results. With its help you will be able to monitor the performance of your tweets and how they ‘travel’ around the platform. Subscription is paid with 5 plans available, ranging from $84/month to $899/month.

A similar social listening tool is Twazzup.  Again concerned solely with Twitter, it will help you track whatever you want by giving you real time updates! You will constantly see an updated list of the top influencers, retweets (retweeted photos) and most popular keywords related to your search.

Another Twitter Tool to consider is Klout. This gem, although not widely appreciated, does more than checking out how your tweets are doing – it also helps you tweet the right stuff. Klout suggests you content that you could share – such that has not yet been seen by your followers and would interest them – and afterwards checks out how it performs.

Universal Social Listening Tools

However important Twitter is, it is not everything. There are a lot more Social Media platforms to be listened to, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube etc. Fortunately, there are tools that will help you following all of them at once. One of them is IceRocket, which follows numerous blogs, as well as Twitter and Facebook. What is more, it follows them not only in English, but in about 20 more languages. The results are presented with the help of clear neat graphs and you have a lot of options to select from, including when to monitor and when not.

Similar service is offered by Hootsuite, with the difference that the latter is free to use. It will help you monitor Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, as well as Google+, WordPress and various other social platforms. You get the results weekly and have the option to organize a team of Social Media Managers, who can be responsible for different networks.

Speaking of universal social listening tools, you can also try HowSociable. As the name suggests, you will see the sociability of your brand in 36 social media platforms (12 of them for free, the rest 24, including Facebook and Twitter, are available through the Pro account). With HowSociable, you get the opportunity to see how your brand performs in the social websites separately, as each of them gets a score based on your performance in it.

Multimedia Social Listening

Finally, here is a very useful social listening tool that will help you keep a track on the images and videos shared on the web and its relation to your brand. With 10Alike (formerly known as Reachli or Pinerli), you will not only see various multimedia, but will get different optimisation options for your relevant content. There are many useful features that will help you take the most out of websites like Pinterest.

In other words, the social listening tools are out there and waiting>  Make sure you try a few of them right away. Some of them are free, others are paid because of the more specific functions they have, but all of them are tried, proven and sure to help you improve your online image and spread the word about your brand more effectively. Good luck!