Social media monitoring is important to managing your brand’s presence and reputation online.

Social media monitoring can be a powerful activity in your arsenal when it comes to reputation and brand management online. Being able to join in the conversation as it is taking place is invaluable, particularly when you can join in with conversation about not only your brand, but your competitors and your industry as well.

However, simply scouring the net for mentions of your brand and keywords is going to take quite a bit longer than you might have time for. Therefore, identifying high-quality social media monitoring tools is important to a successful listening strategy.

Of course, there are tools like Radian6 and Sysomos that can be cost-prohibitive, but the five social media monitoring tools below are inexpensive, efficient and will do a great job assisting you with your  monitoring activities.

Yext

Yext is among the best tools for merchants, particularly local sellers.

There are not too many social media monitoring tools that allow users to listen in on conversation taking place on review sites and see how their brand is being perceived on both a local and global level. The ability to amalgamate all of your reviews, ratings and user comments is both time-saving and a fantastic advantage.

Reputation.com

Reputation management on social media is of ever-growing importance. Considering the trust people have in recommendations they read online, preventing any damage to your reputation is virtually invaluable.

Reputation.com is designed to help you manage your brand’s reputation across a number of channels on the web. One of the best features of this tool is the ability to find out what is being said and how your brand is being perceived on a local level.

Brandwatch

With a built-in spam filter, Brandwatch is among the more user-friendly social media monitoring tools around.

Users can put together a set of keywords, start a search on relevant networks, and the tool will automatically filter out results that are less than ideal so that you receive nothing more than the best, most relevant results for your searches.

Tweetbeep

Tweetbeep monitors the Twittersphere to pick up on conversations that are relevant to you and your brand.

This free tool allows users to insert keywords related to their brands, competitors and their industry and receive notifications when conversations using those keywords start up on Twitter. This is great when you need to focus on other priorities and only need to be alerted when a conversation is happening.

Put simply, “Tweetbeep is like Google Alerts for Twitter.”

BrandsEye

There are dozens of reports that can be generated using BrandsEye, including whether or not a marketing campaign was effective and where conversations are coming from most.

The reporting capabilities with BrandsEye are the real gem with this tool. Some great data can be gathered and analyzed to optimize future social media and online marketing campaigns for your brand.

Incorporating one or more of these tools will certainly boost the effectiveness and value of your social media monitoring activities. Try them out and tell us what you think of them in the comments below or on Twitter!