The importance of social has become more apparent every single year.

Billions of people around the world are actively talking about brands, businesses and influencers online. To really understand what is being said, you are going to have to monitor your mentions.

Here are six of the best social monitoring tools.

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a great monitoring tool. If you’re not familiar with Hootsuite, it has a variety of different uses. For me, I like to post content on Social Media as much in advance as possible to help me save time, and Hootsuite helps me do this. Yes, when it comes to “breaking” sports news, I do post that in real-time (still through Hootsuite).

As well as scheduling content, you can also create search terms, and set them up as streams to keep as up-to-date as possible with content being posted around that search term.

2. Mention

Since 2012, Mention has been one of the industry-leading real-time search tools. Mention is a great alternative to Hootsuite, and allows you to track your competitors, monitor real-time searchers, give influencer insights and most importantly; create reports on all of your mentions.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is similar to Hootsuite in that it is an all-in-one social management tool. You can schedule, monitor and create reports from one central place. The only difference being that Agorapulse only supports Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. It also costs upwards of £38 per month.

4. Google Alerts

If you’re like me, and benefit from receiving email breakdowns of what is being said about you online, then Google Alerts will be great for you. It takes just 30 seconds to set up and you can decide how often you receive alerts to your inbox.

5. Klout

A Lithium Technology-owned tool, Klout is a fun way of determining your influence online. Whilst not 100% accurate in it's measurements, it does take into account all of the content you share on social, and what is being said about you to build your influence score.

It’s always worth knowing whether you are driving the right kind of engagement around the content you share.

6. Tagboard

Tagboard is relatively new to the social monitoring scene, but one that was needed. Essentially, you use Tagboard to search for hashtags across multiple different social networks. If you use specific hashtags, and wonder what other type of content is being shared, use Tagboard to generate all of the searches.

Whilst I have shared six different social monitoring tools above, I don’t use all of them on a regular basis because they tend to overlap around their features.

If I had to pick my top two, it would be Hootsuite and Google Alerts.