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Your brand's reputation determines the longevity and the ultimate fate of your business. With social media, customers can instantly share compliments about your brand, or make you appear like an incompetent demon. The client base and financial status that took you years to build can collapse in a moment by one detrimental but unmonitored and unmanaged social post. It certainly helps to know what others are saying about you online so you can react appropriately, taking damage control if necessary. In the realm of managing your brand's online presence, utilizing Social Media Scheduling Tools is crucial. These tools allow you to plan and schedule your social media posts in advance, ensuring a consistent and strategic online presence.
A while back, we profiled Tools to Monitor Brand Mentions. We take another look at the industry here, looking at 25 social media listening tools. We have deliberately picked products that we (mainly) did not look at in our last article.
Many of these tools target large businesses and enterprises and do not advertise prices for their services. However, it is crucial to incorporate suitable tools, such as Influencer Marketing Platforms, to help you discover your social media mentions, no matter what your size or level of competition.
Top Social Media Listening Tools for 2024:
Adobe Express reported that 61% of businesses have integrated social media listening software into their business growth strategy. After all, 62% of customers polled by Khoros said they want to engage with brands through various channels. Moreover, 68% are likely to spend more money with businesses that understand them and offer personalized service.
Social listening platforms enable brands to tune in to conversations across social networks—and engage with clients and detractors directly when necessary. These tools also empower businesses to identify trends and analyze data on purchasing behavior, providing insights that help with marketing, customer service, and sales. Below, we list 25 leading social listening software you can consider for your company.
1. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
Channels: Facebook (and Messenger), Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google
Brandwatch is a social media listening, publishing, advertising, measurement, and customer data management platform. Its social listening tools give a clear picture of what’s happening and who’s involved.
You can use it to identify popular topics and hashtags for an improved campaign design and content. You can keep tabs on conversations taking place around your brand and products.
Brandwatch gives you much flexibility. You can track anything from brand names, topics, and keywords to phrases, refining your queries with advanced parameters. If you have a global audience, you can track and engage wherever you have followers. In addition, you can filter extensively, accessing and viewing data by keyword, source, demographics, influencers, and content type.
Brandwatch offers sentiment analysis in multiple languages, marking mentions as positive, neutral, or negative to help you prioritize engagement. Users can set notifications to alert if there is a spike in specific mentions. You can react to negative publicity before it gets out of hand. To assist with this, you can set up automated reports of trending topics and mentions, sending them directly to your inbox.
With Brandwatch, you can identify influencers who interact with your topics of interest and, as a result, create strategies for collaboration and brand growth. You can also produce audiences from any social listening project – groups of people who meet specific criteria you set.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Brandwatch for information.
2. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
Channels: No specifics — only mentions 25+ global and regional social media platforms
Digimind provides all the content you need to make sense of social and online data and transform it into actionable business insights. It offers two products: social listening and market intelligence. Both are impressive tools with a wide range of features.
With Digimind’s social listening tools, you can:
- Monitor specific terms and topics
- Analyze mentions (up to 15 emotions for sentiment analysis)
- Share content and engage audiences
- Generate reports
- Measure ROI for owned media (paid and organic)
- Leverage search data for reputational management
Meanwhile, Digimind’s Market Intelligence tools utilize advanced extraction tools to gather information from over 800 million online sources, such as websites, RSS feeds, and forums. The data is then categorized using natural language processing (NLP) technology and semantic analysis engines.
Digimind’s tools enable you to see the conversations that matter the most for your brand, in real-time, across millions of online sources, to gain valuable insights you can use to drive and improve your marketing strategy.
You can analyze and benchmark an unlimited number of social accounts simultaneously with Digimind Social Analytics. However, you can go beyond your social networks to see your brand based on Google search behavior. With Digimind’s Top Reputation module, you can follow what your customers want to know about you and your competitors’ brands, products, people, and more, all in real-time.
Plans: Contact Digimind for pricing. Prices are based on estimates of total monthly mentions with unlimited queries/topics and of the total number of queries required per year with unlimited mentions. Book a demo by filling out their contact form.
3. Brand24
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Spotify, LinkedIn, Reddit, Telegram, TripAdvisor, AppStore
Brand24’s Mentions Feed shows what people say about your brand so you can take action in real-time. You can join in and engage in discussions directly from Brand24.
Meanwhile, its Discussion Volume Chart graphically depicts your brand’s mentions, allowing you to see any surges in brand mentions and discover if there is a problem. It also offers full–mention analytics, giving you a better understanding of who is talking about your brand online.
Furthermore, Brand24 has developed its own Influencer Score to help pinpoint your industry influencers, so you can begin making contact with the people that matter in your niche.
The platform also has a sentiment analysis feature, which doesn’t only display mentions of your brand but also indicates whether these mentions were positive, negative, or neutral.
Stay updated on any changes in the volume of discussions about your company or product with Brand24’s customized alerts. You will receive notifications through alerts within the dashboard or via email. This feature includes negative mentions from blogs that receive over 300k monthly visits.
Plans: Individual $79/month, Team $149/month, Pro $199/month, Enterprise $399/month. Pay the yearly subscription to get up to two months free. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
4. Agorapulse
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube
Agorapulse is another highly professional social media management tool for agencies with social listening features.
It features an extremely clean and straightforward interface.
You can easily set up relevant brand-listening parameters, which allow you to listen to relevant conversations about your brand. You can further refine your YouTube, and Twitter searches by providing words NOT to include in your saved searches. Boolean operators allow you to hone in on only what you want to listen to. Add location and/or language parameters to your Twitter searches if you want to be even more specific.
Perhaps even more critical is that Agorapulse helps you take action on what you hear. You can click on a monitoring item and like, retweet, reply, or reply in DM/PM. You can also label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client so that they can act accordingly.
Plans: Standard $49/month, Professional $79/month, Advanced $119/month
5. Iconosquare
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok
Iconosquare is a standout social media listening platform, delivering essential tools for mastering market trends and staying competitive in your industry. Unlike other tools, Iconosquare offers a range of distinctive features that cut through the noise and focus on delivering actionable insights.
Iconosquare’s listening tab generates a breakdown of the tags and mentions you received according to media type. You can also adjust the settings to view the number of times social captions and comments mention your social profile.
But that’s just the beginning. Iconosquare takes benchmarking to a whole new level by harnessing data collected from users across your industry. This allows you to accurately compare your performance against competitors and gain a sense of where you stand in the market. You can track up to 10 hashtags and 10 competitors simultaneously. However, the platform won’t track hashtags with over 50k posts per day.
The user-friendly comparison tables enable you to identify strengths and areas for improvement. Even better, you can export the data for in-depth analysis and reporting, making it a valuable asset for future strategy planning.
Finally, Iconosquare offers real-time monitoring and adaptation capabilities that allow you to choose custom hashtags to access a live feed of relevant posts, keeping you up-to-date with industry conversations.
Plans: Single $29/month, Teams $49/month. Customized pricing for unlimited users. Save up to 22% for yearly plans. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
6. BrandMentions
Channels: Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, Foursquare, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, YouTube
BrandMentions searches virtually every section of the internet to find all relevant mentions about any of their clients (or any other term that interests them).
Brands can use it to monitor everything being said about their company or product—and the personalities influencing their target audiences—on all the channels that matter, be it websites or social media.
BrandMentions cover all the essential channels where people talk about brands. It also offers comprehensive sentiment analysis, finding out the tone of the conversations.
You can also use BrandMentions to spy on your competitors. You can use it to reveal your competitors’ marketing strategies. The social listening software enables you to quickly research and gain insights on any brand or any topic from any market.
It provides you with real-time notifications with email alerts and link notifications.
Plans: Growing Business $99/month (billed quarterly), Company $299/month. Enterprise/Agency $499/month. Pay the full year to get up to two months’ worth of free subscriptions. They also offer a 7-day free trial.
7. YouScan
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, Telegram, App Store, Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Booking
YouScan’s Insights Copilot, a feature under its Mentions tool, takes social listening to a higher level with AI-generated prompts and questions to help you analyze your chosen topic. To analyze your brand, for instance, you can choose the “Pain Points” prompt to get a summary of the product issues your customers are experiencing. Or you can click any of the AI’s question suggestions, such as “Which brands are mentioned with ours?”
You can also conduct brand or topic monitoring manually using Boolean operators. In a Boolean search, you add “operators”—quotation marks, a slash, and words (and, or, not)—to get more accurate results.
Once you’ve set your search parameters, YouScan will build a page showing all the mentions the platform has collected matching your search criteria. You can then filter the results down in several ways to get what’s relevant to your search.
YouScan’s social listening tool casts a wide net with Visual Insights. This feature searches through images, and you can set detailed parameters to find pictures showing your specific requirements. An incredibly accurate AI engine powers image recognition. It can help you find detailed demographic and psychographic information about the people who use your brand.
You can use YouScan to find mentions of your brand by the most influential people and then determine who among these creators has the most engaged audiences. Moreover, the platform has Smart Alerts, which you can set to notify you whenever it “sees” any negative sentiment about your brand. You can even integrate complaints directly into your Helpdesk system.
Plans: Starter Plan for SMBs $299/month (billed annually), Unlimited Plan for brands and agencies—custom pricing.
8. BuzzSumo
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest
BuzzSumo is primarily a content analysis tool but also acts as a social media listening software.
It allows you to comb the web for any content that includes your search term. It doesn’t just give you search results, however. It also provides the amount of engagement associated with each search result. For example, if you set up a search for your organization, BuzzSumo will find its online mentions. But it doesn’t just tell you when somebody wrote a blog post criticizing your company’s service, for instance. It also tells you that people shared that article 26 times on Facebook, and tweeted about it 478 times – which would require serious damage control.
The platform also provides the total number of links each search result has received.
Buzzsumo provides a useful alerts feature. You can create alerts to track brand mentions, competitor mentions, content from a website, keyword mentions, backlinks, or an author. You can set parameters for your alerts to tailor them to your needs.
Plans: Brand monitoring with crisis alerts are available on PR & Comms for $299/month, Suite for $499/month, and Enterprise for $999/month. Save 20% on fees by paying the full-year subscription. You can also try their 30-day free trial.
9. Sprout Social
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, WhatsApp, Pinterest
Sprout Social is a high-end professional social media management app. Although most of its features relate to social media management and optimization, it also includes social CRM tools and social media listening capability. It includes many collaboration tools, making it easy to work with a team.
One of the most user-friendly features of Sprout Social is its unified Smart Inbox. You can reply to your messages, retweet/repost or repin content, like items, etc., all from within Sprout Social. You can group all of your messages in any way you desire. You can filter your inbox in multiple ways including by keywords and hashtags.
Sprout Social’s social listening feature works in much the same way as the Smart Inbox, and you can track mentions of your brand, your competitors, or selected keywords. You can quickly build complex queries, using Boolean phrases in the Query Builder, making your query visual and obvious. You can refine your searches to ensure that most of the mentions shown are genuinely about your firm.
The feature also includes sentiment research, campaign/audience analysis, customer feedback crisis management, influencer recognition, and competitor comparison—which give you a better grasp of your content’s impact and the public’s perception of your brand. For a broader view of your market, tap into the social listening tool’s industry analysis and trend identification.
Plans: Standard $249/user/month, Professional $399/user/month, Advanced $499/user/month.
10. Talkwalker Analytics
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Weibo, Mixcloud, Flickr, Foursquare, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Google Play Store, Amazon, ReviewTrackers, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor
Talkwalker is a social media marketing platform that empowers the world’s most successful brands to drive business impact by bringing together data and insights from within your company as well as outside sources like social platforms. Its listening feature provides a powerful tool for uncovering valuable information about client consumption habits. Aside from social media, Talkwalker scours through 150 million websites across 196 nations for conversations (in text, voice, and visual format) about your brand, rivals, and industry.
With its proprietary visual listening technology, it goes beyond the scope of just being a “social listening” tool. That’s because you can track KPIs like hashtag performance, which ties efforts back to your business objectives or customer sentiment. You will also be able to see the most popular topics concerning your brand and understand how you rank against competitors.
Want a peek into your future marketing campaign’s performance? Talkwalker’s Blue Silk GPT can provide a 90-day forecast on your KPIs and related topic volumes so you can optimize content and distribution strategies.
Plans: Listen, Analyze, Business, Premium. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Talkwalker for information.
11. Meltwater
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitch, Sina Weibo, Douyin, WeChat
Meltwater provides AI-driven insights. From the data it captures and filters from billions of real-time sources or archival research spanning up to 15 months. You get unlimited keyword search capability and three criteria boxes for each advanced (Boolean) search.
When you monitor a keyword or entity, this platform looks at more than just social media, examining millions of posts every day from blogs, news sites, podcasts, forums, and consumer review sites. The platform adds 1.3 billion new documents to its database and processes over 6 billion engagement activities daily. It filters out irrelevant mentions and assigns sentiment to the mentions that interest you. Thanks to its customizable automated alerts and reporting tools, you can spot negative sentiment shifts and take action before they become full-blown crises.
You can also use Meltwater to find key influencers, track your online performance, and optimize your prospecting strategy through its consumer (market research) and sales (competitor insights) intelligence features.
You can tailor its dashboards to suit your monitoring, benchmarking, and analysis requirements.
Plans: Essentials, Advanced, Suite, Enterprise. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Meltwater for information.
12. Quid
Channels: The website doesn’t list Quid’s supported social channels.
Quid Monitor is the social listening service of AI-driven text analytics leader Quid, which merged with the social media analytics platform Netbase in 2020. The platform combines your company data with information from global consumer and market sources to discover emerging trends or shifts in consumer behavior and anticipate needs and preferences.
Although Quid offers only general details about the listening tool’s features, an article in its blog section says that the online solution collects from over 300 million sources in real-time, categorizing posts by emotion, behavior, and other filters. Moreover, its data warehouse reportedly archives 17 months of historical data.
Users can maximize the benefits of Quid Monitor by using it with the rest of the platform’s product suite, including Quid Discover, which generates a “smart keyword set” for research and offers customizable filtering. Furthermore, Quid Predict uses generative AI to identify events or trends that are more than just fads but could potentially impact your business’s future.
The platform also has a benchmarking tool—Quid Compete—which generates custom reports to measure your current and past performance and how you compare against market leaders and new competitors.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Quid for information.
13. Ipsos Synthesio
Channels: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Sina Weibo, YouTube, Instagram
The Synthesio Social Media Intelligence Suite is a social listening platform that monitors businesses’ online presence and provides their clients with actionable insights. It currently captures social media intelligence from 195 countries in more than 90 languages. It offers automatic sentiment analysis (AS) on more than 20 of those languages.
It features customizable social listening dashboards, displaying an immense amount of data—analyzed from over 800 million sources—relating to social mentions of your brand. All mentions incorporate robust metadata about the content, author, and tone. They can be filtered easily.
You can also integrate into these dashboards paywall data from LexisNexis, logo recognition capabilities, and consumer reviews.
You can also track views, likes, favorites, replies, retweets, and shares from social channels directly on your social media listening dashboards. You can add high-level business intelligence with Media Value and Engagement Rate widgets.
Synthesio enables you to export pre-filtered data sets via API or using an in-house tool, Reveal, and merge Social Listening metrics with performance data in many SaaS business intelligence tools.
The platform underwent a rebranding in 2023 after becoming a part of Ipsos, a well-established name in market research and polling with operations dating back to 1975.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Synthesio for information.
14. Cyfe
Channels: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube
Cyfe provides an all-in-one business dashboard showing social media, web analytics, marketing, sales, support, infrastructure, and more. You can pull data from popular services like Google, Salesforce, Xero, QuickBooks, and many more services using pre-built widgets. Alternatively, you can build your widgets if you wish to work with a product not yet supported.
Cyfe has dashboards available for every area of operation: start-up (data about new sign-ups, app downloads, subscriptions, and other related KPIs), social media, marketing, client, web analytics, finance, sales, project management, and IT.
Cyfe offers a wider range of features beyond social mentions. However, it does incorporate social listening capabilities. It is also much cheaper than many of the more specialist products mentioned here.
Regarding the social media dashboard, Cyfe uses real-time data and metrics to start tracking how your brand or clients are doing across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Vimeo.
Plans: Starter $19/month, Standard $29/month, Pro $49/month, Premier $89/month, Agency $150+/month. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
15. Keyhole
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube
Keyhole tracks hashtags, keywords, social accounts, and influencers, but their quantity differs depending on the tier. Higher plans include additional features, such as media wall and moderation and campaign-level post analysis from the Pro plan and up.
The heart of Keyhole is social media analytics and reporting. You can monitor all accounts and posts in real-time, and use Keyhole’s analytics to help you optimize your social media posting schedule.
You can use Keyhole’s data to optimize and report on your hashtag campaigns. You can discover the total number of posts, the engagement rate, and the total reach and impressions your hashtags have generated.
Keyhole’s listening feature includes volume predictions, sentiment analysis, QuickTrends summarizing the latest industry trends, and competitor analysis.
Plans: Individual $63/month, Team $119/month, Pro $199/month, Advanced $359/month, Enterprise $833/month. Discounts for annual payment. Free trial on all plans except Enterprise.
16. Mention
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Pinterest
Mention helps you monitor the web, social media, forums, and blogs to learn more about your brand and your industry. You can customize your alerts and filters by source, language, and date with your dashboard. Refine your alert by adding or deleting keywords. Company subscription plan holders (for unlimited users) can receive these alerts or notifications via email in real-time. You can also get historical data for up to two years with a company-level subscription.
The platform gives you insights into the sentiment of each mention, its source, influence score, and reach. Mention’s Insights Center—accessible in higher plans—displays graphs representing the result of your alert results, social account reports (listening and comparative alerts), and an export feature for sharing your reports. Options are available for customizing reports and automating their send-out schedule within your team or clients.
Plans: Solo $49/month, Pro $99/month, Pro Plus $179/month, Company – custom pricing. Discounts for annual payment. 14-day free trial.
17. Awario
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Vimeo
Awario finds Instant mentions from all around the web and social media. It crawls over 13 billion web pages daily, in addition to APIs. You can use Awario to find all mentions of your business on social media, blogs, forums, news sites, or any publicly accessible webpage.
Awario’s dashboard tracks the growth in the number of your mentions, their collective reach, and sentiment, including the geographical locations where these messages come from. The platform’s analytics can show you the most impactful conversations first by sorting mentions by audience reach. This feature can, in effect, identify top influencers by social network. At the same time, you can prioritize engagement and respond to urgent negative mentions first.
Meanwhile, Awario’s Mentions Statistics aids your reputation management efforts, measuring the public’s sentiment towards your brand—including marketing campaigns and product launches—over time.
This online solution’s competitor analysis is another feature you can use to strengthen your brand. Benchmark your company against your industry rivals by setting up alerts for keywords containing your competitor’s products and campaigns. Then see how public sentiment compares with yours. You can also track your rivals’ follower growth, posting frequency, and the channels they use to tweak your marketing strategy.
Plans: Starter $49/month, Pro $149/month, Enterprise $399/month. Discounts for annual payment. 14-day free trial.
18. ReviewInc
Channels: 600 review sites, including Google Maps and Facebook Reviews.
ReviewInc offers online reputation and review management software. It follows a three-step process:
First, it performs review monitoring, auditing your company’s online reputation by scanning the web for business directories and sites where your brand appears. Second, it helps you collect more reviews. ReviewInc helps you create a customized campaign to encourage customers to give feedback about your business on review sites. You can customize email, SMS, private requests, thank-you notes, and follow-up messages.
Its third and final step involves amplifying customer feedback. ReviewInc’s integrations allow you to share client reviews on social media or your website with a single click, or even automate the process entirely with free Zapier and Hootsuite apps.
Plans: Monitor, Basic, Pro, Enterprise. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact ReviewInc for information.
19. 76Engage
Channels: The website doesn’t list the platform’s supported sites or social channels.
76Engage specializes in organizing various online activities, which can help brands build engagement and analyze their audience’s opinions. The platform can set up discussion forums, questionnaires, notifications, public or private Q&A sets, polls, voting, and private feedback.
76Engage allows you to assign moderators and administrators to screen and manage your participants’ input. You can customize keyword alerts and parameters for measuring your audience’s answers to produce exportable reports.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact 76Engage for information.
20. Sprinklr
Channels: Over 30 social and messaging channels, including Facebook, Messenger, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Line
Sprinklr’s social listening function falls under Sprinklr Insights, one of the platform’s four services, which also include Sprinklr (Customer) Service, Sprinklr Social, and Social Marketing. The tool’s listening feature aggregates 500 million conversations daily across 350 million sources. It allows you to see the volume, context, and sentiment of online conversations – both historical (dating back to 2014) and real-time – and use that information to make strategic decisions that support business goals. In particular, you can filter out “non-engageable messages” and route the others to team members who can act on or respond to them promptly in the customer’s channels. Sprinklr’s AI can be set up to alert you of potential crises upon detecting risk-laden keywords or anomalies in online activities.
It includes endlessly drillable dashboards and surfaces real-time insights that connect to your unique business KPIs. You can also monitor competitive and industry activity to benchmark successes and decode competitors’ strategies.
Plans: Enterprise plan for Sprinklr Insights (where social listening service belongs)—custom pricing. Contact Sprinklr for information.
21. Emplifi
Key Features: Search/Discovery, Influencer Relationship Management, Content Review, Campaign Management, Campaign Reporting, Influencer Analysis, Audience Analysis,
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter
Emplifi’s social media listening tool allows you to monitor and analyze data from all of your company’s touchpoints, giving insights into what customers want. You can use this information for campaign success by raising the content quality on each level, from conversation starters like hashtag searches or competitor monitoring through keyword research in posts themselves. The platform lets you revisit social messages up to 365 days earlier and up to 30 days back for webpages.
In addition to conducting “deep listening” on sources beyond social channels like blogs and forums, you can also gather customer and influencer feedback from Emplifi Ratings and Reviews. You can later syndicate your seller ratings to boost your online image.
Furthermore, Emplifi enables you to engage with customers regardless of their location using real-time translation for over 100 languages. The platform automatically routes mentions to its community management tool—available in Standard plans and higher—where you can assign teammates to respond to urgent topics.
Plans: Essential $2,400/year. Standard, Business, Enterprise – custom pricing. Contact Emplifi’s sales team for information.
22. Mentionlytics
Channels: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter)
Mentionlytics aptly describes social listening as “taking a shortcut to your customers’ thoughts.” Its advanced filters and Boolean searches enable you to cut through the noise and uncover mentions of your brand, products, competitors, and other issues connected to your business or industry.
The analysis of conversations can reveal top trends, including the latest online activities of top players in your field. But more importantly, you can get to the heart of your customer’s pain points so you can improve their customer journey. You can rework campaigns to align with fresh insights by tapping into Mentionlytics’ AI-driven Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA).
SIA goes beyond campaign performance analysis—it suggests solutions such as how to improve the content of your social posts, including more attention-drawing hashtags, the optimal publication dates, and the identification of content you can repost. SIA can also spot a crisis or viral event so you can take appropriate action. The AI tool also identifies influencers and the most popular sites in your industry (including those where your rivals get published) and recommends ways to work with those creators or publishers for greater brand awareness.
Plans: Basic $49/month, Essential $139/month, Advanced $249/month, Pro $399/month, Agency/Enterprise–custom pricing.
23. Zoho Social
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Business Profile, YouTube, Pinterest, Mastodon
Zoho Social is another powerful social media management platform for monitoring your brand’s audience interactions. Its Live Stream tool offers real-time access and flexibility in responding to comments and collaborating on responses to followers. You can study the social post author’s profile, check how frequently they post, and discuss with your team before responding directly to the message from Zoho Social. The platform also has a Monitoring Columns option that arranges conversations by channel, making content-viewing less overwhelming.
Meanwhile, Zoho’s Message Inbox lets you receive and read direct messages sent to your brand’s social channels like regular emails. You can organize your contact list and forward messages to the department that is best equipped to address the sender’s concerns through Zoho’s mail or CRM integrations. A separate contact directory is available where you can create a social connections “priority list” in one place, even if these contacts are from different channels.
Plans for Businesses: Standard $15/month, Professional $40/month, Premium $65/month;
Plans for Agencies: Agency $320/month, Agency Plus $460/month. 15-day free trial.
24. Critical Mention
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Facebook
Critical Mention has been in the media monitoring business for over a decade, with services covering social media, broadcast media (TV and radio), online news, and podcasts. It became an Onclusive company in 2022.
The platform offers “social mentions analytics” over time for share of voice, audience values, and mentions volume on specific networks. Meanwhile, its sentiment analysis feature helps your brand improve its understanding of each social post’s context. Discover your strengths with positive mentions, which you can repost to polish your image. At the same time, you can work on any deficiencies surfaced by negative mentions and take steps early to prevent risks to your brand reputation. Receive notifications for brand mentions and other keywords, which you can set up by specific media type or market via real-time alerts.
You can customize templates and graphs to generate density maps and word clouds. Present comprehensive reports by comparing your campaign’s performance from a year ago. You can also conduct a competitor analysis using Critical Mention’s archival search.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Critical Mention for information.
25. Hootsuite
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok
With Hootsuite, you can keep track of conversations about important topics, stay up to speed with your content’s performance and brand mentions, and monitor the activities of your competitors via Hootsuite Streams.
Streams are highly customizable social feeds that allow you to view content from your social connections and engage in conversations without jumping to another window. You can organize Steams by social network, priority, business goal, or special searches.
It can work with Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch for tracking brand sentiment, monitoring trends, and conducting consumer research. Hootsuite gathers 16 billion new posts each month. If you’re using another listening tool, you can integrate it with Hootsuite for more customer and market insights.
Knowing what your customers want and where they spend time online doesn’t only boost engagement. It also helps you determine where to spend your advertising budget, the best time to launch a new product, and identify influencers or thought leaders.
Plans: Professional $99/month, Team $249/month, Enterprise—custom pricing. They offer a 30-day free trial and discounts for skipping the trial period.
How Do Social Listening Tools Work?
Social media listening software primarily operates through a two-step process. First, it gathers and filters data using tools that collect online data about your brand and competitors' brands in real-time or within your desired timeframe. You define the relevant keywords related to your company, rivals, and industry that the tool will track across various social media platforms. This enables the software to determine the nature of digital conversations surrounding your brand and business sector. These keywords serve as the criteria for the software to search through social messages and filter or categorize the search results.
The second stage involves analysis and reporting. Your tool's NLP and other machine learning features analyze your collected data, assessing the sentiment of messages as positive, negative, or neutral based on tone and other factors (also called opinion mining). The analysis result helps you understand what customers like or dislike about your product or service. Your tool's analysis report can also spot other patterns and trends, including common complaints, frequently asked questions, and who your customers look up to as influencers or key opinion leaders.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Social Listening Tool
Consider the following steps when selecting social media listening software for your business:
1. Clarify your goals.
Clear objectives and requirements can hasten your platform search. Here are some essential social listening goals to target:
- Gain insights into your competitors and industry trends to differentiate your product within your sector.
- Identify and address negative feedback or proactively prevent a PR crisis.
- Generate new marketing ideas or explore brand innovation opportunities based on social discussions.
- Uncover new niche markets that are interested in your product or service.
2. Check out its features.
An ideal social listening software:
- Runs on a user-friendly dashboard that makes it easy to set filters, access information, and display insights.
Source: brandwatch.wistia.com
- Supports all the social networks that matter to you, including blogs related to your line of business.
Source: brand24.com
- Offers keyword tracking (hashtags and phrases) and advanced filters (date, visits, mentions order, sentiment, and more).
Source: sproutsocial.com
- Automates notifications that will immediately alert you once its filters or data trackers catch content of interest.
Source: mention.com
- Provides brand sentiment and competitor analysis. These features will help get a real-time pulse on what customers think about your product or your rival's. For example, you can innovate your product or improve client service based on customer messages praising a competitor's new offer.
Source: awario.com
- Generates analytics and reporting of insights and recommendations based on your target audience's most-discussed topics and the kind of interactions they have about your brand.
Source: support.iconosquare.com
- Offers numerous customization options, including the ability to monitor a specified number of keywords and integrate with your existing CRM and email marketing solutions.
Source: marketplace.digimind.com
3. Consider your budget.
Set the amount you're willing to spend before searching for tools. Some platforms have a free trial period, allowing you to test their capabilities so you can decide on a subscription plan.
4. Read case studies and reviews.
A company’s past projects and client feedback may resonate with your current marketing challenges, helping you make a more informed choice for your shortlist and final decision.
What’s the Difference between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?
Social monitoring is part of social listening but only tracks mentions of your brand (campaign, product, or service) in real-time, helping you determine your marketing campaign's visibility and performance. Monitoring can avert possible PR crises from negative publicity and preserve your company's good name. Social listening doesn't just identify aspects of your business that people are talking about but why they're discussing them. Discovering how and why customers feel about a particular subject allows you to plan and deliver a better marketing and business strategy.
What Are the Advantages of Using Social Listening Tools?
There are some of the advantages of using social listening tools to increase brand awareness and improve your social presence:
1. You know where you stand with your audience.
One of the first steps towards building a better and stronger reputation for your brand is by getting information about how your audience currently perceives your company and what you have to offer. By using a social listening tool, you get a feel of how online conversations are about your products or services. This is all thanks to the ability to monitor various channels including forums, blogs, review sites, and social media platforms.
2. You thoroughly understand your customers.
To create lasting relationships with your customers, you need to understand them first. This requires more than just knowing their demographics or purchasing habits. You also need to know their interests, opinions, and needs. You can use social listening tools to monitor this feedback and get a clear understanding of what your customer’s pain points are.
3. You discover opportunities and leads.
A social listening tool can also be used for content marketing and identifying new sales opportunities. When you know what people are saying about your brand online, you can develop targeted campaigns that speak to their needs. You can also identify potential customers and reach out to them with personalized messages.
4. It allows you to quickly respond to negative sentiment.
Negative comments will always happen, but the way you react to them speaks volumes about your company. Social listening tools give you the capability to quickly identify and respond to any negative sentiment. This can help turn a negative situation into a positive one.
5. You can track your competition.
Social listening is not just about keeping an eye on what people are saying about your company, you can also track your competition. This way, you can learn from their strategies and avoid making the same mistakes. Additionally, you can also see what areas they are struggling in and try to leverage that information to come up with better campaigns for your audience.
6. You can improve customer satisfaction.
By using social listening tools, you can quickly identify areas where your customers are not satisfied. This way, you can take the necessary steps to improve customer satisfaction. Moreover, you can also use the information gathered from social monitoring to create marketing campaigns that target specific pain points.
7. You can build stronger relationships with your audience.
By engaging with your audience on social media, you are building stronger relationships. This way, you can turn one-time buyers into lifelong customers. You can also use social listening tools to generate buzz and build a community around your brand.
8. You can create more targeted content.
If you want your content to be successful, you need to make sure that it is relevant to your audience. By using social listening tools, you can quickly identify trends and hot topics within your industry. This way, you can create content that is more likely to resonate with your audience.
9. You can quickly identify and solve problems.
Social listening tools are also a great way to quickly identify and solve customer service issues. By monitoring social media conversations through brand mentions, you can spot issues as they arise and take prompt action to resolve them. This helps to improve the overall customer experience and show your customers that you care about their satisfaction.
10. You can identify brand ambassadors.
Listening to social media will help you identify customers who are already raving fans and talk about your brand to their audience. These customers can then be turned into brand ambassadors who can help promote your company on their social networks.
Things to Remember When Using Social Listening Tools
1. There is a lot of data to sift through.
Using social listening tools can be overwhelming because there is a lot due to the sheer volume of data to go through. You need to make time to make sense of all the information you gather to come up with solid insights and sound recommendations for your brand.
2. You need to have a clear purpose.
Having a clear purpose is important when it comes to these tools. It is easy to get lost in all the data, so a defined purpose can be your guide to getting the data you need. Additionally, you won’t be able to effectively measure your results if you don’t know what you want to achieve. Always begin with the end in mind.
3. Social listening tools can be expensive.
While some tools come with a free trial period, the more popular ones can be expensive and may not fit into your budget. Choose the best social media listening tool that does not have to cost you an arm and a leg but can meet the minimum requirements you need to get your brand's top social media data.
4. Not all social listening tools are created equal.
There are a lot of different social listening tools on the market, and it can be confusing if you do not know the outcome you need when using them. Find time to do your research and schedule a demo, so you can shortlist the ones that best suit your specific needs.
5. Be prepared to act on the insights you gather.
Just because you have all this information at your disposal doesn’t mean anything will change if you don't take action. You need to plan how you will use the information you gathered from these social listening tools to improve your business. Otherwise, it will just be data to ignore.
6. Have patience when using these tools.
Social listening tools are great for keeping you up to date with how your brand is being viewed in the marketplace, but it takes a while before they start paying off. Keep in mind that this is a long-term strategy and you won’t see results overnight.
7. You need to be consistent with using the tools.
Consistency is key when it comes to using social listening tools. Set aside time each week to check in on your social media channels and see what people are saying about your brand. This way, you can quickly address any issues that come up and keep abreast of the latest trends in your industry.
8. Have a dedicated person or team to use the tools.
When you assign specific have a dedicated marketing team members who is responsible for to manageing these social listening tools, you can be sure that someone is always monitoring your social media channels. This person in charge can also sift through all the data to make sure real-time action is taken based on the insights gathered.
9. Be prepared to change your strategy.
Your social media strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate changes based on the insights gathered from social listening tools. Be prepared to make changes in your content, social media campaigns, and even your overall marketing strategy if needed.
Final Thoughts
In today's highly competitive marketplace, you must understand what people are saying about your brand. Social listening allows you to do just that. By using the tools mentioned, you get to monitor multiple social media channels, blogs, and websites for relevant content. You can also use social listening to identify opportunities and threats and make necessary changes to your marketing strategy. Furthermore, social listening can also help you identify influencers who could be valuable partners in your influencer marketing campaigns.
These valuable insights can help you adjust your marketing strategy in real-time, ensuring that you're always ahead of the curve. If you are not already using social listening, now is the time to start. The competitive advantages mentioned above are just some of the many benefits that social listening can provide. With these, you can be sure to stay ahead of the competition and continue delivering the best possible experience to your customers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are some of the advantages of Brand24?
Brand24's subscription rate is in the mid-range, starting at $99 per month (or $79 per month when billed annually). It is convenient to use as it shows you a mentions feed allowing you to reply in real-time directly from Brand24’s interface. You can also see if there has been a sudden surge in brand mentions which can indicate a possible issue with your brand. Moreover, it monitors over 25 million online sources in real time.
Can I use Hootsuite for social listening?
Yes, currently there are two ways for customers to use Hootsuite for social listening; Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch and Social Listening with Streams.
With Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch, business and enterprise customers have access to the actionable data from global social conversations, and get insights into customer trends, allowing them to stay ahead of competitors' activities.
Social listening with Streams is the perfect tool for keeping track of social activities and monitoring conversations, mentions, keywords, and hashtags in one place. This tool is available to all plans directly through the Hootsuite platform.
How can you find out when your brand appears in pictures?
Some social media listening tools can tell when your brand has appeared in a picture. Platforms with such a feature include Brandwatch (Image Insights), Brand24 (image monitoring), Digimind (visual listening), YouScan (visual discovery), and Talkwalker Analytics (visual listening).
Is Cyfe good?
Cyfe is much cheaper than most specialist products like 76Engage, Sprinklr, and YouScan. However, its vast dashboard options seem to highlight its social monitoring capabilities rather than social listening features.
Are there affordable social media listening tools for small businesses?
Zoho Social, Mention, Awario, and Mentionlytics are some of the top social media listening tools that will fit the budget of smaller businesses. Zoho’s Standard Plan costs $15 per month or $10 per month if you pay the full-year subscription. The monthly fee for Awario's Starter plan is $49. However, it drops to $29 when you pay for the entire year. The lowest plans of Mention (Solo) and Mentionlytics (Basic) are also worth $49 per month, but becomes $41 when billed annually.
