For most brands, social media is still an unexplored territory. Many people don’t realize that it has far more potential than merely delivering views and website traffic.
Brands are actively experimenting with more powerful marketing tactics than standard post shares. They can enjoy continuous social monitoring without missing a beat, thanks to social media listening tools and their mammoth potential.
Even as you read this, people are talking about you and your competition. These are critical consumer insights for any marketer.
You can further use social listening to gather and analyze mentions of your brand, products, hashtags, and anything else that can be found on social media on the whole and the web at large.
So considering a wide range of budgets and marketing needs, here’s a selection of the best social media listening tools for some real action.
Awario is one of the most popular social media listening tools that offers the best of both worlds — Enterprise-level feature set and good value for your money. Starting at $29/mo, you get full coverage of all social media, blogs, forums, news, and the web, so that no brand mention is left unnoticed. Use Boolean search to create complex queries and get spot-on results.
With every mention of your company pulled in real-time, you can improve customer support and retention. Awario will also bring you leads and influencers — potential customers and brand allies. You can engage with them right from the app, leveling up your social selling and influencer marketing as you go.
Possibly the most exciting part, Awario does comprehensive market research. The tool measures your share of voice, brings competition intel, analyzes the sentiment of conversations about you and other brands in your niche, delivers language and location insights about your customers, and then some.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, News, Blogs, Forums, Review Websites, Web
Keyhole joins others in the list of the best social media listening tools by offering effortless management of social media and influencer campaigns. Similar to other social media monitoring tools, Keyhole delivers real-time data, pulling reach and engagement metrics along the way.
The tool boasts the ultimate hashtag tracking and analytics functionality. It relies on artificial intelligence to predict hashtag performance, impressions, and reach. Furthermore, for every hashtag you track, Keyhole suggests other relevant hashtags in a word cloud.
Keyhole also relies on advanced machine learning for market research to deliver anticipated trends and keywords with the biggest potential.
Supported platforms: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, News, Forums
Brandwatch is Enterprise-level only, which means you can rely on it in both B2B and B2C marketing. The tool offers advanced social media monitoring and analytics, sorting all brand mentions for your quick overview and immediate feedback.
With Brandwatch, you also get insights on the trending topics and content your audience resonates best with. Combined with customer demographic analysis and influencer suggestions, you have all the tools for maxing your content performance and user engagement.
To elevate your internal reporting and turn social listening data into stunning visuals, use Brandwatch’s own visualization toolkit Vizia. It lets you create custom dashboards and share marketing insights in style.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Tumblr, blogs, forums, review and video sites, news
Talkwalker is a go-to option for multinational brands. It lets you monitor global marketing campaigns, measuring your impact by scanning social media, TV, broadcast, and print. Under the Enterprise plan, you can also use image recognition and track your logo across the web.
The tool is brilliant for translating your visibility campaigns performance into KPIs, linking marketing efforts to business metrics. You can then customize dashboards and present social listening findings to colleagues in different locations.
Like other social media listening tools, Talkwalker offers in-depth analytics. Make a note of any fluctuations in your reputation score or sentiment of conversations around your company to promptly address any reputation crises.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn
Audiense is the tool to mine audience insights to utmost precision. This social listening tool will help you understand your demographics with appropriate segmentation. Each segment is further broken down into useful categorizations like age, gender, locations, interests, brand mentions so you can plan a perfect target-focused campaign.
Audiense can also help you find relevant influencers of each segment so you can take their help to amplify your branding. Its AI technology scans through all data points to give you a peek of the mindset and psychology of your followers and target audience.
It also notifies you about your competitors and their real-time status. This game-changing information bridges the gap and can be used to create better digital marketing strategies.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok
Mention is a social media listening tool for real-time monitoring on the web at all times. The best part about Mention is its custom insights, so you only track what you want to with specific filters. Elevate your brand name by being a customer-centric and prompt responder of every brand mentioned across multiple channels.
Its competitive and sentiment analysis benefits will also let you win over your potential customers. Its keyword tracking feature also has boolean alerts to keep a tab on all the plausible combinations of your keywords.
You can also use its advanced features like engage which lets you send messages and reply to your brand mentions. Apart from these, Mention also offers API and slack integrations with social media management capabilities.
Supported platforms: Instagram, Twitter, News, Forums, Blogs, Review and Video Sites, Web
Brand24 is the next pick for social media listening tools to boost social media visibility. The competitive analysis is unrivaled in the industry. It lets you track marketing campaigns and overall social media performance in relevant numbers, so you make informed decisions at each stage.
It also monitors keywords across popular platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, etc. Get a detailed insight into your overall social media reach, interactions, and hashtag performance.
The best feature is that it can categorize your brand mentions into positive and negative sentiments to monitor your online reputation. You can even download summarized reports in PDF and Excel formats.
Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Forums, Web, Comments
BrandMentions is a dedicated platform for brand monitoring, social listening, and reputation management.
This platform allows you to permanently monitor the web and social media for visible and hidden mentions of any business, track trending topics and proactively launch your brand into the conversation.
With one of the most comprehensive mentions databases out there, BrandMentions historically monitors sources like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, and Quora.
Ideal for marketers and businesses who want to keep a close eye on trending industry topics, relevant influencers, social media metrics, and unlinked brand mentions.
With the help of smart alerts, BrandMentions helps users relax, knowing that top platforms reviews and sentiment analysis are just a few clicks away. Advanced features like image monitoring, API, and white-label reports are also available.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Quora
Conclusion
Meaningful conversations exist on social media, and so do excellent opportunities. The most brilliant approach to tap into these conversations and let others discover more about your brand’s existence is to use social media listening tools.
These tools can also assist you in managing your brand’s reputation by weeding out false claims. The beauty of social media monitoring is that its benefits are endless.
There’s always something to learn as long as you keep making efforts constantly. You can manage your overall social media activities with SocialPilot. Take advantage of its 14-day free trial to learn everything there is to know and mend the gaps.
A social media listening tool is built to search social media and the web for all mentions of a keyword. The results can be used for reputation management, competition and market research, customer support, social selling, and SEO.
Social media listening allows companies to know everything that’s being said about them online. By analyzing social media conversations, brands can monitor reputation, get competition intel, generate leads, and provide instant customer support.
Social listening is conducted with the help of social media listening tools like SocialPilot, Awario, Brandwatch, etc. They are designed to find and analyze all mentions of a keyword online.
While both social media monitoring and social listening rely on scraping social media for mentions of a keyword that appears in publicly available posts, social listening covers the web. It delivers broader analytics like audience insights, influencers, and trending topics.
Social listening can help you in finding leads by monitoring industry conversations. You can directly address your customers' pain points and even compete with tactful strategies to appear as a suitable problem solver. Social listening also flares up word-of-mouth marketing to zeroin qualified leads.
Social media listening increases customer advocacy by letting you know of every social mention, bad or good. Your immediate response to all kinds of feedback and queries makes you more legitimate and trustworthy. Each brand response shows the leads that you care about them, and they can rely on you at each step of the customer journey.
About the Author
Jimit Bagadiya
Jimit Bagadiya is the co-founder and CEO at SocialPilot. He brings 13 years of leadership experience in building SaaS platforms. He divides his time between working with his team on product engineering and maintaining a good customer happiness quotient. He aims to bring SocialPilot to the forefront of social business.
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