Social listening tools are online platforms that monitor and track brand mentions, specific conversations, hashtags, or any keywords across various social media channels. With social media now playing an integral role in our lives and shaping digital marketing trends, social listening has become a crucial strategy for many businesses. To put it simply, these tools enable you to “listen” to what people are saying about your business, even if they don’t use the usual @mention feature.
For example, if you own an app, a social media listening tool can help you find out what customers think about your new features or updates. Using these insights, you can adjust your decisions and move toward creating something that your customers really appreciate and enjoy, generating more leads, and conversions. Isn’t it every marketer’s dream?
In this article, we’re going to explore the best social listening tools, the features they provide, and tips on how you should use these tools to get better results.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
- Why Do You Need a Social Media Listening Tool?
- 10 Best Social Listening Tools to Monitor Brand Mentions
- 11 Factors to Consider Before Choosing a Social Listening Tool
- Tips to Make the Most of Your Social Listening Tool
- Try Social Listening Tools for Free
- FAQs
{Updated on 21/07/2023}
Why Do You Need Social Listening Tools?
Social media listening tools are not just useful to monitor brand mentions, hashtags, or keywords. Although the main goal of using these tools is to gain deep insights about your target customers, they can give you deeper levels of insights into your opportunities to grow and your competitors as well.
generally, having a social listening tool let you:
- Identify negative feedback and answer quickly before they damage your online reputation.
- Understand customer needs and preferences
- Monitor the activity of your competitors to detect any market gap
- Improve customer engagement and brand loyalty.
- Measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns by tracking social listening metrics like sentiment and brand awareness KPIs
These are just a few of the many benefits of social listening that these tools can provide. Now, let’s check some of the absolute best social listening tools in the market.
10 Best Social Listening Tools to Monitor Brand Mentions
We have curated a list of the best social listening tools that offer various features that takes your social media strategy to the next level.
Mentionlytics
Trusted by big names, politicians, and many businesses of all sizes, Mentionlytics is one of the best all-in-one platforms, specifically designed for social listening and social search.
It let you get actionable insights based on analyzing millions of online conversations and social media interactions by using advanced algorithms and big data analysis.
Using this listening tool, you can create your own dashboard to track and monitor social mentions on both all major social media channels and the web. Mentionlytics also lets you track key social media metrics such as reach, engagement, sentiment, follower growth, share of voice, and much more.
Mentionlytics’ Social Listening Features
Here are some of the social media listening features that Mentionlytics offers:
- Social Media Monitoring
Mentionlytics monitors social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, and others for brand social mentions, hashtags, or any phrase that you desire (your products, services, or app features for example) and competitors’ activity.
- Web Monitoring
Mentionlytics monitors news sites, blogs, forums, and other online sources for brand mentions.
- Keyword Tracking
The tool can track specific keywords and phrases related to a brand or industry, allowing businesses to stay up-to-date with the latest trends and topics. For example, if you are in a tech niche, you may want to be the first one to hear about specific terms “Artificial Intelligence,” “Tesla”, or ” #IoT.”
- Sentiment Analysis
Mentionlytics analyzes the sentiment of brand mentions, so you can understand how your customers feel and how many negative or positive reactions are there about your brand.
- Automated Reports
With Mentionlytics reports and ready-to-use templates, you can get real-time data and insights to make better decisions.
Share of voice report by Mentionlytics
- Advanced Search Options
It allows very strong filtering using advanced boolean queries, delivering only relevant to your Brand or Product or Competitor mentions.
- Influencer Identification
Mentionlytics can identify key influencers talking about a brand or industry, so you can connect with them and leverage their influence to reach more people.
- Social Intelligent Assistant
Last, but not least, what makes Mentionlytics unique compared to other social listening tools is its Social Intelligent Assistant or SIA.
With the help of SIA, you can get actionable and personalized advice for your brand using the power of AI.
Mentionlytics’ AI advisor recommendation on Social Listening
- Integration with Slack
To make your life easier, you can receive notifications on your Slack channels whenever someone mentions your brand.
- Performing more Accurate Social Listening with Filters
With a wide range of useful filters on the platform, Mentionlytics has made it super easy to find exactly what you want.
Category Filters in Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics Pricing
Mentionlytics offers a free trial with access to all of the premium features: Get started with a free version here!
After a trial, the app offers flexible billing plans for all budgets, starting from only $69.
Ready to try Mentionlytics?
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media listening tool that offers many features to help businesses manage their social media accounts, engage with their audience, and measure the impact of their social media activity.
Hootsuite Features
Hootsuite Insights allows businesses to monitor brand mentions, track industry trends, and analyze customer sentiment in real-time. In addition, the tool lets businesses tailor their social media strategies based on their target audience’s demographics and behavior.
Hootsuite Pricing
Hootsuite pricing starts from €99 per month for a professional plan. There’s an option for the free trial for professional and team plans.
The Sprout Social listening platform allows customers to gain insight from their social media data by connecting with audiences, streamlining publishing workflows, and collaborating in real time.
Sprout Social Features
With its easy-to-use features, this tool provides great customer service and has gained high user adoption due to its ability to measure social reach.
In addition to providing a detailed report on social mentions across social platforms, it is ideal for monitoring brands. It has a high ROI and a high adoption rate. Sprout Social allows brands to understand their audience, uncover current trends, and accordingly, inform their social media campaigns.
Sprout Social Pricing
Sprout Social plan starts from $249 per month.
Bonus: Dive into a list of competitors and alternatives to Sprout Social.
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is the fourth option on our list of social listening tools which is primarily a content analysis tool. However, it is also used as a social media listening tool. It enables you to uncover platform insights, track mentions, and get social engagement data. It gives a complete package of social media monitoring to up your level of performance on social platforms.
Buzzsumo Features
It gives you an insight into the online mentions of your brand and engagement stats for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. Buzzsumo also offers an alert feature where you can create alerts to track important insights. It includes brand mentions, competitor mentions, content from a website, keyword mentions, backlinks, or an author. However, you can customize it and set your parameters for alerts according to your needs.
Buzzsumo Pricing
The basic plan of Buzzsumo starts at $199 per month/user for one alert.
Meltwater
Meltwater is yet another social listening tool that lets you monitor, research, and analyze social media activities. It also offers several features that can help you understand the perception your audience holds for you. With the help of insights gained through it, you can create customized messages for your audience.
Meltwater Features
Meltwater helps to examine millions of posts daily from different platforms be it social media, blogs, and news sites. You can filter out irrelevant mentions which are not related to your brand. It also assigns sentiment to the mentions that pick your interest.
Meltwater Pricing
Unfortunately, Meltwater does not offer fixed pricing plans. You have to book a meeting with them to get the offer.
Bonus: Check out the list of Meltwater Competitors and Alternatives.
NetBase
NetBase is another social listening tool that provides real-time insight into customer conversations. It helps to understand important customer attributes, emotions, behaviors, hashtags, people, and brands through AI. It processes millions of social media posts daily and also uses non-social data to help businesses grow online.
NetBase Features
You can capture all the conversations about your business across multiple locations. It also helps to analyze the latest emoji and language used on social media platforms. If you want to know when your brand appears in pictures, AI helps you better in this regard. It helps you find popular user-generated content relating to your brand on visual platforms, such as Instagram. As it tracks all social media activities, it also helps you track if anybody has misused your logo.
NetBase Pricing
Unfortunately, NetBase does not offer fixed pricing plans. You have to book a meeting with them to get the offer.
Digimind Social is another social listening tool that lets you know the public opinion about your brand. It offers AI-powered social media listening services and real-time software. All this helps the brands to listen, engage, analyze, and report.
Digimind Social Features
With this social media listening tool, you can access to all social conversations about your brand. It splits them into categories and gives a sentiment rating to each mention. It could be positive, negative, or neutral. It can also integrate well with another social listening tool, Hootsuite. This helps you to manage all of your social activities together. You can also join the conversations that mention your brand.
Digimind Social Pricing
Digimind does not offer fixed pricing plans, however, you have to book a meeting with them to get the offer.
Cyfe
Cyfe offers a dynamic and all-in-one business dashboard that helps you visualize and monitor all social media activities. It provides various features, including social media, web analytics, marketing strategies, sales, support, and infrastructure. It is the perfect dashboard template that connects all your data and starts monitoring essential KPIs.
Cyfe Features
This social media listening tool helps you pull data from popular services like Google, Salesforce, Xero, QuickBooks, and many more services with pre-built widgets. Also, you can easily build your own widget according to your needs. Also, it uses real-time data and metrics that help to track your and competitors’ activities across different platforms. It includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Vimeo.
Cyfe Pricing
Cyfe billing starts with the Starter Plan $19/mo for a Dashboards &1 User
Reputology
Another social listening tool on our list is Reputology, which acts as a gauge of how your business is doing and points out the key areas which need improvement. If you want to monitor, respond to, and analyze all of your online reviews from a single point, then Reputology is a good choice.
Reputology Features
It offers 24/7 review monitoring, allowing you to review around 100 review sites. These include Google My Business, Facebook and local search directories, employee review sites, app directories, and more. Reputology helps you to track reviews related to your locations, products, and services from a single dashboard. This helps to leverage reviews to grow your business. Its semantic analysis technology helps to convert unstructured content from reviews & feedback into actionable data.
Reputology Pricing
The single-location plan ranges from $29 – $49 per month for one location.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is one of the powerful social listening tools that take care of your social media presence. Not only does it monitor your social media platforms; but it also tracks websites, print, TV, and radio broadcasts. It has a proven KPI framework that is used to benchmark your brand campaigns.
Talkwalker Features
Talkwalker helps you measure customer sentiments and your brand health. It connects efforts to your results and provides an instant report that helps to strategize your campaigns. You can also find the best stories and influencers to promote your brand online that amplify your brand message and leave a global impact.
Talkwalker Pricing
It starts with the basic Plan for $9,600 per year.
11 Factors to Consider Before Choosing a Social Listening Tool
Selecting the right social listening tool for your needs is crucial, and it begins with asking the right questions. Here are a few important things you should consider:
1. Coverage
How extensive is the tool’s reach? Can it monitor all the social media platforms you’re interested in, as well as blogs, forums, news sites, and other web content? You’ll want a tool that can listen to conversations wherever they’re happening online.
2. Real-Time Monitoring
Does your chosen social listening tool provide real-time updates? In today’s fast-paced social media landscape, you want a tool that alerts you to mentions and conversations as they happen so you can respond promptly.
3. Sentiment Analysis
Can the tool gauge the sentiment behind posts? This feature helps you understand not just what is being said, but also the tone – whether it’s positive, negative, or neutral. It’s an effective way to measure sentiment about your brand.
4. Ease of Use
Is the tool user-friendly? You don’t want to spend all your time trying to figure out a complex interface. It should be intuitive and easy to navigate, enabling you to focus on interpreting the data instead.
5. Analytical Capabilities
How robust are social listening tools’ reporting and analytics? You want a tool that can provide insightful reports and data visualizations, helping you understand the bigger picture of your online reputation.
6. Pricing
Does it fit within your budget? Make sure the tool offers good value for its price and that it fits within your budget constraints. Expensive doesn’t always mean better.
7. Customer Support
How is their customer service? Ideally, you want to choose a provider that offers reliable and responsive customer support, in case you run into any issues or need help using the tool.
8. Customization
Can you customize your social listening tool to suit your specific needs? This could include setting up custom alerts, creating bespoke reports, or adjusting the dashboard to show the metrics that matter most to you. A good tool should be flexible enough to accommodate your unique requirements.
9. Scalability
Will the tool scale with your business? As your business grows, you’ll likely have more data to analyze and more mentions to track. You need a tool that can handle this growth and continue to deliver the insights you need without compromising on performance.
10. Data Export and Sharing
Does the tool allow you to export data and reports easily? Whether it’s for sharing with your team, presenting to stakeholders, or for your own analysis, being able to export data in various formats can be a useful feature.
11. Competitor Analysis
Does the tool allow for competitor tracking? Being able to listen to what’s being said about your competitors can provide valuable insights and help you stay ahead of the game.
By asking these questions, you’ll be able to choose a social listening tool that meets your specific needs and helps you stay on top of your online reputation.
Tips to Make the Most of Your Social Listening Tool
Social listening can be tricky sometimes. Here are some tips that help you use your tool in the best way:
Use Advanced Query Construction
Building an effective query is like casting a net into the sea of social chatter – you want to catch relevant conversations without bringing in unrelated chatter. You can use a Boolean search query to achieve this. If you’re a tech company, for instance, tracking just the keyword “Apple” might bring in conversations about fruit. Using advanced queries such as “Apple -fruit” can help filter out irrelevant mentions.
Boolean Search by Mentionlytics
Set Automate Alerts
Immediate responses to customer queries or issues can greatly improve brand reputation. Set up alerts on your social listening tool for phrases like “Can anyone help” or “problem with” along with your brand name, so you can quickly address customer concerns.
Use Segmentation
Divide your data based on certain parameters to get more specific insights. For instance, segment mentions by geography to understand how sentiments vary across regions. This could be valuable for a multinational brand, tailoring its messaging per region.
Track Trends Over Time
Identify shifts in sentiment or emerging trends by tracking data over time on your social media listening tool. For example, a gaming company might track sentiment towards their game over several months to assess the impact of updates or bug fixes.
Share of Voice Report by Mentionlytics
Customize Dashboards
Tailor your social listening tool’s dashboards to highlight the data that’s most relevant to you. If you’re a marketing manager more interested in sentiment analysis and brand mentions, make sure these are prominent on your dashboard.
Leverage AI Capabilities
Many tools offer AI features that can identify patterns and trends in large volumes of data. For instance, they might identify a sudden increase in negative sentiment, helping you spot and address a potential crisis early.
AI-driven insights by Mentionlytics Intelligent Assistance
Regularly Refine Your Social Listening Strategy
Your social listening strategy should be fluid. As your brand evolves, new products are launched, or recent trends emerge in your industry, adjust your keywords and queries to match these changes.
Try Social Listening Tools for Free
These are some of the best social listening tools that keep you in the loop of every activity. These will consider what is being said about your brand, competitors, industry, and even a particular keyword or hashtag that’s trending.
Want to have a taste of it for free? Then try Mentionlytics for free to see who’s talking about your brand!
FAQs
What is a social listening tool?
A social listening tool is a software application that allows businesses to monitor and analyze online conversations about their brand, products, or industry. These tools can track mentions on social media platforms, blogs, forums, news sites, and more.
How do social listening tools work?
Social listening tools work by crawling the web and gathering data based on specific parameters, such as keywords, hashtags, or brand names. The tool then aggregates and analyzes this data to provide insights, such as sentiment analysis, trend identification, or audience demographics.
Can these tools help me understand my competition?
Yes, many social listening tools allow you to track mentions of your competitors, giving you insights into their online reputation, customer sentiment, and more. This can help inform your own marketing strategies and identify opportunities in the market.
How can I use the data from social listening tools?
You can use the data from social listening tools in a variety of ways, including reputation management, customer service, product development, competitor analysis, and marketing strategy. The insights you gain can help you make informed decisions and engage more effectively with your audience.
Can these tools track conversations in different languages?
Many social listening tools have the capability to track conversations in multiple languages. However, the effectiveness can vary between tools, so if this is an important feature for you, make sure to check this during your evaluation process.
Can I track historical data with social listening tools?
Some social listening tools can provide access to historical data, which can be useful for identifying trends over time or analyzing past campaigns. However, the availability and extent of historical data can vary between tools.
Can social listening tools analyze visual content?
Some advanced social listening tools can analyze visual content to some extent, such as identifying brand logos in images or videos. However, this is a relatively new feature and may not be available or fully accurate in all tools.
Gather and analyze all Web & Social mentions of your brand
Mentionlytics works 24/7 and scans for pages and users mentioning your brand and your competitors. Get Share of Voice, Sentiment Analysis, Influencers and many other reports automatically.
