As social media continues to infiltrate our daily lives, we rely upon it for more and more. Whether it be communication, news, shopping or entertainment, platforms such as Facebook are increasingly worming their way into every niche imaginable. For businesses in search of new customers and brands who want to gain visibility, performing well on social media is essential.

It is arguably impossible to achieve explosive and sustainable growth on social media without both a strategy and a set of tools to monitor progress. As it turns out, there are dozens of formidable utilities available that can help brands keep an eye on their social media enterprises. Below, we’ll look at three top contenders that can help your brand grow on social media even more.

Mention

For those who are looking for the tried and tested, Mention is one of the oldest social media monitoring utilities available. With a free trial available and plans for as little as $29 per month, Mention provides a monitoring solution that largely revolves around search functions. With this utility, brands can scour all mentions over the past 24 hours and discover what people are saying about the brand on Facebook, Twitter and a host of other platforms. This utility also integrates easily with apps such as Slack, making it easy for groups to integrate data and results with existing work-related tasks.

TweetDeck

Some utilities for monitoring social media only focus on individual platforms, but nevertheless do their precise jobs effectively. TweetDeck is an absolutely free utility for monitoring social media activity and is well-known among those who use Twitter as a premiere solution. Given that Twitter is one of the more common venues for user-brand communications, keeping an eye on what’s happening there just makes sense. TweetDeck works by pinging links, tweets and relevant mentions directly to your desktop or mobile device, making it easy to always see the bigger picture.

Brandwatch

For brands and businesses that are both larger and have an extensive social media presence, the Brandwatch tool is a highly useful utility. Designed at its core to make the interdepartmental marketing game more streamlined, organizing workflow via Brandwatch is easy. Incorporating an array of social media metrics and analytics, even the pickiest of marketing gurus and data geeks will be pleased with the analytic offerings it provides. From demographic breakdowns to information valuable for market research, this premium solution ($500 per month) is the end-all, be-all for big businesses.

Generating buzz and attention on social media is about more than just pinging links and content to your audience. A key element in growing and succeeding revolves around analyzing your existing performance. These three utilities each offer specific benefits for specific brands, whether your audience is large or small.