“What social listening tool should I choose in 2025?” you are wondering quietly. Whether you’re already using one and want to switch to another or you want to start from scratch with a new marketing tool for social listening, we have prepared a list of the top 12 tools for you.
We’ve tried them and checked their reviews, best sides, and shortcomings to make your choice as easy as possible.
Here, we’ll show you exactly what to look for and pay attention to when choosing social listening software and how to get the most out of your chosen tool.
Table of Contents
What Is a Social Listening Tool?
Social listening tools help you in tracking and collecting mentions of your brand and keywords on social media platforms, analyzing them, and providing actionable insights from raw data.
Social listening helps PR, marketing, and social media management in so many different ways that nowadays, it’s almost unimaginable to create a business strategy without it. It tells you what the audience is thinking, feeling, and saying about your brand.
To be specific, listening to online conversations helps you:
- Monitor brand reputation by tracking positive, neutral, and negative mentions with sentiment analysis. This enables swift responses and proactive brand management.
- Spot trending topics and industry shifts early on. That gives you the opportunity to align your social media posts and stay ahead of competitors.
- Engage with your audience without spending 24/7 on socials. The tool detects direct and indirect mentions for you.
- Gather competitive intelligence by analyzing competitor activities, sentiments, and engagement strategies, providing insights into market positioning and potential opportunities.
- Figure out which posts are getting noticed on different social media channels and how they resonate with your target audience.
- Discover influencers and brand ambassadors who organically support your brand or have a strong impact in your niche.
- Improve your products and services based on direct customer feedback collected from social media conversations, which will help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Gain high-quality leads by identifying potential customers actively expressing interest or intent related to your products or industry, enabling targeted and timely outreach.
Investing in listening tools ensures that you’re not operating blindly. Instead, you’re making informed, data-driven decisions to improve marketing effectiveness, audience engagement, and, ultimately, your business outcomes.
Now let’s check 12 tools which, according to our opinion, deserve your attention.
12 Best Social Listening Tools Reviewed & Assessed
We have a list of the top social listening tools for 2025 for you to consider. Check their performances, features, pros and cons, and prices, and determine which one is your best business solution.
1. Mentionlytics – Smart Social Listening Powered by AI
Consider Mentionlytics your personalized AI social listening expert. It tracks, collects, and processes mentions from social media platforms and the web and provides powerful analytics, actionable insights, and personalized bits of advice based on the collected data.
With this tool, you can get clear information about your audience, customers, competitors, and brand reputation — even in real time.
Example of Mentionlytics’ Performance Dashboard and SIA notifications.
Our Highlight
Mentionlytics excels for businesses of all sizes that want deep, actionable customer intelligence and streamlined social media analysis. That’s why our users love SIA, the Social Intelligence Advisor — Your AI personal advisor when it comes to social media and competitive intelligence!
SIA will advise you when it’s the best time to post based on your past performance, keep you up-to-date with your daily most important topics with AI summaries, or indicate an unsatisfied customer who’s very loud on socials.
From Real Customer Reviews
If we look at the customer’s feedback on reviewing platforms, we can see that Mentionlytics has an excellent score (ranging from 4.3 stars on Google Play (73 reviews) to 4.9 stars on G2 (87 reviews).
Users emphasize that the tool is very useful for social listening and analysis, has a simple, straightforward interface, is budget-friendly, and has excellent customer support.
On the other hand, according to the users, due to numerous features, it might be slightly overwhelming at first to understand the purpose of each function.
However, they also emphasized that the helpful and responsive customer support team quickly guides them through any initial confusion.
“Everything in one place, and makes me look like I spend hours searching the internet – but its actually just a few seconds to check in after all the set up is done.”
“There is a bit of a learning curve, but the team is helpful and really quick to jump in.”
Main Features Users Love
- AI-Powered Sentiment Analysis: Accurately detects emotions, including sarcasm, with over 95% precision.
- Customizable Reports: You can create tailored reports to match your team’s specific needs and workflows.
- Share of Voice: Easily measure and compare your brand’s visibility against competitors.
- Top Influencers: Quickly discover and connect with key influencers relevant to your brand.
- AI Mention Clustering: You can check all mentions clustered by topic in a minute without checking each one separately.
Pricing
The Basic plan costs just $58 per month, but you can catch it on the time-limited offer of $41 monthly on a yearly subscription basis. There are also a lot of paid plan options you can choose from to fit your business needs.
We offer a 14-day free trial (no credit card required).
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Don’t miss out on this limited-time offer! Take advantage of Mentionlytics for a seamless social listening experience without overspending your budget!
2. Talkwalker – United With Hootsuite
Founded in 2007, Talkwalker became a well-known option for multinational brands due to its multilingual monitoring option. In 2024, Hootsuite, the social media management platform, acquired Talkwalker and expanded its services to social listening through its platform.
Our Highlight
When it comes to Talkwalker, our highlight would be powerful analytics combined with strong AI features, which make it especially suitable for large enterprises and brands focused on global market insights, reputation management, and crisis prevention.
From Real Customer Reviews
The reviewing score for Talkwalker ranges from 4.3 stars on G2 (132 reviews) to 4.8 stars on Product Hub (59 reviews).
Users emphasize their analytics and social measurements as the most useful features but also mention that the price is higher than that of the competitive tools on the market.
“Talkwalker has the ability to fully customize your search terms while looking at sentiment, geographic locations, and media types.”
“One of the downsides of the version I use is that you can only search conversations from the last 30 days.”
Main Features Users Love
- Visual Listening and Image Recognition: Identify brand logos and products within images shared online, giving deeper insights into visual brand mentions.
- AI-Driven Sentiment Analysis: Sentiment analysis that understands the tone and context behind conversations and classifies mentions as positive, neutral, or negative.
- Crisis Management Alerts: Proactive monitoring and instant alerts for potential crises or spikes in negative sentiment.
- Competitive Benchmarking: Comprehensive comparisons against competitors to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities.
- Trend Prediction and Analysis: Powerful trend tracking capabilities to stay ahead of emerging topics and customer expectations.
Pricing
Talkwalker’s pricing is customized based on specific business needs and requirements. Contact the vendor directly for detailed pricing information and available plans.
3. Sprout Social – Best for Social Media Management for Multiple Accounts
Sprout Social is a social media management and listening platform. This dual function makes it convenient for businesses that need to manage multiple social channels and accounts and get customer conversations in one place.
A screenshot of Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox feature from our testing.
Our Highlight
This tool is very useful for businesses that need to track multiple accounts and are looking for a comprehensive social listening tool that enables them to track conversations on various platforms.
Sprout’s unified Smart Inbox makes it especially valuable for companies managing high volumes of mentions and seeking data-driven insights.
From Real Customer Reviews
From the users’ review scores on various platforms, we can see that their rating ranges from 4.2 stars on Gartner (229 reviews) to 4.4 stars on G2 (3,877 reviews) and Capterra (595 reviews).
Users consistently praise the slick interface and the convenience of features.
On the downside, the most common complaint is cost — Sprout is one of the pricier tools, and smaller teams often find it exceeds their budget.
“Sprout Social is a powerful tool that makes managing social media seamless. The user-friendly and intuitive interface and robust scheduling features save time, while the in-depth analytics provide valuable insights.”
“The Social Listening feature could be more robust, as it doesn’t always provide in-depth results. We often have to apply multiple filters to refine the data, which can be time-consuming.”
Main Features Users Love
- Unified Social Inbox for Engagement: All your messages, comments, and mentions across platforms appear in one feed (the Smart Inbox), simplifying community management.
- Easy Multi-Channel Publishing: Advanced scheduling tools let you plan and publish content to multiple networks at optimal times, with a calendar view and approval workflows.
- Robust Analytics & Reporting: Sprout provides in-depth reports on engagement, impressions, and response times, helping teams measure ROI and refine strategy.
- Collaboration & Team Features: Sprout supports multiple users with task assignment, content approvals, and an audit trail — great for larger teams coordinating responses. It even supports integrations (Slack, Marketo, etc.) to fit into your workflow.
- Continuous Improvement: Reviews note that Sprout Social frequently updates with new features (like AI Assist tools and improved analytics) and is in step with the latest social trends.
Pricing
The pricing tiers start at $199 per seat per month, billed annually.
4. Meltwater – PR Teams Old Acquaintance
Meltwater is a veteran media intelligence and social listening platform used by PR teams and enterprises worldwide. It tracks brand mentions across social media, news, blogs, and broadcasts, helping organizations monitor their media presence and glean consumer insights.
Our Highlight
When it comes to Meltwater, its strength lies in combining traditional news monitoring with social listening, giving a 360° view of brand mentions.
From Real Customer Reviews
The overall rating score for this tool is 4.0 stars on both G2 (2,240 reviews) and Capterra (96 reviews).
The users like the variety of features they provide, but some complained about the social data they fetch, especially for Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok.
“I use Meltwater every single day, multiple times a day. It has tons of features, but the one I use most often is the explore feature to conduct social listening and sentiment analysis for clients. Meltwater is very user-friendly. The UI/UX experience is easy to navigate and implement, depending on your personal or your client’s needs.”
“The only thing I wish would improve is the API capabilities of some of the social platforms within the Explore feature, such as including Threads, providing profile names on Facebook social export lists, or being able to recognize and collect keyword mentions that are included in either video or images themselves versus just the captions.”
Main Features Users Love
- Extensive Media Coverage: Meltwater monitors not just social networks but also millions of news sites, blogs, and even TV/radio transcripts — users love having all that in one tool for a true omnichannel listening experience.
- Powerful Search & Filtering: The Boolean query builder (Explore) is very advanced, allowing precise filtering by keywords, sources, locations, etc. Users say once you master it, you can pinpoint exactly the conversations you care about.
- AI-Powered Insights: Meltwater’s AI can surface consumer insights and trends and even perform sentiment analysis at scale. For example, it offers industry-leading consumer intelligence features that help understand not just what is being said but also the context (customer sentiment, demographics, and emerging themes).
- Integrated PR Tools: In addition to listening, Meltwater includes a media contact database and press release distribution. Reviews highlight that it’s convenient for PR teams to monitor coverage and then directly engage journalists or influencers from the same platform.
- Dashboard & Reporting: Users appreciate the customizable dashboards and the ease of exporting reports. Meltwater offers tons of pre-built charts and the ability to create your own, which is great for showing ROI and media impact to stakeholders. It’s regularly updated with new features and improvements, indicating the product team is active (a plus noted by several customers).
Pricing
Meltwater’s pricing is not publicly listed – you must contact them for a custom quote.
5. Determ – Press Coverage and More
Focused on press coverage but keeping an ear out for social media, Determ’s AI-powered tool offers summarized reports and competitive monitoring.
Our Highlight
We’ll have to agree with all other users, their interface is so user-friendly and easy to navigate that you won’t need any support on that topic. Whether you like this tool or not, this is something you can’t deny.
From Real Customer Reviews
There are not too many reviews about Determ, especially after they rebranded in 2023. However, if you look at the reviewing platforms, you’ll see the ratings go from 4.4 stars on Software Advise (39 reviews) to 4.7 stars on G2 (43 reviews).
Users just love the interface, and they praise the support, but they are not so impressed with the price, and there are some complaints about data accuracy.
“- Real-time tracking
– great user experience
– user-friendly dashboard
Determ is a great tool, but the customer service is the true value!”
“Can’t add new queries on the mobile app. I rarely need them, but it would be a good option to have them in the future.”
Main Features Users Love
- User-Friendly Interface: Designed for ease of use, facilitating quick adoption by teams.
- Sentiment Analysis: Evaluates the tone of mentions to assess public perception.
- No Limits: There are no limitations on users, keywords, or reports, regardless of the plan you use.
- 3 Months Historical Data: You can go up to three months in the past for mentions.
- Customizable Reports: It allows users to generate reports tailored to specific metrics and KPIs.
Pricing
The pricing plan is not public, so you’ll have to contact them for a quote.
6. Brandwatch – Consumer Intelligence Platform
Brandwatch is one of the oldest social listening platforms on the market and is definitely a big player in the game.
It was founded in 2007 and is now owned by Cision, a public relations and owned media company. That comes with the advantage of a blend of listening and a social media monitoring tool.
Example of Brandwatch’s emotion analysis feature from our testing.
Our Highlight
There are several great points when it comes to Brandwatch, but one of the best things is its analytics. Powerful data analysis and customizable dashboards give users a chance to have actionable insights in a second.
From Real Customer Reviews
The average customer rating score ranges from 4.2 stars on Capterra (236 reviews), 4.4 stars on G2 (623 reviews), to 4.7 stars on Gartner (30 reviews).
The users like the analytics the most and think it’s very insightful. Interestingly, despite its popularity, the users complained about the learning curve, the dashboard being glitchy and sometimes buggy, and the price.
“I can obtain crucial data that offers insights, useful for decision-making.”
“Sentiment is not accurate, even though it has help from AI. Some elements are not available in the dashboards, as in other tools, that can help view the data in different ways with the information in hand.”
Main Features Users Love
- Robust Analytics: This social listening tool offers comprehensive and useful analytics for any segment marketing team needs.
- Wide Range of Networks Covered: It covers more than 8,000 news sources in different languages.
- Iris AI: Enables fast search with instant insights, topic analysis, writing assistant, and analysis.
- Extensive Data Set: Multilingual across more than 190 countries.
- Authoritative News Sources: Access to premium global content.
Pricing
Brandwatch doesn’t have a public pricing, so you’ll have to contact them for a quote.
Get the Actionable Insights You Need With Mentionlytics
No credit card, no pressure. Just real insights waiting to be discovered.
7. Mention – Big Names Favorite
When talking about Mention, we can’t skip the fact that it’s a choice of some big brands, such as Hyundai and many others. Is it their sleek interface, or extensive data that draws these big names, or is it the Mention brand?
Example of mentions graph on Mention social listening platform from our testing.
Our Highlight
The first thing we’ve noticed is that they are transparent with their pricing and plans. That’s something most of the users will find useful. Plus, they offer a free trial, which always comes in handy since you can see for yourself if the tool works for you or not.
From Real Customer Reviews
The average score for this tool ranges from 4.2 stars on Gartner (67 reviews) to 4.7 stars on Capterra (290 reviews) and Software Advice (290 reviews).
The users like the simplicity of the software and the comprehensive data. On the other hand, they claim it might be challenging at first to get around, and sometimes the results are not as accurate as you might expect.
“They have the most comprehensive data resources; you can also classify your reports and feeds according to your needs. You can collaborate with the team easily, and automated queries make a difference if you want to go deeper.”
“It’s hard to manage the mentions at the first adoption stage. It’s hard to set this tool up since it is a more advanced monitoring tool.”
Main Features Users Love
- Quick Chart: Provides you with quick access to charts with various data.
- Slack Integration: Easy to get notifications within your working space, without the need to check it on the platform to know what’s happening.
- Respond: Direct responding option. Social media direct messages and comments.
- Spike Notification: Allows you not to check the platform every minute — it will send you a notification if something out of the ordinary happens — a spike in mentions, for example.
- Top Mentions: Shows you the most influential posts.
Pricing
Mention pricing starts at $41 monthly when billed annually for one user and one social media account.
8. Agorapulse – Social Media Management First
This is a tool with a main focus on social media management. You can schedule and publish posts from the app, and you can also do social listening.
Example of Agorapulse’s listening features from our testing.
Our Highlight
If we set aside the management of your social media, the listening process is very easy. It’s an intuitive social listening tool, and you’ll get a basic real-time data sentiment analysis report related to your keyword.
From Real Customer Reviews
If you look at the reviews, you’ll see the score ranges from 3.0 stars on TrustPilot (31 reviews), 4.5 on G2 (955 reviews), to 4.6 stars on Capterra (710 reviews).
The users like most its social management features, but think there might be room for improvements when it comes to features, the number of social platforms it integrates with, and deeper sentiment analyses.
“I like how easily I can schedule our social media posts, however, I think Agora needs to step up their AI game.”
“They lack behind features that are readily available with other social media tools.”
Main Features Users Love
- Unified Social Inbox: All your social conversations in one tidy inbox so you never miss a message, comment, or mention.
- Queue Categories & Content Scheduling: Organize, schedule, and recycle your posts effortlessly with smart content queues and a visual calendar.
- Team Collaboration & Approval Workflows: Collaborate seamlessly with teammates or clients using built-in roles, assignments, and approval flows.
- Detailed Reporting & White-Label Reports: Create beautiful, ready-to-share reports that showcase performance without the spreadsheet hassle.
- Social Listening for Brand Monitoring: Enables tracking keywords and hashtags, so you always know what’s being said about your brand.
Pricing
The pricing plans start at $79 monthly when billed annually for one user.
9. Sprinklr – Community Management on a Higher Level
Here’s another popular listening and monitoring tool that’s been around for almost 15 years. It grew, developed its features, and became what it is today: a tool that established brands use.
Our Highlight
Sprinklr’s standout feature is its AI-powered automation, which streamlines repetitive social media tasks, provides real-time content recommendations, and offers sentiment analysis to understand customer interactions better.
From Real Customer Reviews
Sprinklr’s reviewing score ranges from 4.0 on G2 (1,008 reviews) to 4.5 stars on Gartner (25 reviews).
Users love the insights this tool provides, but at the same time, mention that due to a lot of features, it might be overwhelming and take a lot of time to understand the software.
“Good platform for community management and social media scheduling.”
“It’s a useful platform, but some of the more advanced components can take some getting used to.”
Main Features Users Love
- Social Publishing & Engagement: Managing and scheduling content across multiple channels from a single dashboard.
- Social Listening: Monitor brand mentions and industry trends across various platforms to gain insights into customer sentiment and market dynamics.
- Employee Advocacy: Amplifying a brand’s reach by enabling employees to share approved content, turning them into brand advocates.
- AI-Powered Compliance: AI-driven approval processes ensure that all published content adheres to brand guidelines and compliance standards.
- Reporting & Analytics: Comprehensive analytics for measuring the performance of your social media campaigns, including insights into engagement, reach, and audience behavior.
Pricing
The pricing is not public, so you’ll have to contact them for a quote.
Let Mentionlytics Be Your AI Ears
It listens, processes the noise, and hands you the insights on a silver platter.
10. YouScan – Analysis of Text and Visuals
YouScan is not a new player; it’s been around since 2009, but it sure innovates a lot. It’s a tool of choice for many famous FMGC brands.
Our Highlight
When it comes to YouScan, our highlight is its AI visual insights. You’re able to track keywords even when they show up on a visual (or video), and you can use filters to narrow down the search.
From Real Customer Reviews
YouScan has excellent reviews on review platforms, ranging from 4.7 stars on G2 (205 reviews) to 4.9 stars on Capterra (64 reviews).
Users love the deep audience insights, which come in handy when you want to explore your target audience, and the wide range of languages covered. On the flip side, they are not so enthusiastic about price, learning curve, and filtering out irrelevant mentions.
“YouScan is a super reliable AI-powered platform for gaining deep audience insights. It excels in image recognition, sentiment analysis, and multilingual tracking, making it a powerful tool for brands that need more than just keyword monitoring.”
“Limited API Integrations – could be better, but this feature is rather interesting for a very limited list of clients. Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Features – Some AI functionalities take time to comprehend and fully utilize.”
Main Features Users Love
- Visual Insights: Detects brand logos and analyzes product usage in user-generated images with smart image recognition.
- Audience Insights: Provides you with a deep dive into your audience’s demographics, interests, and even occupations for more targeted strategies.
- Influencers: Identifies key influencers along with their top interests and engagement metrics to guide your outreach efforts.
- Custom Dashboards: You can build and share fully customizable dashboards tailored to your team’s reporting needs.
- Quick Search: Instantly get keyword metrics and top mentions to monitor buzz around any topic in seconds, even when you’re short on credits.
Pricing
The pricing starts at $299 monthly for an annual subscription.
11. BuzzSumo – Content Strategy & Listening
BuzzSumo is, first and foremost, a content research tool with some additional listening features.
It’s useful for marketers, content creators, and PR professionals because it’s easy to discover trending topics, analyze content performance, and identify key influencers within their industry.
Example of Buzzsumo’s influencer finder from our testing.
Our Highlight
We have to say that BuzzSumo is excellent in providing real-time insights into content trends and audience engagement. And, of course, if you want to find influencers, you can easily do that with this tool.
From Real Customer Reviews
Users rated BuzzSumo with 4.5 stars, both on G2 (103 reviews) and Capterra (146 reviews).
What they like best about this software is the capability to gather all the news related to the keyword, brand, or competitor.
Hence, some think the price is too high and that it should use more AI to make the features easier to use.
“BuzzSumo is a great tool for grouping all the news available on sites, blogs and YouTube into different categories.”
“Sometimes it gets too repetitive with the same news showed through different portals. It should have a way to group them under the same title using AI features.”
Main Features Users Love
- Content Discovery: You can easily access the most shared and engaging content across various platforms.
- Trend Analysis: You can monitor emerging trends and viral topics in real time.
- Influencer Identification: Identify and connect with influential figures within your niche to amplify your content’s reach and credibility.
- Content Analysis: Evaluate the performance of specific content pieces, including metrics like social shares, backlinks, and overall engagement, to refine your content strategy.
- Monitoring & Alerts: Set up alerts for brand mentions, competitor activities, or specific keywords to stay informed about relevant conversations and industry developments.
Pricing
The starting package costs $199 per month for one user, billed annually.
12. Hubspot – CRM You All Love With X (Twitter) Listening
If you’re using this tool to handle your customers, clients, proposals, and so on, you’ll probably want to have an ear to the ground and see if you can extract some leads from social media.
Hubspot gathers mentions on platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, but tracking keywords is available only on X.
Our Highlight
Our highlight would be Social Inbox, which tracks interactions on your published social posts alongside AI-generated insights to help you analyze your social interactions more effectively.
From Real Customer Reviews
HubSpot Marketing Hub ratings range from 4.4 stars on G2 (12,385 reviews) to 4.5 stars on Capterra (4,342 reviews) and Gartner (323 reviews).
While HubSpot’s social media management tools allow for publishing and engagement across multiple platforms — including Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube (which users love ) — their monitoring features are largely limited to X.
This means that real-time monitoring of brand mentions, keywords, and industry trends within HubSpot is predominantly available for X.
“Simple, user-friendly interface. Everything I need is in one place!”
“I wish I could manage YouTube and Reddit through HubSpot. I also really wish there was a social listening tool, something more powerful than the Monitor tab under Social.”
Main Features Users Love
- Social Publishing: Schedule and publish content across various social networks, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter), directly from the HubSpot platform.
- Social Monitoring: You can set up keyword monitoring streams to track brand mentions, relevant conversations, and industry trends.
- Competitor Streams: Monitor competitors’ top posts across Facebook, Instagram, and X to inform your social strategy and stay competitive in your industry.
- Unified Social Inbox: You can manage interactions such as comments, mentions, and new followers from multiple social media accounts in a single, organized inbox.
- Reporting and Analytics: It offers detailed reports to compare platform performances, analyze campaign effectiveness, and measure the ROI of your social media efforts.
Pricing
Hubspot Marketing Hub’s price starts at €792 per month for 3 seats, paid annually upfront.
How to Use Social Listening Tools
Even with the most straightforward social listening software solutions, it can be challenging to grasp what the tool can do for your business.
Here’s a short explanation of what you should expect from the social media listening platforms.
For Sentiment Analysis
First of all, social media sentiment analysis should be accurate and real-time. Why? Because you’re able to scan what your customers or potential buyers feel about your brand to adjust your marketing campaign accordingly.
That’s the most important thing. Mentionlytics, for example, has a 95% accuracy, according to our users, so you don’t have to double-check sentiment reports or do manual curation.
Example of sentiment and emotion analysis for Ryanair in Mentionlytics.
If you’re a visual type, you’ll want the tool to have a colorful dashboard and charts for sentiment analysis, but the accuracy and real-time updates are most important.
It’s always a good idea to check the sentiment analysis first when you’re trying the tool. If you see a higher percentage of results that are a bit off, it’s best to look for another tool.
For Reputation Management
Social listening plays a key role in reputation management. By collecting and analyzing comments and brand mentions across social and web platforms, you can understand how your brand — or even a public figure — is perceived online. And what topics are associated with it.
When done right, social listening doesn’t just show you where you stand; it shows you where to grow. It highlights areas for improvement, where your brand didn’t fulfil the expectations, and reveals what changes might elevate your brand’s public image.
That’s why it’s an essential tool for PR professionals, brands, and even politicians — anyone who needs to monitor public sentiment and respond immediately. Remember, more monitoring, less damage control.
For Custom Reports
Social media analytics are a core part of modern marketing reports — but not every business tracks the same metrics. And not every team asks the same questions. That’s why customizable reports aren’t just a nice-to-have — they’re essential.
A good social media listening software should let you build reports around what matters most to you. Whether you’re tracking brand sentiment, share of voice, influencer impact, or campaign performance, tailor-made reports ensure your team gets the insights that are actually relevant.
Custom reports are useful when you need to share results with stakeholders who don’t live in the data. You can highlight exactly what needs attention and skip the rest, making your reporting process faster, clearer, and more impactful.
And if you’re managing multiple brands, campaigns, or regions, customizable dashboards and scheduled reports help you keep everything organized and running smoothly without repetitive manual work.
Bottom line: One-size-fits-all reporting doesn’t work in marketing today. Custom reports give you the flexibility to turn raw data into meaningful, actionable insight on your terms.
For Measuring Share of Voice
If you’re not comparing yourself to your competitors, you’re only seeing half the picture. Share of Voice (SOV), your brand awareness key metric, helps you understand how much space you occupy in the conversation compared to others in your industry.
Example of Share of Voice for social listening strategy with sentiment analysis by Mentionlytics.
Is your voice rising above the noise or getting drowned out?
Look at SOV as your realistic benchmark tool, measure progress, and adjust strategy based on where you truly stand in the market.
For Influencer Identification
You don’t need to chase celebrity influencers or blow your entire budget to make an impact. In fact, partnering with niche or nano-influencers can often bring better engagement and stronger trust with your target audience.
Where to find them? Well, through your social listening tool, of course. It can identify those who are creating buzz in your industry and who are already talking about your niche.
Example of Top Mentioners for Monday.com in Mentionlytics.
Check their engagement rates, how many followers they have, and on which platforms they’re most impactful.
That way, you’re not just picking influencers at random — you’re choosing partners who align with your brand values, fit your budget, and already resonate with your ideal audience.
It’s a smarter, more strategic way to grow your reach.
What Should I Look for in a Social Listening Tool?
Whether you’re managing a brand, working in PR, or leading a marketing team, here are the essential features to look for.
- Broad Data Coverage
A great tool should pull mentions from a wide variety of sources — not just major social networks but also blogs, review sites, and even news articles. The more sources it covers, the clearer your picture of public sentiment will be. - AI-Powered Social Listening Analysis
With the volume of data coming in, AI helps make sense of it all. Look for tools with smart sentiment analysis (bonus points if it can detect sarcasm), keyword clustering, and anomaly detection. These features help you act on insights instead of getting lost in metrics. - Customizable Dashboards & Reports
Every team has different priorities. Your marketing team will not have the same KPIs as your sales team. That’s where customization comes into play. It lets you focus on the KPIs that matter most. - Collaboration Features
If multiple team members are involved — from content creators to PR specialists — you’ll want collaboration tools like shared dashboards, comment tagging, and approval workflows. These features make it easier to work together without missing a beat. - Real-Time Alerts
Speed matters. Instant notifications when something important happens — like a spike in mentions or a sudden sentiment shift — can make all the difference when it comes to responding in time, especially during a crisis. - Influencer & Audience Insights
The best social listening tools also help you discover top influencers in your niche, track engagement, and understand your audience’s demographics, interests, and behavior patterns. So, you know not just what people are saying but who’s saying it and why it matters.
At the end of the day, the right social listening tool should help you monitor smarter, respond faster, and act more strategically.
Try a Social Media Listening Tool for Free Now
If you’ve made it all the way to the end of this article, congrats! You clearly care about finding the right social listening tool. So here’s your reward:
Try Mentionlytics for free. No credit card needed — just a bit of curiosity and a hunch that smarter marketing and PR starts with better listening.
Test it out, explore the features, and see if it’s the right fit for your needs and your budget.
FAQ
Which Tools Can Be Used for Social Listening and Keyword Alerts?
There’s a long list of tools you can use for social listening and keyword alerts. It all depends on your business needs and budget. You can opt for Mentionlytics, Brandwatch, Social Sprout, Sprinklr, or any other.
Are There Any Free Social Media Listening Tools?
Some of the tools offer a free trial from 14 to 30 days, such as Mentionlytics, Agorapulse, Sprout Social, and others. Talkwalker, for example, offers a free keyword alert for blogs, news, forums, and X.
Are Social Listening Tools AI?
In the beginning, social listening tools were more keyword scanners and alarm systems. But today, most (but not all) tools are AI-powered, meaning they have more sophisticated capabilities than the previous models.
