If you have a social strategy for lead generation (which you absolutely should), you need a social media tracking tool so you can measure and analyze your social interactions. Social media tracking tools enable you to listen and respond to customer and prospect interactions on all of your social channels.
Through deep analytics and reporting, social media tracking tools can help you engage with your audience and provide them with relevant content based on their actions.
Note that many marketing automation tools are now including social analytics in their suite, but there are also many stand-alone vendors you can use to enhance social interactions.
Radian6: Radian6 is a social media tracker that works in real time, using customized keywords, phrases, and filters to provide analysis and guidelines for tracking and engaging your audience through social channels. Radian6 is now part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, so its integration with Salesforce.com is improving with each release. Radian6 excels at lead generation, crisis management, and competitive analysis.
Sysomos: Sysomos not only collects and stores data from customer and prospect interactions on social channels, but it also helps to score potential influencers — the people who engage the most with your content. Sysomos offers two tools — Sysomos MAP, which is focused mostly on analytics, and Sysomos Heartbeat, which includes the ability to collaborate and engage with bloggers and other influencers.
Lithium: Lithium Social Marketing tracks customer and prospect engagements across multiple social media platforms. Because Lithium tracks social campaigns in real time, marketers can quickly iterate their strategy to reflect the new information Lithium provides. Lithium also enables companies to create unlimited user profiles and up to 50 preset searches — far more than any other social trackers do.
In addition to a social media monitoring tool, your business should consider having a social media management tool. A social media management tool enables your social media manager and team to effectively keep track of and post on all of the social channels your company participates in.
You can have multiple social channels open at the same time in one dashboard, and you can post and create lists all in one place. A social media management tool becomes increasingly necessary as you scale.
HootSuite: HootSuite's management tools allow users to launch and monitor social media campaigns from a single dashboard to track and manage social engagement. HootSuite is a big player in the space with more than seven million users, and offers three solution levels — free, pro, and enterprise — all of which can orchestrate social campaigns and schedule messaging across multiple platforms.
Crowdbooster: Crowdbooster offers different levels of solutions, from a simple metric reporter and social scheduler to real-time measurement of engagement. Crowdbooster focuses on Facebook and Twitter and can give targeted recommendations based on customer and prospect interactions. Crowdbooster can provide you with instant feedback about your performance on social channels and enables you to manage multiple social accounts in one place.
Argyle Social: Argyle Social excels mostly in the B2B (business-to-business) space, and enables users to create and assign custom tags and segments to potential customers. Argyle Social has a consolidated dashboard that monitors Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and LinkedIn.