Use these platforms to manage, measure, and analyze your social media marketing initiatives.

To succeed in today’s connected world, you need to build a community around your company, brand, and products. Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns. There are countless tools out there, offering many ways to analyze, measure, display, and create reports about your engagement efforts.

These 50 tools distill data in ways that are relevant to your social media marketing plan, enabling you to figure out how to succeed with your audience.

Determining which tools are right for you requires a clear definition of your objectives. Some are real-time, highly customized dashboards that enable you to manage multiple accounts, use shared work spaces, and respond on multiple social networks with one click. Others are simple, effective, and lightweight, and provide the right amount of functionality.

1. Alterian/SDL ($) | Alterian is now SDL, an integrated platform that blends the marketing analytics, campaign management, and social media capabilities from Alterian with those of SDL.
2. Argyle Social ($) | Identify and engage with more prospects, qualify and quantify better leads, and build and maintain stronger relationships by linking social media actions to the marketing platforms you’re already using.
3. BackTweets (Free) | Track how many people are talking about you, who’s talking, and what they’re saying. You can search through a tweet archive for URLs sent via Twitter, including results for full URL links, shortened URLs, and URLs without the “www” prefix.
4. BlitzMetrics ($) | Social media dashboards for your brand that monitor content across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Tumblr, and more. It helps you benchmark against your competitors, learn which demographics are the most active, and track content performance so you can improve your reach and engagement.
5. Bottlenose ($) | A tool that provides live social intelligence by analyzing activity across all the major social networks. Use it to search, monitor, analyze, target, and engage in real time, all from one place.
6. Brandwatch ($) |This service reads through and summarizes what’s being said on the Web about brands, people, and products. Define keywords to track (brands, topics, people names, products) and get access to mentions,  trend and campaign analysis, and competitive info.
7. Buffer (Free and $) | An app that manages multiple Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts, with the ability to set a tweeting or updating schedule unique to each. Includes detailed analytics for all your posts.
8. Buzz Equity ($) | Listen to social media conversations in real time from various social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, blogs, news, forums, reviews, and video websites.
9. CARMA ($) | Evaluate your overall social media image, brand recognition, message penetration, competitive positioning, and areas of strength and weakness, and use the data to develop a strategically sound and effective communication strategy.
10. Collective Intellect ($) | This Oracle platform captures millions of conversations a day across multiple social networks, including Facebook and Twitter. It extracts sentiments, preferences, and intentions from those sources and displays the information in real time.
11. Crimson Hexagon ($) | Tap into social media conversations with listening tools that help you understand how the most engaged consumers think and feel about your brand, why consumers are choosing other brands over yours, and how your ads/marketing are really perceived by your audience.
12. Curalate ($) | This tool applies advanced image analytics to social media conversations to give you detailed insights for your initiatives on Instagram and Pinterest.
13. CustomScoop ($) | Track media coverage, listen to social conversations, monitor your competition, measure PR and marketing effectiveness, and get automated daily reports.
14. CyberAlert ($) | Monitor 100,000+ consumer-generated media sites for word of mouth, including Twitter, blogs, Usenet (there’s a blast from the past :), and video sites.
15. Facebook Insights (Free) | Facebook’s built-in tool provides Facebook Page owners with metrics around their content. Helps you understand and analyze trends within user growth and demographics.
16. Fliptop ($) | A customer intelligence platform that uses publicly available information, including social data, to score leads so you can prioritize your pipeline, better target your audience, and know more about your customers.
17. Google Alerts (Free) | Get email updates of the latest relevant Google results (Web, news, etc.) based on your queries.
18. Gorkana ($) | This tool searches through and filters conversations to provides insights into the most relevant conversations about your brand. Offers audits and reports plus daily social media alerts.
19. HootSuite (Free and $) | A social media management system that enables teams to collaboratively execute campaigns across multiple social networks from one dashboard. Includes audience identification tools, the ability to streamline workflow, and custom reports. I use HootSuite to manage my company’s Twitter account.
20. Icerocket (Free) | A free resource for brand monitoring, it taps the Web, blogs, Twitter, and Facebook, and delivers easy-to-read results in one page.
21. Klout (Free) | A tool that finds the influencers in your audience so you can target and empower them to become advocates for your brand.
22. MarketMeSuite ($) | A dashboard similar to Hootsuite and TweetDeck, it can be used to manage and market on multiple social profiles, schedule messages, use geotargeting, and more.
23. MediaMiser ($) | Web app that collects and analyzes relevant content about your brand from social, traditional, and digital media. Spots trends in media coverage, including sentiment, share of voice, and top regions.
24. MediaVantage ($) | Pulls traditional media coverage and social media mentions into a database that helps you monitor your reputation, align your teams and messaging, and measure results.
25. Meltwater ($) | Combines social media monitoring and analytics with social engagement tools to help you create targeted marketing campaigns and build  brand relationships.
26. Mention (Free to $) | An iPhone and Android app that lets you create alerts for your company, its keywords, your brand, and your competitors. Updates in real time.
27. NetBase ($)| A social intelligence platform that enables you to monitor, understand, react, engage, and publish through both owned and earned channels.
28. Netvibes (Free and $) | A platform that tracks clients, customers, competitors, and your reputation across media sources, analyzes live results with 3rd party reporting tools, and provides media monitoring dashboards for brand clients.

Read more: http://www.pamorama.net/2013/05/12/50-top-tools-for-social-media-monitoring-social-media-analytics-social-media-management-2013/#ixzz2TXwAxlvA

50 Top Tools for Social Media Monitoring, Analytics, and Management | Pamorama | Social Media Marketing Blog.