Be it a customer, a third-party reviewer, or the general public, when someone mentions your brand on social media, you need to know about it. Is the conversation around your brand positive? Is a negative review going viral? Maybe your brand is a part of a new TikTok trend.
Keeping a manual track of all these mentions is practically impossible; social media listening tools make it a breeze. These tools monitor social media platforms for specific keywords, slogans, hashtags, and mentions of your brand.
They also provide comprehensive reports and analytics for you to decipher if the general sentiment around your brand is positive or negative. You can then use this information to shape your marketing strategies.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of monitoring and analyzing social media platforms and online conversations to understand what's being said about a brand, product, or industry. This involves tracking mentions of specific keywords, topics, competitors, and customer feedback to gather insights. Social listening helps businesses and marketers in several ways:
- Understanding Audience Sentiment and Trends: By tracking conversations, you can gauge how your audience feels about your brand and identify emerging trends.
- Identifying Opportunities for Engagement: Engage with your audience by responding to their comments, answering questions, and addressing concerns.
- Tracking Brand Reputation and Managing Crises: Monitor brand mentions of your brand to quickly identify and respond to potential PR crises.
- Gathering Competitive Intelligence: Keep an eye on what your competitors are doing and how their audience is reacting.
- Informing Content Strategy and Marketing Decisions: Use the insights gathered to refine your content strategy and make more informed marketing decisions.
By analyzing this data, companies can make smarter decisions and create more targeted and effective marketing strategies. Social listening tools, such as Sprout Social and Brand24, make this process easier by providing access to millions of social media posts and influencer content, as well as generating visual reports to help you understand your data better. Consider these tools as your brand's virtual ears, constantly scanning the digital world for any mention of you.
1. Sprout Social
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, WhatsApp, Pinterest, Threads
Plans: Standard $249/user/month, Professional $399/user/month, Advanced $499/user/month.
Sprout Social is undeniably one of the best social listening tools with a dedicated Listening tool that processes up to 50,000 posts per second. The tool can listen to around 600 million messages daily, ensuring nothing slips through the cracks.
Sprout Social listening features
According to Forrester’s Total Economic Impact report about Sprout Social, the platform’s tools helped customers achieve a 233% return on investment (ROI), with payback within six months of usage.
Key Features
The query builder is one of the most notable features of Sprout Social. Businesses can build listening queries to monitor keywords and hashtags related to them. There’s no prior experience or Boolean knowledge required to get started with this feature. Instead, you can use one of the tool’s pre-made templates, such as competitor analysis, industry insights, brand health, and event monitoring.
Sprout Social query builder
Sprout Social also uses AI technology to uncover meaningful insights from conversations happening across social media platforms. Businesses can get the full picture of the impact of their mentions without changing the queries periodically.
Instead, they can filter the data collected by Sprout Social to only see the vertical they want to focus on, including events, products, media, and more.
The Word Cloud feature in Sprout Social allows users to visualize the most frequently used words and phrases in their mentions. Businesses can identify important data points and insights for future campaigns with this feature.
Sprout Social Word Cloud
Besides audience analysis, Sprout Social also facilitates crisis management for businesses. Brands can set custom alerts to monitor evolving situations and respond promptly to any potential crisis.
Sprout Social further allows competitor analysis by offering share of voice (SOV) metrics. Businesses can compare their social media presence to that of their competitors and then close the gap if there is any.
The social listening features also assist you in finding influencers and ambassadors for your brand. Businesses can measure the impact of posts made by ambassadors and use that data to build partnerships and collaborations.
Sprout Social supports integrations with a multitude of platforms, including the most popular social media platforms. In addition, the tool offers integration with Shopify, Salesforce, Tableau, Hubspot, Zendesk, Google My Business, Trustpilot, Yelp, and more. That way, you can monitor every platform you have a presence on.
Sprout Social integrations
Success Strategy
96.5 (WTDY-FM) Philadelphia, a RADIO.com pop station in the Entercom brand, used Sprout Social’s listening features to find the winner for its #ArtistOfTheSummer competition. The listeners voted for their favorite artists in nine rounds of polls, bringing millions of messages and a ton of attention to the station.
The radio station used the Conversation Overview feature in Sprout Social after every poll to get the aggregates of the votes. Apart from that, the station also monitored the usage of the hashtag “#ArtistOfTheSummer” and what people were saying about it on social media.
Sprout Social Conversation Overview feature
MTV’s Hottest Summer Superstar competition, another hashtag-based voting system, was also happening at the same time. Since the radio station’s topic query was the same as MTV’s, it also got surface insights into a competing event.
Sprout Social Word Cloud feature
Sprout Social’s listening tool allowed 96.5 radio station to go through 21.9 million messages from 637,000 unique individuals to find its winner: Louis Tomlinson. Not only that, the station also got 168,000 new X followers and saw over 17 million impressions on Instagram and X.
96.5 radio station case study results
The station’s success is a testament to Sprout Social’s multi-level benefit to brands. Its social listening tools combine audience insights and trend analysis with competitor research to magnify the results of social campaigns.
2. Brandwatch Consumer Intelligence
Channels: Facebook (and Messenger), Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, WhatsApp, YouTube, Google, Reddit, Tumblr
Plans: Upon request.
Brandwatch takes social media listening to the next level by coupling it with its consumer intelligence platform. The tool collects data from multiple sources, including social media platforms, forums, blogs, news sites, and review websites. It then analyzes this data to provide brands with insights into consumer behavior, demographics, trends, and sentiment.
Brandwatch Listen
Trusted by brands like Toyota and McDonald’s, Brandwatch empowers you with data-driven decision-making. You can use it to identify what people are saying about your brand as a whole or your products, events, collaboration, and even the competition.
Since all this information is relayed in real-time, it’s easier to leverage Brandwatch’s insights for crisis management, trend forecasting, and campaign optimization. You can also use it to track the success of your social media marketing campaigns.
Key Features
Brandwatch’s listening tool lets you measure your mentions by day. You can see a snapshot of the whole week to determine which days had a higher volume of conversations about your brand.
For a deeper-level analysis, each mention is shown with certain metrics to tell you of its sentiment. The notification includes the content, sentiment, reach, date, time, and platform-based score.
Mention volume by day
Brandwatch also shows you an overall view of your brand on different platforms. There are visual charts to show brands the proportions of positive, negative, and neutral mentions on major social media platforms, blogs, and forums.
Since the data is updated regularly, brands can also see if their mentions have dropped or increased over a period of time. Brandwatch shows you the percentage of this change to make it easy to decide when it’s time to take action.
Brandwatch sentiment analysis
If there are any unusual trends in the data, Brandwatch’s AI smart alert automatically pings you about it so that you can take action immediately.
With 48 Boolean operators, it’s easy to specify your searches to the T. Brandwatch keeps a year of historical data for you to track important topics and trends over time. The tracked mentions are not limited to English; the tool also gathers data from other languages, making it a truly global solution.
Mention volume peaks
You can connect Brandwatch’s Listen tool with its Engage feature to analyze beyond social media. The Engage feature further lets you dive into your mentions on niche forums and other community pages.
Similarly, the Consumer Research tool gathers insights from 1.4 trillion posts across 100 million online sources to inform you about your customers. Brandwatch’s AI also specializes in image analysis, letting you get insights from visual mentions.
Brandwatch Listen feed
Its customer classifiers are powered by Brightview, allowing you to train the system to form data categories based on your preferences. So, instead of positive and negative social media sentiment, you can also categorize data by campaigns, platforms, products, events, or other factors that are specific to your brand.
Success Strategy
Pierre Fabre, a dermo-cosmetic and pharmaceutical company, used Brandwatch
“for crisis management and for monitoring the social conversation to see what people were saying about our brands,”
according to the company’s social media intelligence manager, Céline Cassagnes Febvre.
In 2020, the company created a social listening strategy that was handled by its CORE (Communication, Reputation, and Engagement) department. The department created Social Hub as a subdivision to monitor the brand’s online reputation.
Pierre Fabre got Brandwatch on board to make it possible. In 2021, when the company experienced a crisis, Brandwatch set real-time alerts for the crisis communication team to be aware of all information shared on social networks and in the press. With this data, the crisis team was able to guide its responsive communication strategy.
Brandwatch impact on Pierre Febvre
In another instance, the company used Brandwatch’s social media listening to launch its Naturactive line of menstrual health products. Brandwatch’s data helped Pierre Fabre discover that most of the conversations around the female experience were happening on forums.
So, the company used forums as a primary source of information to design its SEO and content marketing campaigns. Since Brandwatch highlighted the exact keywords women were using, the company could enter the market by “establishing a relatable vocabulary that resonates with consumers.”
Brandwatch made the product launch a success, which ultimately led to long-term success for its sub-brand, Naturactive, helping it win the Product of the Year 2022 in France.
3. Brand24
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Linkedin, Medium, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch.
Plans: Individual $79/month, Team $149/month, Pro $199/month, Enterprise $399/month, if paid annually. Pay the yearly subscription to get up to two months free. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
Brand24 is an AI social media listening and consumer research tool trusted by over 4,000 brands, including Uber, Samsung, and Stanford University. With its AI features, the tool makes it seamless to track your brand’s mentions across social media platforms, blogs, news sites, forums, review sites, podcasts, and more.
The Brand24 Summary dashboard is where you get a bird’s eye view of your brand’s online presence. It shows you the total number of mentions, impressions, and reach of your brand. You can also see how many of the mentions are positive and negative.
There’s also a line graph that shows the change in brand mentions over time. Since the tool collects mentions from over 25 million sources in real-time, you’ll always be the first to know what your customers are saying about you.
Brand24 dashboard
Key Features
The most comprehensive feature of Brand24 is its Mentions Feed. Think of it like your social media news feed, but instead of seeing what your friends are sharing, you see all the conversations happening online about your brand.
Mentions Feed
The tool also shows a Discussions Volume Chart, which helps you identify sudden changes in brand mentions. If any of the changes peak, you can start crisis management and leverage positive publicity, whichever of the two the case may be.
For the brand mentions that get a significant reach, Brand24 gives them an Influence Score. Mentions with higher scores can be your future brand advocates or online ambassadors.
Brand24 also sends alerts that you can customize according to your preferences. For example, you can choose to get in-app or email notifications for negative or positive mentions that get more than 50k impressions.
You can export the sentiment analysis data from the tool as PDFs and infographics to share with your team or clients. If only data from a certain platform is needed, Brand24 allows that, too. Brands can filter data by number of visits, sentiment, mention source, platform, and other factors.
Mention analytics
Brand24’s reports include a summary of mentions, mention coverage graphs, the number of mentions per category, a numerical summary, and other visualizations.
If you need detailed insights about the social media listening data you’ve collected, you can use Brand24’s AI. All it takes is a quick click to convert the visual and textual data into practical guidance.
You also get a ChatGPT-like AI-powered virtual assistant that can answer questions about your brand mentions and brand health. Brand 24’s AI also conducts topic analysis, helping you get trend-based insights for your social media campaigns.
Brand24 AI assistant
Success Strategy
The efficiency of Brand24 lies in the fact that the tool doesn’t only show brands the positive, but also the negative, so that they can act on the feedback. For example, when Uber released its new rider app, the company saw a lot of enthusiasm around it on social media.
In just 2 days, the online discussions saw a 100% increase. However, amidst these discussions, some users were not happy with the app. Brand24 helped Uber identify them.
Uber mentions
Uber used Brand24 to identify negative reviews so that it could discover what people did not like about the app. Social media listening, particularly on X, helped Uber identify features that people wanted to see in its app, as well as features that didn’t serve their intended purpose and needed to be modified.
Krzysiek Radoszewski, the marketing lead at Uber’s Eastern Europe arm reported that social listening helped the company satisfy its users needs, resulting in “an 11% increase in new users, and a 7% increase in average number of rides per user.”
Uber app optimization
Since Brand24 provided regular reports on the social media discussions around Uber, the company was able to act swiftly and make necessary changes to improve its app and overall customer experience.
4. Iconosquare
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok with Pinterest and YouTube coming soon.
Plans: Single $49/month, Teams $79/month, when paid annually. Customized pricing for unlimited users. Save up to 22% for yearly plans. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
Iconosquare is a social media-centric tool that lets you master listening and manage all conversations around your brand on social media. The tool’s distinguishing feature is its focus on competitor listening.
Competitor overview
You can select your competitors and track their social media activities, benchmarking them against yours. Iconosquare facilitates social listening across X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok.
Key Features
Iconosquare allows you to benchmark your industry by tracking conversations on social media. The tool collects data from other competing brands in your industry, providing you insights about current trends so that you can determine where you stand.
You can also track relevant hashtags, whether for specific campaigns or your brand as a whole. Depending on your frequency of social listening analysis, you can schedule automated monthly reports to track your progress over time.
Iconosquare comparative table
Iconosquare’s Conversations feature shows you all comments across your social media channels in one place. You can mark these comments as read or unread. The platform also lets you reply to comments.
With Iconosquare, you do not have to do the math yourself. The tool conducts sentiment analysis for all your brand mentions on social media and lets you export them for further analysis.
Social media reporting
A unique feature of this tool is the Random Comment Picker. If you run contests or giveaways, you can use the Random Comment Picker to randomly select a winner from all the comments on your post.
Random Comment Picker
Success Strategy
Racing 92, a European rugby team, realized it was spending too much time collecting social media data. So, the teams switched to Iconosquare to get precise statistics.
Icnonosquare helped the team refine its social media content by providing insight into how people react to it. The team was also able to benchmark its performance against 13 other rugby clubs and create targeted campaigns based on data-driven insights.
Racing 92 team
Jeanne Mallet, the spokesperson for the team’s communications department, said:
”I spend 50% less time on social media reporting, which means I can show more data than before in my monthly reports!”
Racing 92 also collaborates with partners to create content. When these stakeholders want to see results, Racing 92 can show them the data through Iconosquare.
Iconosquare reports
The tool’s social media listening strategy is so effective because it keeps industry benchmarks and competitors in check. With this comparative data, you can see your brand’s standing in the market and decide on improvements to make.
5. Agorapulse
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, X (Twitter), LinkedIn
Plans: Standard €49/month, Professional €79/month, Advanced €119/month, billed annually.
Agorapulse is a social media listening platform that lets you take control of your social interactions and discover the conversations around your industry, brand, and competitors. The tool lets you capture conversations from thousands of news websites, social media networks, and millions of blogs.
Agorapulse’s social listening capabilities are not limited to your brand alone. You can also conduct industry-wide searches for the latest trends and topics.
Agorapulse listening
The tool gives you volume, engagement, and sentiment metrics for the past seven days for the topics of your choice. Agorapulse also gives its own sentiment score to topics and indicates how it has increased in the past few days. It further breaks the sentiment down into positive, negative, and neutral, all compiled in a visual chart.
Agorapulse Sentiment Analysis Score
Key Features
Agorapulse’s key feature is its brand name and mentions dashboard. The dashboard breaks down the number of engagements you get per day. It gives you an idea of the best-performing posts that have driven a lot of reactions.
Agorapulse listening tool
With this tool’s social listening search bar, you can also search for specific keywords and hashtags. You can use this to find topics and posts that are doing well in your niche.
The tool also lets you find keywords and terms your customers use to discover products on social media. Similarly, Agorapulse shows you the sentiment around your marketing campaigns and the keywords people are using to react to them.
Agorapulse Social Listening
Since the tool also shows you which of your audience members’ social media posts drive the most engagement, you can use it to identify and collaborate with nano influencers and ambassadors who have a high reach and impact within your target market.
Success Strategy
Agorapulse works so well for social listening because it doesn’t end its offering there. It goes on to allow users to respond to comments from the same platform and even publish new content to Instagram within its dashboard.
TravelMedia.ie used all of these features in Agorapulse for efficient community management. Since the agency managed a range of brands in the travel industry, it needed a tool that would aggregate all social media interactions in one place.
TravelMedia reports
Agorapulse’s dashboard proved to be the right place for the agency. Even better, the agency enjoyed the ability to generate informative reports to share with its clients.
TravelMedia also analyzed the comments and sentiment around social media ads through Agorapulse. It gave the agency an overview of how well a campaign was performing, and which keywords or phrases were doing well.
Robb Wolf, the best-selling author of The Paleo Solution, also used Agorapulse for the same purpose. Previously, the author was using multiple platforms to do each of these tasks individually.
But with Agorapulse, Wolf could read the comments on all of his social media platforms in the same dashboard. He could also respond to these comments and keep his readers engaged. The higher engagement resulted in an estimated 20% increase in sales for his books.
6. Digimind – An Onclusive Company
Channels: No specifics — only mentions 25+ global and regional social media platforms
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.
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.
7. BrandMentions
Channels: Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Facebook, Foursquare, X (formerly Twitter), Pinterest, YouTube
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.
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.
8. YouScan
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Twitch, Reddit, Telegram, App Store, Yelp, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Booking
Plans: Starter Plan for SMBs $299/month (billed annually), Unlimited Plan for brands and agencies—custom pricing.
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.
9. BuzzSumo
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest
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.
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.
10. Talkwalker Analytics
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Weibo, Mixcloud, Flickr, Foursquare, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Google Play Store, Amazon, ReviewTrackers, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor
Plans: Listen, Analyze, Business, Premium. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Talkwalker for information.
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.
11. Meltwater
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitch, Sina Weibo, Douyin, WeChat
Plans: Essentials, Advanced, Suite, Enterprise. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Meltwater for information.
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.
12. Quid
Channels: The website doesn’t list Quid’s supported social channels.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Quid for information.
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.
13. Ipsos Synthesio
Channels: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Sina Weibo, YouTube, Instagram
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Synthesio for information.
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.
14. Cyfe
Channels: Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube
Plans: Starter $19/month, Standard $29/month, Pro $49/month, Premier $89/month, Agency $150+/month. They also offer a 14-day free trial.
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.
15. Keyhole
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube
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.
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.
16. Mention
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Pinterest
Plans: Solo $49/month, Pro $99/month, Pro Plus $179/month, Company – custom pricing. Discounts for annual payment. 14-day free trial.
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.
17. Awario
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Vimeo
Plans: Starter $49/month, Pro $149/month, Enterprise $399/month. Discounts for annual payment. 14-day free trial.
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.
18. ReviewInc
Channels: 600 review sites, including Google Maps and Facebook Reviews.
Plans: Monitor, Basic, Pro, Enterprise. Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact ReviewInc for information.
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.
19. 76Engage
Channels: The website doesn’t list the platform’s supported sites or social channels.
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact 76Engage for information.
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.
20. Sprinklr
Channels: Over 30 social and messaging channels, including Facebook, Messenger, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, Line
Plans: Enterprise plan for Sprinklr Insights (where social listening service belongs)—custom pricing. Contact Sprinklr for information.
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.
21. Emplifi
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter
Plans: Essential $2,400/year. Standard, Business, Enterprise – custom pricing. Contact Emplifi’s sales team for information.
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.
22. Mentionlytics
Channels: Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter)
Plans: Basic $49/month, Essential $139/month, Advanced $249/month, Pro $399/month, Agency/Enterprise–custom pricing.
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.
23. Zoho Social
Channels: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok, Google Business Profile, YouTube, Pinterest, Mastodon
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.
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.
24. Critical Mention
Channels: X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, YouTube, Facebook
Plans: Prices aren’t shown on the website. Contact Critical Mention for information.
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.
25. Hootsuite
Channels: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok
Plans: Professional $99/month, Team $249/month, Enterprise—custom pricing. They offer a 30-day free trial and discounts for skipping the trial period.
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.
How Do Social Listening Tools Work?
Social listening tools work in one of two ways. They are either automated to gather and process pre-defined data or show data based on the queries or keywords you search for.
For example, if you're a shoe brand, and you want to find the current talk around sneakers on social media, you can use a social listening tool to gather data on the keywords "sneakers'' on your desired platforms.
Similarly, you can use competitive benchmarking to see how this keyword is being used by other shoe brands. Social listening tools, such as Emplifi, give you access to millions of social media posts and influencer content. You can use this data to replicate your competitors' successful social media content strategies.
Source: emplifi.io
Alternatively, you can customize the tool to gather data on specific hashtags or mentions of your brands on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Brand24 works along this principle. Brands can automate reporting and get a feel for how their company or product is perceived online.
If a brand has started a hashtag-based marketing campaign, it can also track the relevant hashtag. Brand24 will measure the hashtag's reach and volume of mentions.
Brand24 hashtag measurement
In both mechanisms of action, the next step is reporting. Most social media listening tools make their data human-friendly by creating visual reports.
Some tools also have integrated AI assistants that help you derive insights from your reports. For example, Brand 24 has an AI virtual assistant that answers your questions about your social media data.
How to Choose a Social Media 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?
Source: khoros.com
Social listening is a broader concept than social monitoring. In the latter, you only track and respond to direct interactions with your brand or specific keywords. It's a relatively short-term solution and is reactive in approach.
In monitoring, your goal is to keep your followers engaged. You respond to their inquiries, resolve complaints, and thank them for positive feedback.
Social listening is a more proactive and long-term approach. Its goal is to generate actionable insights that you cannot only use for social media strategies but also for crisis management, product development, brand awareness, and overall brand reputation management.
In social listening, you track not only direct interactions with your brand but also mentions of your brand or industry keywords that may not directly involve your company. For example, person A may not comment on your Instagram post, but they may use your brand name in a tweet expressing their negative opinion about your product.
By tracking this mention and the comments underneath it, you can decipher if other people also feel the same about your brand. You can then work on addressing the underlying issue and improving your brand's reputation.
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.
What Should You 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.
