Top Free Social Media Research Tools For Better Reach

The digital marketing industry is incredibly competitive and over-saturated. Establishing an online presence is difficult. Standing out is even more challenging. Social media research tools are an essential part of any marketer’s toolkit.

Social media research plays a vital role in any marketing campaign. It gives marketers insight, allowing them to understand their target audience and how their brand is perceived online.

Before we delve further into the subject, we must understand a few simple concepts from the short refresher below.

What is Social Media Research?

Social media research involves studying a social media site to uncover how your audience responds to varying topics, trends, content, etc.  Determining popular trends helps marketers identify their campaigns’ and brand’s potential strengths and weaknesses.

Social media sites are treasure troves of data because of their mass adoption. According to this 2021 report, over 4.2 billion people use social media platforms worldwide. The sheer amount of data collected from these accounts will yield valuable information on your target community.

How Does it Affect Your Business?

Social media research aids businesses by providing relevant metrics about how potential customers view their products and services. Social media researchers collect, analyze, and present data from various sources, including social networks. 

Proper market analysis will allow you to target the right audience for your campaign. Targeted marketing efforts usually yield better conversion rates. According to this 2019 study, targeted marketing ensures that your audience receives only relevant information.

Social media researchers help firms formulate a powerful marketing strategy and PR campaign. In addition, social media researchers identify the ideal customer profiles, price parameters, and demographic information.

Despite the many benefits social media research tools can give, their paid options often come at a hefty price.

It means that smaller businesses may not have the resources to implement these advanced measures in their analysis. Fortunately, there are a plethora of free tools that offer the same functionality. 

Top Free Social Media Research Tools to Use.

These five free social media research tools can help you and your team identify customer sentiment and engagement. They are available for free. Users also have the option to pay for additional features if they like what the base version provides.

TweetDeck

TweetDeck provides users with a customized Twitter interface that monitors different users, hashtags, keywords, and lists. It also allows users to view content from various groups such as customers, employees, or competitors.

TweetDeck is an excellent tool during live events and tweet storms. It helps users keep up with live conversations while keeping track of their brand’s notifications and mentions.

Social Mention

Social Mention is a software that searches through blogs and news articles to see mentions of a keyword or phrase. It provides insight into the most popular trends and can be used to gather data on what the world says about your brand. 

Boardreader

Boardreader crawls message boards and discussion forums to monitor what the internet says about your brand in the comment sections. 

The insights found in comment sections are valuable because they grant analysts access to the unblemished truth of how a brand is perceived. The language used in comment sections tends to be strong and unapologetic. So, be sure you’re emotionally ready before you look into a comments page. 

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media research tool that integrates with multiple platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 

It also compares which marketing efforts significantly impact each social media website, thus improving how you target your ads and engage your audience.

BuzzSumo

The main feature of BuzzSumo is its ability to check the number of links your domain and content receive via backlinks. By monitoring backlinks, businesses can determine the type of content that performs best on different networks.

This feature will help them identify the type of content they will want to publish again. It also shares insight into the kind of web pages they need to create.

Don’t Forget Native Analytics Tools.

Any analyst worth his salt should never overlook the native analytics tools of each social media platform. Google Analytics and others are pretty decent, but they cannot correctly track the performance of each individual’s account. 

With native tools, you will know what is working and what is not to enable you to fine-tune your approach. Whether a beginning marketer or an expert, you must learn to use native analytics tools for accurate social media measurement.

Takeaway

Market analysis is always daunting, but some tools can make specific tasks easy. While other options are available, these free tools provide most of what analysts need to start their research.