It’s likely that you already have social media incorporated into your online marketing strategy. However, it’s not enough to simply post content regularly. Along with researching relevant and timely content to post, and creating well-written social media captions that attract and engage audiences, you also want to know that you’re reaping the rewards of all your efforts.

The best way to go about this is by monitoring all your social media efforts. The platforms themselves continuously evolve. For example, statistics show that females are 38% more likely to use Instagram over men. Plus, Twitter is accessed through a mobile device by 82% of its users. As a marketer, I find that having this kind of data available to me helps me make more informed decisions about how I can promote my business better and achieve maximum engagement.

The good news is: we don’t have to this manually anymore. Today, we have the option to use multiple monitoring tools that can track everything from keywords, hashtags, URLs, and so much more. To help you get started, below are the tools that I use.

1. Keyhole

If you use a lot of Twitter and Instagram, Keyhole helps you track keywords, URLs, usernames, and hashtags. The platform allows you to see data in real-time, and even lets you review historical data, as well as heat maps that indicate top activity levels across different parts of the world.

All this information allows you to understand how your users respond to your brand and your content by monitoring conversations surrounding your posts and sentiments behind it.

2. Hootsuite

Posting regularly and consistently on all your social media platforms can get tiresome and time-consuming. When you’re running a business, it’s also likely that you forget to post at all. To address this, a lot of marketers automate the process with a scheduling tool like Hootsuite, so you never have to miss posting again.

The best thing about Hootsuite is that it also incorporates monitoring into its robust set of scheduling features. The platform helps you track activity across the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and even Foursquare, WordPress, and Google+.

3. Twitter Counter

Twitter Counter is dedicated to the popular microblogging platform. It focuses on delivering Twitter statistics and allows the use of buttons and widgets that you can add to blogs, websites, and profiles to indicate the volume of followers and Twitter visitors.

4. Digimind

Digimind is all about measuring sentiment. It works by determining whether the audience perception of a particular word you used in your post is negative, neutral, or positive, which helps give you a clear picture of how your brand is perceived compared to your competition.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout social is one of the more popular social media monitoring tools simply because it’s able to provide comprehensive data and analytics designed to boost your social media engagement.

The platform also features a scheduling platform, as well as a dashboard that facilitates better collaboration with you and the rest of your team. It features some of the most intuitive and simple user experiences, giving it one of the highest reviewed usability ratings in the industry. It’s also best known for being scalable—which makes one of the best tools to add to your arsenal if you’re a growing startup.

Like a lot of the strategies used for content and online marketing, utilizing social media and monitoring your results has to be consistent. Using these tools will help you achieve just that. If you’d like to know more, get in touch with me through Leadspanda and I can personally help you figure out what we can do to give your social media efforts a boost.