Social media monitoring is incredibly important in social media marketing. It’s insightful and helps you keep an eye on everything without having to manually find out everything. It shows you trends, analytics, and is needed for businesses. The best way to monitor is by using tools and the internet has a ton!
Monitoring Tools
- HootSuite
HootSuite is a great tool to use to help monitor your social media. It monitors conversations and most things related to your industry. It’ll monitor anything based on certain keywords you’ve set up, locations, and users.
As well, this tool is shareable. If you have a team or a partner you can share it to then and even assign them a task!
In general it’s very easy and simple to use with an awesome sharing aspect for bigger companies.
- Google Alerts
This is a very common, main stream one, but it works well. It catches keywords about your business and even your competition then sends them to you. You get constant alerts for each keyword you put in explaining where specifically they found the keyword. It is constantly updating and on the ball about new trends and significance. As well, a big power to this tool is that it’s free. So small businesses just starting out can use it without having to pay.
As well, since it’s so popular, if you get stuck on anything or need help understanding, you can simply look it up! There are many tips and tricks you can find online to help you get your Google alerts set up while there may not be for smaller, less popular monitoring systems
News Sources:
Twitter is one of the best places to get your news. Why? Because that’s where reporters go.Many reporters from CTV, CBC, and other news sites to to Twitter to find news tips and stories. After all, interesting news is where the people are…and they are on twitter.
However, while saying that, Twitter is not the most reliably. People aren’t forced to fact check everything they say. But, you get a lot of opinions, unprofessional opinions. You get to see what actual people are saying about an event, not what a reporter that has to hold their tongue is saying. It’s definitely a good source of opinionated news.
- CBC
CBC is an accredited newspaper, so obviously it’s a good source of news. They update quickly and are on top of most current problems. Their online page is easy to navigate and very accessible
However, unlike twitter it’s a lot less opinionated. They will state what they have seen, but you won’t be able to see exactly what someone is thinking. However, because it’s classified as news, they make sure to fact check and deem what they are telling is true to current knowledge. So using CBC and Twitter together is a great way of getting news. You get the opinions of the people as well as what is actually happening, not just their biased statement of it.
Using just one tool for social media isn’t worth it. You need to use multiple to be able to get the best experience, as well you should choose the one best for your company. If your company works better with Hootsuite than Google Alerts, use Hootsuite. Don’t feel pressured to follow the mainstream and use what works best for you.
Algonquin College Social Media Certificate Program 
I agree with both of your suggestions for social media monitoring tools. I use both Hootsuite and Google Alerts for work and have had a great deal of success with them.
Unfortunately, one of the issues with using Twitter as a media source is the prevalence of questionable sources. The Twitter algorithms may then display more and more fake news sources.