In 2021, social media marketing has become an integral part of the marketing strategy for almost every B2C and many B2B products and services. Also in Japan, social media are used by the majority of the population and are forecast to be a part of daily life of three-quarters of all inhabitants by 2026. Efficient social media management including monitoring and social media tracking is key to a successful strategy, and the good news is that you don’t have to do everything manually as there are many tools that can help you.

Tools can assist with figuring out information like which hashtags and keywords to use, how people talk about your brand and industry, and how your campaigns are doing. Let’s go over 7 social media monitoring tools that can be used in Japan.

Sprout Social

For comprehensive social media monitoring, Sprout Social is one of the world’s most-used tools. With Sprout Social you can both compare multiple social media channels at once or dive deeper in one channel to see how your brand is doing. You can track things like follower counts, post impressions and engagement, and judge content performance in one glance. Knowing what your competitors are doing is an important part of social media management, and handily, competitor activity can also be measured with this tool.

You have to pay to use Sprout Social through monthly subscription fees, but if you’d use a digital marketing agency your social media campaign can take advantage from tools like Sprout Social without having to pay for it separately. Hashi Media uses a professional version of Sprout Social to benefit clients’ campaigns.

Zoho Social

If you want a social media management tool that is easy to use for scheduling, monitoring, and reporting, Zoho Social is a good tool to consider. Zoho Social’s tools are flexible and can be adjusted to your business’ needs. Their user interface is intuitive and well-designed, which makes it easier to use compared to many of the free tools that are available. If you are comfortable with the Japanese language, culture, and trends, this may be the tool that can help you break into the market in Japan using social media marketing.

Sprinklr

Sprinkl is a customer experience platform that can be used for marketing, advertising, and researching. Social media can be monitored across more than 30 channels, Because Sprinklr’s platform is so comprehensive, it offers a holistic view on the customer and their journey. This makes it straightforward to make tweaks to a marketing strategy that keeps the whole customer experience in mind, so those tweaks will be a lot more effective and likely to lead to positive changes.

As Sprinklr primarily aims at larger companies, their pricing is accordingly and usually too high for smaller companies. If you’d still like to make use of the benefits Sprinklr can offer to your campaigns, hiring a digital media agency that uses the tool is a way to do so. At Hashi Media, we use Sprinklr to keep abreast of clients’ campaign performance and make necessary changes in order to maximize their leads and conversions.

Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a tool that is specialized in social conversation monitoring. This is important for figuring out what is being said about your brand and industry and what the sentiment is about your competitors in comparison with your brand. It can help you monitor various channels like forums, blogs, review sites, and social networks.

Once you have a good overview of general sentiments and engagement, you can start steering the conversation in the right direction if comments are negative by interacting and fixing product, service, or image issues that can be fixed. If you want to do this for a Japanese audience, it is important that you can understand the local language and culture, and properly localize your response.

Google Data Studio

One step up from Google Analytics is Google Data Studio, which shows exactly what is important in the story of a strategy in a visually attractive and simple way. This makes it especially easy to present important data and statistics to others, as the presentation mode shows a created story that flows based on the data that matter to the campaign that is easy to understand. In addition, unlike Google Analytics, Google Data Studio goes beyond website traffic and can also include other types of data related to Google ads and social media  accounts.

At Hashi Media we use Google Data Studio to report about campaign progress to our clients in an easy to understand way, so they can stay on top of what’s going on with their social media marketing campaigns in Japan.

Hubspot

Hubspot’s monitoring tools make it easy for users to connect social media campaign results to the growth of their sales and revenue. You can easily assess the success of your projects on different social media platforms and see which platform(s) are most vital to your campaigns. This information is very useful to see which marketing methods are paying off and which ones aren’t performing as they should. With this knowledge, you can adjust your campaigns accordingly and save money on ineffective campaigns in the long run.

Facebook Tools

Even though Facebook has a smaller market share in the B2C market in Japan compared to other countries, you can still find a significant percentage of the Japanese population on Facebook. For B2B marketing, Facebook is especially interesting because many Japanese people are on Facebook for business purposes. The good news is that many tools that make marketing on Facebook easier are free to use.

There are Facebook tools for social listening, advertising & optimization, organic social management, analytics, and more. So you can imagine that it takes a significant time investment to pick the right tools for your business, become well-versed in using these tools, and get the maximum performance out of them. Digital media agencies are experts in using Facebook tools to enhance social media marketing performance for their clients. Especially if you are trying to enter a new, unknown market like Japan, it could be worth considering partnering up with a digital media company. We also encourage you to check out our partners article over at DesignRush and the tools they recommend.

Your Digital Media Partner in Japan

Hashi Media is Japan’s go-to content marketing and social media company. If you are planning on entering the Japanese market and don’t know where to start, we’ve got you covered.

• Content creation
• Social media management
• Digital marketing strategy
• Brand localization

If you enjoyed what you read today and found it valuable, contact us today and let’s talk about your project.