30+ Social Media Monitoring Tools, Tips, And Strategies: A #Bufferchat Recap

Jul 10, 2014 4 min readBufferchat
Photo of Nicole Miller
Nicole Miller

Director of People @ Buffer

Update – we launched Respond a social listening tool and customer service tool

Respond displays your community’s tweets in a real-time tweet inbox. The list of new messages—both tweets and DMs—runs down the left column. Each particular message opens into the panel on the right.

This intuitive layout gives the Twitter stream an inbox feel where you can reply, archive, keep track of conversations, and—excitedly—reach inbox zero!

We’d love for you to experience the real-time support experience with Respond. Click above to get started right away.

Ok, back to the blogpost!


Bufferchat 7.9.14 Shannon

Our latest weekly #bufferchat on Twitter was Wednesday, July 9, where we focused on social media monitoring and welcomed Shannon Byrne, Content and PR Manager for Mention, as our special guest.

Check out the full Storify recap to discover a whole host of awesome people you should follow on Twitter.

How important is listening?

We started off the conversation by asking about the importance of social media monitoring in participant’s online strategies.

The resounding response was that listening is a key part of learning and connecting with your community.

Listening and monitoring tools

Participants responded with a variety of tools they use to monitor conversations amongst their community. Here are just a few of the apps mentioned!

  • Public Relay

Knowing what to monitor

How do you best decide what keywords to listen to? Here’s what some of our participants said:

How do you best jump into the conversation?

What have you learned from social media monitoring?

Listening leads to learning, and here are just a few of the things our participants have learned from listening:

  • social listening is the lifeblood of our marketing strat. We tailor everything to what we learn about our cmnty.” Shannon
  • “Brand voice is critical…” Mike
  • “By listening, we learned what topics our audience cares about, when & why they engage…” Amelia
  • “Either you control your message or someone else will do it for you.” Art
  • Listening has also allowed us to adjust our strategy based on our audience’s engagement.” Divya
  • People just want to be heard & understood…” Miss K
  • If you’re true to the audience, it reflects in your messages and their responses…” Ankita
We don’t know everything & people don’t always want what you’d expect…” Sparket Media
  • People want to be talked to, not talked at.” Miss Grant

A very special thank you to Shannon from Mention for joining us for this incredible chat!

Join us every Wednesday at 9 am Pacific, noon Eastern, 4 p.m. GMT for #bufferchat!

To keep connected with #bufferchat in between the chats, check out our Google+ Community! Topics and questions will be shared on the Google+ community before each chat.

Screen Shot 2014-07-09 at 3.09.18 PM

What social media monitoring tools do you prefer? What thoughts above resonated with you? Do you have any tips about social listening? Let us know in the comments!

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