The ability to monitor conversation around your organization has become imperative in today’s marketing landscape.

A Sprout Social study revealed that 86 percent of social media users either follow or want to follow brand accounts—but will unfollow those accounts if you are too promotional, don’t respond to them or try to be funny when it doesn’t fit your brand voice.

Also, not all consumers who are singing your praises—or bashing you—are standing outside your digital front door.

Using the right tool to monitor the digital landscape can enable you to increase sales and consumer loyalty. It can also be the difference between stopping a potential crisis in its tracks or watching it snowball and unfold into mainstream press coverage.

There are many that perform very similar functions. Digital marketing agency Jointviews came up with a list of its top digital monitoring tools, which include:

Hootsuite
Keyhole
Google Alert
Twitter Counter
Brand Watch
Digimind
Klout
Sprout Social
Buzzlogix
Mention
Simply Measured
Zoho Social
Buffer
Falcon.io
Spotlyte
Jointviews also meted out several key characteristics of each top tool in the infographic below: