Social listening tools are software applications or platforms that allow brands and individuals to monitor and track conversations and mentions about their brands, products, and services across various social media channels and online communities.
These tools use algorithms and machine learning to analyze big data and identify trends, social sentiments, and patterns in online conversations.
Besides providing valuable insight into consumer opinions, the data also helps brands identify emerging issues and provide better customer service.
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Why Do You Need a Social Media Listening Tool?
The goal of social listening isn’t just to keep an eye on your competitors, but also to make your customer service better. With all kinds of social media activities like brand mentions, reviews, FAQs, feedback, and complaints, it’s becoming a more reactive strategy. You get ahead of the competition and find influencers who can help you market your brand online.
Here are some of the main advantages of using social listening tools:
Monitor brand reputation
Monitoring a brand’s online reputation through social listening tools can help brands identify negative feedback, respond to customer complaints, and resolve issues before they escalate.
Understand customer needs and preferences
Using social listening tools, brands can gain insights into their customers’ needs, preferences, and opinions. By analyzing social media conversations, brands can create content that resonates with their customers.
Stay ahead of the competition
Using social listening tools, brands can identify emerging market trends and opportunities and monitor their competitors. Keeping an eye on competitors’ social media activities can help brands identify market gaps as well.
Improve customer engagement
Through social listening tools, brands can identify opportunities to engage with their customers. Responding to customer inquiries and feedback can strengthen relationships with customers and improve brand loyalty.
Measure the effectiveness of social media campaigns
By tracking engagement, sentiment, and other key metrics, social listening tools can help brands optimize their social media strategies and improve their ROI.
10 Best Social Listening Tools
To keep everything under the radar, you need some specific social listening tools that can help you boost your brand’s performance. 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
Mentionlytics let businesses get actionable insights based on millions of online conversations and social media interactions by using advanced algorithms and big data analysis. There’s a dashboard that shows you real-time data, like how many mentions there are about your brand, sentiment analysis, along with key social media metrics.
Mentionlytics’ Social Listening Features
Here are some of the features that Mentionlytics offers:
- Social Media Monitoring
Mentionlytics monitors social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and others for brand social mentions, hashtags, and competitor 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.
- Sentiment Analysis
The tool analyzes the sentiment of brand mentions, so businesses can understand how customers feel about their brands.
- Automated Reports
With Mentionlytics reports, you can get real-time data and insights to make better decisions.
- 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 businesses 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 that it offers you a Social Intelligent Assistant or SIA.
With the help of SIA, you can get actionable and personalized advice for your brand using AI.
Mentionlytics Pricing
Mentionlytics offers several flexible billing plans for all budgets, including:
- Basic Plan $49 per month
- Essential Plan $99 per month
- Advanced Plan $199 per month
- Pro Plan $299 per month
- Agency Plan starts at $450 per month
P.S. There’s a free social media monitoring trial for the first 14 days!
Ready to try our Mentionlytics? Get started with a free version here!
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media listening tool platform that offers a wide range of features to help businesses manage their social media accounts, engage with their audience, and measure the impact of their social media activity.
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 Features
- Brand monitoring
- Social media analytics
- Customer engagement
- Team collaboration
- Reporting and analytics
- Automated publishing
- Content management
- Multi-account management
- Post scheduling
Hootsuite Pricing
- Professional Plan €99 per month
- Team Plan €249 per month
- Business Plan €762 per month
- Enterprise Plan Custom Solutions
There’s a 30-day free trial for professional and team plans. Enterprise has custom solutions with customized team training.
The Sprout Social platform allows customers to gain insight from their social media data by connecting with audiences, streamlining publishing workflows, and collaborating in real-time.
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 Features
- Social Media Monitoring
- Reports & Dashboards
- Social Analytics Channels
- Monitoring & Listening
- Data Management & Analysis
Sprout Social Pricing
- Standard Plan $249 per month
- Professional Plan $399 per month
- Advanced Plan $499 per month
Buzzsumo
Buzzsumo is a powerful online tool, 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.
- It provides engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit.
- It gives you the number of links that each search result has received.
- It 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
- Pro Plan $99 per month
- Plus Plan $179 per month
- Large Plan $299 per month
- Enterprise Plan upon request
Meltwater
Meltwater is yet another social listening tool that lets you monitor, research, and analyze social media activities. It also offers a number of 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
- It offers AI-driven insights that emphasize analytical and focused engagement.
- Meltwater helps to examine millions of posts daily from different platforms be it social media, blogs, and news sites.
- It helps you to filter out irrelevant mentions which are not related to your brand. It also assigns sentiment to the mentions that pick your interest.
- You can set up searches, find key influencers, and track your online performance.
- Meltwater includes multiple dashboards that can be customized to meet your needs better
Meltwater Pricing
Unfortunately, Meltwater does not offer fixed pricing plans. You have to book a meeting with them to get the offer.
NetBase
NetBase 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.
- You can easily compare the performance of owned, earned, and partnered content with the help of NetBase.
- 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
- It gives you 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 also helps to measure how your content is performing after considering the performance of various social accounts.
- It can also integrate well with another social media tool, Hootsuite. This helps you to manage all of your social activities together. You can also join the conversations that mention your brand.
- It also shows your brand position considering Google search behavior. You will get access to important insights. It includes what your customers want to know about your brands, products, people, and competitors.
- It provides various features from monitoring to analyzing, and social engagement.
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
- It 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.
- The dashboards can visualize data for individual departments that incorporate everything from analytics, sales, social, and online reviews.
- 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.
- It is easy to set up and configure using many pre-populated widgets. These widgets include Google Analytics, Facebook Pages, Facebook Ads, Grade.us, SERPs, Moz, Twitter, Mailchimp, and Instagram.
- You have no limits on your monitoring and can view data past the last 30 days.
Cyfe Pricing
- Starter Plan $19/mo for 2 Dashboards &1 User
- Standard Plan $29/mo for 5 Dashboards & 2 Users
- Pro Plan $49/mo for 10 Dashboards & 5 Users
- Premier Plan $89/mo for 20 Dashboards & Unlimited Users
Reputology
Reputology 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, where you get to review around 100 review sites. These include Google My Business, Facebook and local search directories, employee review sites, app directories, and more.
- It 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.
- Reputology platform enables you to respond to reviews within the platform itself. It makes use of semantic analysis technology. This semantic analysis technology helps to convert the unstructured content from reviews & feedback into actionable data.
Reputology Pricing
- Solo Plan for $110/mo Per Seat
- Professional Plan for $60/mo Per Seat (Total $180/mon for 3 seats included)
- Agency Plan for $40/mo Per Seat (Total $400/mo for 10 seats included)
- Partner Plan for $25/mo Per Seat (Total $2500/mo for100 seats included)
Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another powerful social listening tool that takes 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
- It 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.
- It helps you find the best stories and influencers to promote your brand online that amplify your brand message and leave a global impact.
- It also uses image recognition technology to help you identify and pick social media posts related to your brand and products. It is useful in cases when your brand is not mentioned in the caption or content anywhere.
Talkwalker Pricing
- Basic Plan for $9,600 per year
- Corporate On request
- Enterprise On request
Ready to Choose Your Social Listening Tool?
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 social listening tools for free? Then book a demo session with Mentionlytics to see who’s talking about your brand!
Gather and analyse all Web & Social mentions to 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.
