10 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools in 2023 [+Tips]

Are you looking for the most effective social media monitoring tools to help your brand track and respond to online conversations in 2023?

Monitoring all of your channels can be a time-consuming task, but it doesn’t have to be. With the right toolkit, you can easily manage complex tasks such as tracking mentions of your brand, competitor analysis, identifying influencers, and more.

To make things easier for you looking for an efficient solution, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best social media monitoring tools that will help boost engagement with customers or followers this year.

So, let’s get started!

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking mentions, comments, hashtags, or conversations on social media channels to gain insights into what people are saying about your brand, product, or service.

Consider social media monitoring as a radar system for your brand or business. Just as a radar system constantly scans the surroundings to detect and track any incoming objects, social media monitoring tools continuously collect and analyze mentions and comments across various social media platforms.

But it doesn’t stop there. Brands use social media monitoring for various reasons, mainly:

• Measuring Social Share of Voice (SOV): a great metric to compare position to competitors
• Tracking Social media campaigns: by tracking branded hashtags and keywords
• Social media sentiment analysis: reveals the feelings of conversations about their brands
• Measuring Social ROI: to see how much their strategy is paying off
• Identifying potential influencers: who’s talking about them frequently and positively?

How does it work?

Social media monitoring involves 3 main steps:

1. Gathering data from multiple sources like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram
2. Analyzing these data to extract insights and identify patterns
3. Compile the findings into clear and concise reports or dashboards

It’s almost impossible to do these steps manually, especially if you have a well-established brand and already have some publicity. That’s why you need a social media monitoring tool to automate these process for you.

Top 10 Social Media Monitoring Tools in 2023

Here you will find the 10 best social media monitoring tools for you to take into consideration:

1. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a powerful social media monitoring tool for tracking mentions, hashtags, keywords, and sentiment across multiple languages, providing organizations with access to audience insights and historical data. Companies have the opportunity to discover top influencers while finding potential leads and creating an opportunity for brand growth. With the help of Mentionlytics, a business can protect its online reputation, as the tool is not made only for social media monitoring, but for the broader web as well.

It allows jumping into conversations in real-time, replying to potential customers, and on that same note preventing a potential crisis. The app comes with a Social Intelligent Advisor; an AI service capable of deriving actionable insights from social data. This is a unique feature among other social media monitoring tools that provides smarter insights, better social media analytics, and simple suggestions for personalized brand management.

It enables you to track and monitor mentions of your brand, your product, or your competitors on the entire web (news sites, forums, blogs, and ANY other website) and several social media platforms, like TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, Google Reviews, Youtube, Linkedin, etc.

Mentionlytics is ideal for small, medium, and large organizations, but it also supports agencies and individuals. Providing value for money, it is easy-to-use and offers the possibility of creating different social media reports, allowing an organization to take a step in the right direction.

In a few words, Mentionlytics’ social media monitoring app is designed in a user-friendly way, focusing on generating informative reports. The app supports the monitoring of multiple social platforms and presents data in a single dashboard. The quality and quantity of data are what make Mentionlytics one of the most powerful tools in the market, counting thousands of satisfied customers all over the world.

Mentionlytics Pricing

• 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!

Mentionlytics features

Some of the major Mentionlytics features are:

• Social intelligence advisor (unique feature)
• Share of Voice
• Customizable report builder
• Top mentioner’s report
• Boolean mentions search
• Social reach
• Full web monitoring
• Competitor monitoring
• Full analytics dashboard with graphs and detailed analysis
• Marketing leads or topics monitoring
• Publisher
• Labeling and assignment of mentions
• Mobile application
• Integration with Hootsuite

2. Hootsuite

With over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of users, Hootsuite powers social media for organizations around the world – from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises. Build your brand, strengthen connections with customers, and drive business results business leaders care about by integrating social seamlessly across your whole organization.

With Hootsuite, you can confidently schedule posts across multiple social networks (including Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube), manage organic and paid social content together, easily keep track of customer conversations, break down silos in how you collaborate with your company, and gain actionable real-time audience insights from social media to make critical business decisions-all from one intuitive dashboard. Use the best time to publish views to see the optimal days and times to upload your posts and build awareness, boost engagement, and drive traffic.

The app uses monitoring filters that allow the user to search based on a keyword or a location. This supports the process of filtering social conversations by using keywords, locations, or hashtags. In addition, this social media monitoring app is offered in multiple languages, so you can track hashtags and monitor what are the future endeavors of your competitors across the globe and of course the content they publish.

As one of the world’s most widely trusted social media monitoring solutions, Hootsuite can set you up for success with expert certifications, training, and coaching in social marketing, social listening, customer support, and care. Push your results further and get more from social faster with Hootsuite.

Hootsuite features

The available features are:

• Automated publishing
• Content management
• Multi-account management
• Post scheduling
• Brand monitoring
• Customer engagement
• Team collaboration
• Reporting and analytics

Hootsuite Pricing

• Professional Plan €99 per month
• Team Plan €249 per month
• Business Plan €762 per month
• Enterprise Plan Custom Solutions

The Enterprise plan provides custom solutions, with personalized team training. The professional and team plans include a free 30-day trial period.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media monitoring tool that empowers customers to do more with their social media strategy. Better connect with audiences, streamline publishing workflows, collaborate in real-time, and turn social data into meaningful insights at scale.

Sprout Social’s easy-to-use platform is simple and intuitive enough to get you up and running in minutes but powerful enough to support the largest enterprises. Through an all-in-one solution that includes social publishing, engagement, analytics, reviews, social commerce, and social listening.

The app provides easy-to-use features while providing great customer support that ensures satisfaction. This tool comes with a high ROI and has gained a high user adoption thanks to the ability to measure social reach. When it comes to reporting, the user enjoys a detailed report on one platform enabling the discovery of top influencers. It is ideal for brand monitoring, as it also supports reporting of social mentions across social platforms. It gives organisations an ability to understand their audience, uncover current trends, and on that account, inform the campaigns on their social media profiles.

With Sprout Social, the organisation can reach a wide audience, enabling planning, organising, and scheduling of content. With a reporting platform, the app lets you engage with customers on a real-time basis. To make strategic decisions, you can use the application to check out the analytics data.

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

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a Consumer Intelligence Acceleration platform for brands to drive business impact. It combines a multitude of internal and external data sources with AI-powered Blue Silk™ technology, for the most expansive view of consumers.

Talkwalker’s AI-powered platform ingests billions of customer signals every second to form the most live and complete picture of the customer. Speeding up the time it takes to identify any change and adapt to it. Giving brands precious time back to fine-tune strategies and make valuable business decisions. With offices around the globe, Talkwalker helps over 2,500 brands to maximize profits with actionable consumer intelligence, as well as to provide access to online media in real-time. This tool enables you to discover product mentions, event monitoring, and mentions of your brand.

Talkwalker features

• Reports & Dashboards
• Social Analytics
• Platform Monitoring
• Monitoring & Listening
• Data Management & Analysis

Talkwalker Pricing

• Basic Plan $9,600 per year
• Corporate On request
• Enterprise On request

5. Buzzsumo

Founded in 2014 and loved by marketers worldwide ever since, BuzzSumo is the all-in-one content marketing tool that gives you the content research and performance insights you need, fast. From Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit data, to large-scale content analysis, influencers, trending news stories, and media alerts, you get it all and more with just one simple BuzzSumo subscription.

By collecting billions of articles and trillions of social engagements – and integrating them into one easy to search app – BuzzSumo made it simple for companies to identify trends, understand their audience, and monitor their brand. That means they get the insights they need to create competitor-beating, traffic-attracting, reader-pleasing content, time and time again.

The app considers that data-driven research is the secret to creating top-tier content that drives likes, shares, and top rankings. They know that time as a marketer is valuable, so they built BuzzSumo to make comprehensive content research accessible, fast, and easy.

Buzzsumo features

• Reports & Dashboards
• Social Analytics
• Results
• Monitoring & Listening
• Data Management & Analysis

Buzzsumo Pricing

• Pro Plan $99 per month
• Plus Plan $179 per month
• Large Plan $299 per month
• Enterprise Plan upon request

6. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media monitoring app providing marketers with access to data from over 80 million sources. This tool delivers a huge amount of data for social media analytics and sentiment analysis. Simultaneously, it grants access to data beyond the usual demographics, analyzing positive, neutral, and negative comments.

Brandwatch Consumer Research is a “self-serve application” or software as a service, that archives social media data in order to provide companies with information and the means to track specific segments to analyze their brands’ online presence.

The tool’s coverage includes blogs, news sites, forums, videos, reviews, images, and social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. Users can search data by using text and image search, charting, categorization, sentiment analysis, and other features to provide further information and analysis.

Brandwatch Features

• Reports & Dashboards
• Social Analytics
• Platform Reporting
• Monitoring & Listening
• Data Management & Analysis

Brandwatch Pricing

Brandwatch has not provided pricing information for its services. You have to contact the app to obtain current pricing.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole helps marketers measure, improve and report on the impact they’re making on social media. Keyhole’s social listening, influencer tracking, and social media analytics products help marketers improve their social media strategy, and prove their impact on colleagues and clients.

Keyhole’s easy-to-use dashboard allows you to build and share reports instantly, saving hundreds of hours a year.

Use Keyhole’s dedicated Influencers metrics to analyze advocates talking about your hashtags. You can filter influencers based on geo-location and keywords in their bios. Reach out to influencers to help boost engagement and increase your influencer marketing ROI. You can also sort influencers based on the exposure they generate and engagement levels.

The social media analytics dashboard has a convenient word cloud that shows hashtags commonly used with your main hashtag. You can easily use the tool to identify the most popular hashtags relevant to your campaign and find areas of opportunity.

In other words, Keyhole is a hashtag analytics tool, which provides users with effective social media monitoring to help them understand online conversations. This software holds an effective platform for analyzing the profile of social media followers to better understand their interests.

Keyhole features

More specifically, it offers:

• Campaign monitoring
• Influencer monitoring
• Brand monitoring
• Event monitoring

Based on its functionality, Keyhole is an effective tool for carrying out market research. You will have access to hashtag analytics, real-time data, fast reporting, and the ability to track influencers’ activities on their social media profiles.

Keyhole Pricing

• Basic Plan $79 per month
• Plus Plan $159 per month
• Professional Plan $399 per month
• Enterprise Plan Custom Pricing

8. Mention

Mention is a social search engine and monitoring solution enabling brands and agencies to understand audience perception across social media accounts and the web. By using Mention you can easily monitor what is being said online about your brand or products, get comprehensive analytics on their industry, and measure the impact of your marketing and PR activities.

This online social media listening tool provides marketers with the ability to pay attention to conversations by making sure they do not miss valuable information for their marketing strategy. The app also allows users to share relevant content with their online communities and build their audience. Consequently, by using the platform, you can be aware of what your target group customers are saying online, and never miss any kind of information that may be proven useful.

Mention Features

Some of the features of this app are:

• Social Media Management
• Media Channels
• Geographic Coverage
• Reporting
• Monitoring and Listening
• Data Management and Analysis

The three key elements that best describe the tool are; monitor, listen, publish. Pin-point important conversations, which means easily monitoring over 1 billion sources across the web daily, including press articles, review sites, forums, and blogs. The following step is listening and making sense of posts across social media platforms. Uncover trends in conversation, filter, and analyze data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And lastly, connect with your audience across social media accounts and grow your online presence. Easily draft, schedule, and publish posts from multiple channels.

Mention Pricing

• Solo Plan $41.00 per month
• Pro Plan $83.00 per month
• ProPlus Plan $149.00
• Company Plan upon request

9. Sendible

Sendible is one of the leading social media monitoring tools for agencies looking to manage social media more effectively for their clients. The Sendible platform brings all your social networks together into a centralized hub and is the easiest way to execute a winning social media strategy for multiple brands at scale. Positioned as a productivity tool for agencies, you can be certain that your team will save hours!

With powerful social media engagement, monitoring, publishing, lead generation, and reporting features, Sendible gives you all the tools to delight your clients every step of the way.

The app’s social media automation features help to simplify the process of driving interactions, growing a following, and starting conversations on social media. The unified Priority Inbox is loved by brands and agencies alike, who are saving hours each day by consolidating the most important conversations from multiple sources into a single stream. With social media reports that are designed to impress, you can deliver both meaningful and impressive-looking insights showcasing your progress on social media.

Simultaneously, Sendible’s sophisticated compose box helps you schedule your social media posts in bulk and at optimal engagement times throughout the day.

Sendible Features

• Social Management
• Reports & Dashboards
• Social Analytics
• Content & Collaboration
• Monitoring & Listening
• Data Management & Analysis

Sendible Pricing

• Creator Plan €24 per month
• Traction Plan €75 per month
• Scale Plan €165 per month
• Expansion Plan €349 per month

10. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is a social customer care and marketing solution. It enables agencies, marketers, and business owners to manage multiple social media channels, automate customer service, and schedule social media publications. Additionally, it analyses marketing results, monitors and benchmarks against competitors, collaborates within teams, and automates reporting processes.

NapoleonCat currently integrates with Facebook, Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business. The tool’s social media monitoring software grants access to new information when it comes to social media marketing. The app stands out for its automated customer service solution, which provides access to actionable analytics and features. NapoleonCat is made for allowing users to redesign their social media strategy, by ensuring access to data-backed insights.

NapoleonCat Features

On that same note, the app offers;

• Solutions for small businesses to build a strong media presence
• E-commerce services to optimize social media sales funnels
• Agencies assist by serving multiple clients using one platform
• Enterprise services that offer dedicated solutions to large teams

Social inbox, automatization, publishing, analytics, reporting, and Instagram scheduler are features that enable users to analyse social media performance, make valuable observations based on data, and create dedicated reports.

NapoleonCat Pricing

• Standard Plan $21 per month
• Pro Plan $42 per month
• Custom Plan upon request

Social Media Monitoring Best Tips and Practices

Here are some tips and best practices that can come handy when monitoring social media.

Set Up the Monitoring Process

Once you’ve selected your tools and platforms, set up your monitoring process by following these steps:

1. Create a list of keywords and phrases related to your brand, products, and industry. Include common misspellings and variations. For example, Starbucks may want to monitor social media for phrases like startbox as well!
2. Set up alerts and notifications in your monitoring tool to track mentions of these keywords across your chosen platforms.
3. Establish a schedule for reviewing your feeds and responding to comments, questions, and mentions.
4. Assign specific team members to monitor each platform and ensure they’re familiar with your brand’s voice and guidelines for responding to customer inquiries.

Respond to Negative Comments, Complaints, and Inquiries

Perhaps one of the best benefits of social media monitoring is being able to respond and handle negative comments more effectively. If you receive a alert for raising negative sentiments, here’re some tips to procedure:

1. Respond promptly: A quick response shows that you value your customers’ opinions and are committed to addressing their concerns.
2. Be empathetic: Express understanding for the customer’s situation and acknowledge their feelings.
3. Offer a solution: Provide a clear plan for resolving the issue, whether it’s a refund, replacement, or other remedy.
4. Take the conversation offline: If necessary, ask the customer to contact you directly through email or private message to discuss the matter further.
5. Follow up: Ensure that the issue has been resolved to the customer’s satisfaction and thank them for their feedback.

Reward people that say good things about

Imagine this scenario: someone on Twitter just discovered your product and they can’t contain their excitement. They didn’t use any hashtags, not because they wanted your company to notice, but because they genuinely wanted to share their enthusiasm with their friends.

Now, without a social media monitoring service, you might have missed out on this valuable feedback. But thankfully, with the right tools in place, you are able to catch these moments.

By being aware of this positive mention, you have the opportunity to show your appreciation and reward the person for becoming an unofficial brand ambassador. It could be as simple as expressing gratitude or even offering them a special gift. Such a gesture is likely to amplify their excitement and potentially lead them to share even more about your brand, magnifying its impact.

Know your enemies!

Being well-informed about your competition puts you in a better position to succeed when market is competitive.

With multiple players vying for success, it’s important to keep a close eye on your rivals.

By monitoring their social media activities and strategies, you can learn from their tactics and capitalize on their mistakes. Using your competitors’ names as monitoring terms allows you to stay updated on their latest actions, enabling you to make informed decisions and adjust your own strategies accordingly.

Create your very own social newsletter

Have you ever wanted a newsletter that brings a fresh twist? Imagine receiving a curated list of social media posts on specific topics straight to your inbox, instead of the usual collection of articles from a single website.

It’s like having a dynamic newsletter that captures the latest buzz in your industry and diverse perspectives shared across various social media platforms.

But that’s not all! Another valuable approach is to keep an eye on influential individuals within your industry, often referred to as opinion makers. Engaging with them can open doors to potential influencers for your product or brand.

Find leads and customers

You can use social media monitoring to find and connect with potential leads and customers. It helps you identify users who are interested in your products or services. By tracking conversations, you can discover people who are actively seeking solutions or expressing their needs.

With a solid monitoring process in place, you can target your efforts, engage in conversations, and foster relationships with potential customers.

Now Over to You

In a nutshell, social media monitoring tools are your secret weapon for staying on top of the digital game!  As we’ve discussed throughout this blog post, selecting the right monitoring tools, focusing on relevant platforms, and implementing best practices are all crucial components of a successful social media monitoring strategy.

By staying proactive and adaptive, businesses can harness the power of social media to strengthen their brand reputation, foster customer loyalty, and ultimately, drive growth and success in an increasingly competitive market.

Remember, staying informed and connected is the key!

Want to give it a free try? Enter your brand, product, competitor, or any other keyword you have in mind in the box below!