In today’s fast-paced digital era, social media has become an indispensable platform for businesses to engage with their audience, build brand presence, and drive growth.
However, navigating the vast and ever-changing social media landscape can be challenging for businesses. This is where social media listening tools come to the rescue.
But how?
These social listening software are designed to help businesses monitor, analyze, and derive valuable insights from the immense amount of data generated on social media platforms.
With these tools, businesses can track mentions, discussions, and sentiments about their brand, products, or services across multiple social media channels
By analyzing this data, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s preferences, pain points, and expectations.
These insights from social listening tools empower companies to tailor their social media marketing strategies, refine their products, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
So, considering a wide range of budgets and marketing needs, here are some of the best tools for social listening for some real action.
How we analyze and select Tools:
Our process involves actively weighing essential factors for consideration like user experience, G2 ratings and reviews, scalability, and more. We assess the proficiency of these tools in keyword tracking, dashboard, and user experience to rank them.
These top 10 social listening tools are curated with the aim of equipping marketers with the right tools to help grow their businesses.
Let’s get started!
Mentionlytics is one of the most complete social media listening software offering listening, analytics, and reporting solutions for businesses of all sizes. Powerful features, like sentiment analysis in every language, are included even in smaller pricing plans, making the tool the go-to platform for small businesses aiming to grow fast.
Larger companies and organizations can also benefit from more advanced features like Share of Voice, AI-powered mention clustering, and AI-powered emotion analysis to analyze competitors, identify market trends, and understand their audience needs.
With Mentionlytics, you can track online conversations from the entire web & social channels, filter results with Boolean searches, and understand the context behind the data. The highlight is the Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA), which provides personalized advice to improve performance and sends real-time alerts when a crisis is about to strike.
Supported platforms: TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Linkedin, Reddit, web, news, blogs, forums, and more.
Awario is one of the most popular social media listening tools that offers the best of both worlds — An enterprise-level feature set and good value for your money. Starting at $49/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 visualization toolkit Vizia. It lets you create custom dashboards and share marketing insights in style.
You can also explore these Brandwatch alternatives to reveal other features that could complement your reporting needs.
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 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 address any reputation crises promptly.
Supported platforms: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn
Audiense is the tool to mine audience insights with the utmost precision. This social listening software will help you understand the demographics of your audience with appropriate segmentation. Each segment is further broken down into useful categorizations like age, gender, location, interests, and 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 at 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 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 a great social media listening tool 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 social media listening 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 the top platform’s 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
Digimind is a powerful social listening and market intelligence platform that can help you transform data into actionable business insights. With this tool, you can track the conversations that matter the most to your brand in real-time across millions of sources and gain valuable insights to use to drive and improve your marketing strategy.
Under the umbrella of Digimind, there are multiple dedicated solutions like Brand Reputation, Competitive Intelligence, Consumer Insights, Influencer Identification, Campaign Analysis, and Trend tracking and innovation.
This cohesive system enables businesses to get comprehensive insights into the activities happening on social media. You can track specific keywords and topics, generate reports, and measure ROI for owned media.
Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit
Meltwater is another tool that is known for its remarkable social media monitoring and AI abilities. It provides AI-driven insights and examines millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites.
It filters out non-relevant mentions and assigns sentiment to the mentions that interest you. You can utilize Meltwater to set up searches, find out influencers, and check your online performance.
The tool includes multiple dashboards, including some that monitor, benchmark, and analyzes your online activities. It also allows you to customize your dashboards to meet your requirements better.
You can do 3 keywords per search and add multiple filters to refine the results. The best part is its sentiment analysis feature, with this, you can determine whether each mention is positive, negative, or neutral.
Last but not least, you can generate customized reports with key metrics, charts, and insights to measure your social media efforts.
Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Reddit , Linkedin , Twitch, Pinterest
How Do Social Listening Tools Work?
Social Listening Tools operate on a two-step basis:
Step 1 – Data Collection and Filtration
First, you define the keywords you want to track. These include keywords for your brand, competitors, and trending topics in real time.
This helps you identify all relevant conversations surrounding your brand. The keywords act as a filter that helps these listening tools scroll through multiple messages across social media platforms and accumulate relevant conversations as per your needs.
Once that is done, analyzing the data comes next.
Step 2 – Data Analysis and Reporting
These tools utilize NLP and other machine learning features to analyze sentiments across your brand – positive, negative, or neutral. These insights will help you understand what your customers like or dislike about your brand.
You also get to know trends like what customers are finding unique about your brand and what they are expecting from you in the coming future. You can also track opinions from influencers, frequently asked questions, and complaints.
We will discuss later in the blog how you can make use of these opinions.
All of this helps you get a pretty accurate idea of your brand image amongst your target audience.
That said, these are just some of the advantages you get from using these tools.
What Are the Advantages of Using Social Media Listening Tools?
1. Understanding Your Audience:
Social Listening tools help you uncover what exactly your audience wants from you. Imagine a tweet popping up on your feed from a delighted customer or an Instagram Story that mentions your product or service.
All of that is pretty useful, not only as promotion but also as feedback. It helps you gain insights into your customers directly.
Take the fintech company SoFi, for example, they effectively used social listening and understood a lack of understanding among its target audience regarding financial structuring and student loans. This led them to create educational content around these topics and position them as thought leaders.
2. Gaining Business and Product Intelligence:
Remember that it’s social listening and not hearing. You get a pool of valuable insights from these conversations for your product development and marketing teams.
Zappos, for instance, turned social feedback on their Twitter account and turned it into actionable information for their UX team. Feedback like this helps your team to learn about issues with your current product or service. These issues can be as small as a shipment delay or even a bug.
3. Effective Crisis Management
Prevention is always better than a cure. You can gather quick information on positive or negative sentiments online by analyzing them in real-time.
Once you find that, you can dive deeper into the reasons why. This helps you address PR challenges before they can escalate.
4. Building Customer Relationships and Acquisition:
You reassure your customers by joining in conversations, both positive and negative.
Sharing helpful information and addressing their concerns builds a genuine connection with your audience. This helps you become a go-to choice for your customers while building new connections.
5. Exploring Collaboration Opportunities:
We talked about using the opinions of influencers earlier. Tracking them is good, but building social media collaborations with these creators is even better.
Building organic collaborations with niche-specific influencers will help your brand stand out. It will showcase you as being helpful rather than just being sales-driven.
6. Keeping Tabs on Competitor and Industry Trends:
Keeping track of every trend is a hassle, even if you have the right tools. And there is a high chance of at least one of your competitors being aware of a new trend.
So, all you need to do is keep an eye on them in addition to the keywords you are already tracking. This will help you identify current social media trends in your industry that you might miss out on. You can even identify opportunity gaps and capitalize on them.
7. Enhancing Campaign Targeting:
Successful advertising campaigns have one thing in common – personalization. They are on-point in tapping into their customer’s emotions, concerns, and preferences.
So, if you are looking to start a social media advertising campaign, start tracking conversations related to it beforehand. This will help you understand your audience better and tailor your campaign accordingly.
Now, when we say tracking here, we are talking about social listening and not social monitoring.
If you also thought that both of them were the same, you are right and wrong at the same time.
What’s the Difference between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?
In one sentence, social monitoring falls under the umbrella of social listening.
Social monitoring helps you understand where. It helps you track all the mentions of your brand, be it your product, service, or campaign. Social listening helps you determine the why. It helps you dig into these mentions further and draw actionable insights from these mentions.
Taking the example of the famous ice cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, social monitoring tracks their mentions, while social listening explores the reasons behind these mentions, providing actionable insights such as flavor preferences or feedback on new releases.
So, now you know how monitoring and listening differ from each other. Also, we hope you have a more concrete knowledge of social listening and if you want more information on social media monitoring tools, you can visit our listicle.
However one question remains: among the listed social listening tools, how to find the right fit for you?
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Social Media Listening Tool
Consider the following 4 factors to determine the right social listening tool:
1. Goals
What do you want to use social listening for? – You need to answer this before you move to the other factors. These could be tracking your competitors, identifying trends, preventing negative PR, or even discovering new opportunities to innovate your brand.
Once you have identified that, the next thing is to look at the features that contribute towards your goal.
2. Features
The tool must have a user-friendly dashboard to help you understand the data, beginner to advanced filters for keyword tracking, notifications, sentiment and competitor analysis capabilites, analytics, customization, and even support.
You need to choose the features that are the right fit for you. When looking at the features, you also need to look at the next factor – budget.
3. Budget
You may select a certain feature that’s out of budget. So, now you have to decide whether the feature is worth extending your budget. If not, you can choose a different tool that aligns with your goals.
The final filter, or rather a factor to look at, is reviews.
4. Reviews
This is one is straightforward. You get to know directly from people who have used the tool you are thinking of buying.
Good for you, we have already included ratings and reviews from relevant sources for your convenience.
So, that’s all you need to know about a social listening tool to make your final decision.
Conclusion
Meaningful conversations exist on social media, and so do excellent opportunities. The most brilliant approach is to listen to these conversations carefully. You will get to discover more about your brand’s reputation from your audiences themselves.
Social listening tools can also assist you in managing your brand’s reputation by weeding out false claims. The beauty of social media listening is that its benefits are endless. It depends on how you wish to use it.
There’s always something to learn as long as you keep making efforts constantly. You can manage your overall social media activities with SocialPilot. You get a 14-day free trial to test out all its features including an AI Assistant for your social media posts.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media listening tool?
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.
Why is social listening important?
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.
How to conduct social listening?
Social listening is conducted with the help of social media listening tools like Awario, Keyhole, Brandwatch, Talkwalker, Audiense, Mention, etc. They are designed to find and analyze all mentions of a keyword online.
What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening?
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.
Can social listening help you find leads?
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.
How can social media listening increase customer advocacy?
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.
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