When you are building your social media management toolkit, you need to make some hard decisions. With so many tools out there, you’ve got to chose between the must-have and the wouldn’t it be nice kind.
So what about social media monitoring tools? Do they deserve a place in your toolkit or are they just too expensive to be worth the trouble?
What does a social media monitoring tool really do for you?
A social media monitoring tool helps you stay in touch with your followers and listen to what people say about you and your industry.
Some tools just give you the basics while others provide a more comprehensive, social CRM style solution. With Agorapulse, for example, you can track mentions, set specific alerts and listen out for keywords, hashtags and geotagged posts. And, you can manage all your social media accounts, schedule social media posts and answer comments from inside the dashboard.
Other tools, like Mention, focus on the monitoring part alone.
Are social media monitoring tools expensive?
Expensive is a relative term. What’s impossibly high priced to one person is totally affordable to another. And no, it’s not because one of them is swimming in money.
Not everyone is Scrooge McDuck (source)
The real question is whether a social media monitoring tool is worth it for you — whether adding one to your toolkit will help you grow your accounts, improve your business, win more customers and make sales.
Missed opportunity cost can end up being a lot more expensive than investing in the tools you need to get the most out of your business. This is especially true for marketing agencies and mid-sized businesses. When you are bootstrapping, you can mostly get away with stringing together a marketing kit from a bunch of trials and free tools. It’s functional enough to…
