Social media listening tools give you the power to discover what your (current and future) customers really think about you.

That’s something we’d all like to know, right?

After all, research from SuperOffice shows that the number one reason customers ditch a company is because they think that company doesn’t care about them.

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But it’s not only about turning your customers’ frowns upside down; social media listening generally helps you deliver a better standard of service. And research shows that better customer service offers tangible benefits:

  • Three in four consumers will spend more money with a business that delivers good customer experiences (source)
  • 85% of Americans who leave a five-star review after a positive customer experience are likely to recommend the brand to friends and family (source) 74% of customers say they’ll forgive a company for a mistake after receiving excellent service (source)

However, with tens of thousands of social media updates posted every second of every day, manually listening for brand mentions is simply too labor-intensive. You need the right tools for the job to do social listening effectively.

Check out 28 of our favorite social media listening tools:

1. Buffer

Price

  • Free publishing tools for individuals getting started with social media
  • Upgrade from $6 per social channel per month to access publishing, analytics & engagement tools for social media geeks

Summary

More than a social listening tool, Buffer takes an omnichannel approach to social media management, allowing you to handle all your social platforms in one place. That’s helpful if –– like most brands –– your audience could be anywhere rather than exclusively active on Facebook or LinkedIn.

Buffer makes it simple to track down the most important conversations your customers engage in online. Once you’ve found them, the centralized dashboard and shared team inbox allow you to join those conversations and drive audience engagement.

Key Features

  • Listen for conversations on multiple platforms, including Facebook, X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
  • Measure audience behavior and engagement through analytics and reporting tools
  • Plan and build campaigns using the publishing and scheduling features

2. Brandwatch

Price

Summary

Two-thirds of the Forbes 100 most valuable brands use Brandwatch, which deserves a spot on this list.

It helps users understand how customers feel about their brand by monitoring mentions –– not just of their brand name but also of their products and logos. It’s even possible to conduct multi-year analyses to identify big-picture trends.

Key Features

  • Monitor key publications, regions, and influencers to gather industry-level insights
  • Measure the impact of your marketing strategies to understand how consumers feel about your brand and messaging
  • Track online mentions to understand customer perception, spot changes in sentiment, and measure brand visibility

3. Sprout Social

Pricing

  • From $199 per user per month

Summary

Sprout’s social listening tools are designed to help companies extract actionable insights from global social conversations, enabling them to identify gaps in their industry and boost the strength of their brand.

Compatible with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X/Twitter, YouTube, and the wider internet, Sprout offers extensive training and educational resources to ensure you get the most value from the platform.

Key Features

  • Keep track of conversations and relevant themes to understand how consumers feel about your brand and broader topics
  • Catalog conversations and audience information to build a clear picture of consumer sentiment, industry trends, and brand opportunities
  • Explore customer feelings on specific topics, products, and companies to enhance your messaging and brand positioning

4. Mention

Price

  • Plans priced from $41 per month
  • TikTok, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube only available on custom Company plans

Summary

Mention boasts a vast amount of social media listening functionality. Users can listen to millions of conversations across multiple platforms, organizing the most important ones using Mention’s “Smart folders” functionality.

Filtering options make it easy to gauge audience sentiment, while the Insights Center helps you stay focused on top-level goals. Reports can be built using rich data from your brand, a product, a competitor, or a broader industry topic.

Key Features

  • Filter key conversations to analyze and compare trends quickly
  • Schedule automated reports to receive them in your inbox at the time and day that suits you
  • Build detailed dashboards to understand trends at a glance better

5. Brand24

Price

  • $79 per month for individuals tracking a single brand

Summary

Unlike social media management tools that incorporate social media listening functionality as part of a much broader feature set, Brand24 is built from the ground up with monitoring and listening in mind.

Users get access to a wide range of social media listening tools. Their tools include a mentions feed, where you can quickly discover what people say about your brand in real-time. Additionally, a discussion volume chart helps you identify sudden changes in activity levels.

Key Features

  • Cut through the noise with customized alerts, such as only receiving notifications on negative brand mentions from blogs with more than 300,000 monthly visits.
  • Filter results across a range of criteria, including mention source, sentiment, and number of visits
  • Turn your data into infographics, PDF reports, and .xls files

6. Awario

Price

  • From $49 per month

Summary

Rather than relying on a single third-party data source to provide social media listening data, Awario crawls over 13 billion web pages daily. That means you get access to a whole lot of information!

Using your brand name as a keyword lets you quickly find relevant discussions across multiple social platforms and join in when necessary. Plus, you can keep track of sentiment and share-of-voice data to understand the scale and quality of your brand reputation.

Key Features

  • Use sentiment analysis to sort mentions by positive, negative, and neutral
  • Track down your top social influencers across multiple platforms
  • Monitor mentions for keywords in any language and given location

7. Keyhole

Price

  • From $89 per month for one user

Summary

Marketers at more than 7,000 organizations use Keyhole to measure and demonstrate the impact of their social media marketing, with plenty of big names –– including Billboard, Reuters, and the Smithsonian Institution –– relying on its social media monitoring tools.

Keyhole gives users a detailed view of their brand, audiences, and industry by displaying their direct and indirect mentions, hashtags, keywords, and influencers on a single platform.

Key Features

  • Understand how your audience feels about your brand and competitors using Keyhole’s AI-powered sentiment analysis tool
  • Use QuickTrends –– like Google Trends for social media –– to instantly identify critical trends and opportunities in your industry
  • Boost your social media following and increase conversions with account recommendations on top times to post and hashtags to use

8. BuzzSumo

Price

  • Priced from $199 per month for one user

Summary

Although best known as a content analysis tool, BuzzSumo also offers a range of social media listening functionality that allows users to track mentions, trends, and updates for their brands, competitors, and the wider industry.

What’s more, you can get alerts on almost everything, so your results never get missed amid all the noise of your social feeds.

Key Features

  • Set alerts for the topics, brands, and keywords that have the most significant impact on your marketing goals
  • Monitor influencers, bloggers, and journalists to ensure you’re the first to engage with their latest posts and articles
  • Browse the world’s most extensive index of social engagement data based on information from five billion articles

9. BrandMentions

Price

  • From $79 per month
  • All plans include a seven-day free trial

Summary

BrandMentions monitors key online channels to keep you posted about everything that’s going on in your niche, including anything related to your brand. It’s used by almost 11,000 large and small organizations, including big names like Adobe and McCann.

Users receive new mentions on their brand and market directly to their inbox, ensuring they’re up to date with the latest developments the moment they happen.

Key Features

  • Keep tabs on everything that’s being said about your company or product
  • Learn when and where your brand is being mentioned to help optimize your marketing strategy
  • Understand your audience’s interests and the products that most closely align with their needs

10. AgoraPulse

Price

  • Offers a free 30-day trial
  • Premium plans start at $49 per user per month

Summary

AgoraPulse offers a whole suite of social media monitoring tools — covering everything from reporting to publishing — used by more than 31,000 social media managers daily.

Its social listening tool helps brands understand what current and potential customers say about them and their rivals. As well as a desktop platform, it has a dedicated mobile app that allows users to access the latest insights on their Android or iOS devices from any location.

Key Features

  • X/Twitter and YouTube search parameters allow users to find exactly what they’re searching for via boolean operators.
  • Labeling important posts, customer feedback, and competitor activity makes retrieving and responding easy.
  • Unlimited saved searches help users keep up with conversations with customers, prospects, and new opportunities.

11. YouScan

Price

  • Priced from $299 per month

Summary

YouScan differs slightly from the other social media listening tools in this article.

As the name alludes to, it’s an image-based social listening platform. Powered by AI, it can gather brand mentions by logos, keywords, and text on images across thousands of media sources and over 500 billion historic conversations.

Images can be described clearly, giving brands and agencies access to instant consumer insights.

Key Features

  • Automatically locates key information from billions of conversations by sorting mentions by subjects, categories, and trends.
  • AI-powered data segmentation eradicates the need for manual data processing.
  • Provides context on brand conversations, helping users track down the most relevant subjects.

12. Digimind

Price

Summary

Digimind describes itself as a piece of intelligence software that helps customers fully understand market trends and consumer insights across their competitive landscape.

Its social media listening functionality allows users to simultaneously analyze conversations across millions of online sources to leverage audience insights and optimize their marketing strategies.

While Digimind does all the standard stuff you’d expect from a social media listening tool, it also offers a proprietary “Top Reputation” module, which uses Google search data to provide a real-time view of your brand image.

Key Features

  • Get to-the-minute tracking on the information people seek about your brands, people, products, and competitors.
  • Generate social listening reports in seconds using Digimind’s pre-designed templates.
  • Brand mentions are marked as “read” once you’ve seen them, helping you keep track of the latest conversations.

13. HootSuite

Price

  • From $99 per month for one user and up to 10 social accounts

Summary

HootSuite is one of the best-known social media management tools on the market, helping customers optimize their marketing, sales, and support strategies.

While most people think of HootSuite as a simple scheduling tool, it also offers social media listening functionality powered by Brandwatch, another of the platforms on this list.

Known as HootSuite Insights, its social listening tool provides an instant, real-time overview of millions of online conversations.

Key Features

  • Set up immediate alerts to easily identify any spikes in brand mentions.
  • Search for online conversations related to any keyword or topic.
  • Filter searches by data, demographics, location, and other factors.

14. Talkwalker

Price

Summary

Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform is trusted by over 2,500 brands, including Orange, Spotify, and the European Investment Bank, trust Talkwalker’s consumer intelligence platform.

Its suite of tools is designed to help customers build stronger brands and gain a deeper understanding of their market.

From a social media listening perspective, Talkwalker can monitor both online and offline conversations about brands, products, and campaigns. The platform covers 187 languages and tracks conversations across 150 million websites.

Use social listening to analyze brand mentions across ten social networks, including full firehose access to X/Twitter. Go beyond social to track discussions on online news sites, blogs, forums, and offline databases and understand what your customers and prospects think of your brand.

Key Features

  • Talkwalker claims to be the only platform to offer fully integrated “visual learning” capable of tracking over 30,000 brand logos.
  • Analyzes brand mentions across ten social networks.
  • Tracks discussions across news sites, blogs, forums, and even offline databases.

15. Meltwater

Price

Summary

Meltwater modestly describes itself as the “Swiss Army knife” of media monitoring platforms, with a toolkit that includes social media listening, influencer management, and sentiment analysis.

It’s designed to be used by everyone from the smallest businesses to the largest enterprises and

claims to offer the world’s most comprehensive social listening platform, capable of tracking conversations across Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, and YouTube — as well as more niche platforms like Pinterest, Reddit, and Twitch.

Key Features

  • Create highly customizable monitoring dashboards to track conversations in real time
  • Offers unlimited searches across its pool of 200 billion global conversations
  • Uses AI-driven algorithms to identify brand mentions on thousands of podcasts

16. Quid

Price

Summary

NetBase Quid is a consumer and market intelligence platform that does everything from social media analytics to historical and real-time media monitoring.

Its social listening tools can analyze thousands of conversations as they happen, allowing customers to spot trends and address issues at the moment they emerge.

Beyond that, it helps users understand the channels on which their audiences are most active and build customer segments based on shared interests.

Key Features

  • Track customer sentiment and passion over time to get an up-to-date view of customer satisfaction levels.
  • Use psychographic attribution to understand where the biggest opportunities lie among your existing and potential customer base.
  • Combine data from social media, surveys, your CRM, chat logs, and voice responders to build a deeper understanding of your audience.

17. Synthesio

Price

Summary

Synthesio aims to speed up and improve business decision-making by providing AI-powered audience insights.

Many social listening tools use data spikes to spot trends and highlight potential issues. However, Synthesio provides based on a host of advanced factors, including changes to daily posting patterns and shifts in conversation.

Importantly, it can categorize and name themes as they emerge, meaning you can tap into opportunities you may never even have considered.

Key Features

  • Semantically similar conversations are automatically grouped together, providing valuable context and helping you gather higher-quality insights
  • Customers can discover user-generated content that drives high levels of engagement
  • Allows reports to be shared across the whole organization, ensuring that audience data is at front of mind during the decision-making process

18. Reputology

Price

  • Offers a 14-day free trial
  • Plans start from $110 per month for a single user

Summary

Reputology is essentially a social media listening tool explicitly geared to review platforms.

So, it’s more of a niche offering than many of the all-rounders in this article. However, with 89% of consumers reading reviews before making a purchase, it can provide highly valuable insights.

Reputology monitors over 100 review sites — including big hitters like Facebook, Google My Business, and the Apple App Store — allowing customers to monitor, analyze, and respond to online reviews from a single platform.

Key Features

  • Provides a single source of truth for all reviews written about your brands, products, services, and (if relevant) store locations
  • It uses semantic analysis technology to transform unstructured review content into meaningful data
  • Sends automated notifications, allowing users to read and reply to reviews as they arrive, all from within the Reputology platform

19. Emplifi

Price

Summary

Emplifi is the all-round customer experience platform formerly known as Social Bakers.

Established more than a quarter-century ago (i.e., before social media listening was even a “thing”), it helps brands handle more than one billion social media interactions across over 28 million social profiles every month.

Want another impressive-sounding number? According to Emplifi, it analyzes more than 138 million voice-of-customer data points daily. That’s a lot of data.

Key Features

  • It uses AI-driven analysis to understand the sentiment behind all incoming mentions, offering a real-time view of what people think about your brand
  • It breaks down your share of voice vs. your competitors, helping you understand your position in the market
  • It makes it easy to track down the accounts driving the most valuable and relevant conversations (and which of your competitors are already joining in)

20. Zoho Social

Price

  • From $10 per month for one team member

Summary

Zoho Social is part of Zoho’s sprawling suite of business tools covering everything from sales engagement to customer relationship management to building landing pages.

The platform was named 2024’s best social media management tool for individual creators by Forbes Advisor, thanks to its affordable pricing, ease of use, and detailed analytics. In addition to social media listening, it offers post-scheduling and content calendar functionality.

Key Features

  • Track social media engagement and notifications in real-time across up to 10 channels (depending on your price plan)
  • Build a social listening dashboard with in-depth tracking for hashtags, page reviews, user profiles, and more
  • Keep up with what your connections and people you follow are saying about you on social media.

21. Pulsar

Price

Summary

Pulsar is an audience intelligence and social media listening platform for brands and media organizations.

Used by big names like Danone and Pandora, Pulsar claims to combine the power and depth of a data science tool with the immediacy and simplicity of a Google search. Clever stuff!

Key Features

  • Discover the main segments that make up your audience, then understand the different ways they talk about the same topics.
  • Get a complete picture of your conversations across different audiences, channels, and markets, from social media to print and broadcast to blogs and reviews.
  • Use AI models trained on your brand, industry, or use case to find the most relevant conversations.

22. Exolyt

Price

  • Free-for-life plan for one tracked TikTok account, one tracked hashtag, and one influencer campaign
  • Paid plans start at $250 per month

Summary

All the other tools featured in this article are general social media listening platforms for multiple social networks. Exolyt is different because it focuses on a single channel: TikTok.

The platform offers various tools related to organic content on TikTok, covering everything from social listening to performance monitoring to competitor analysis.

Key Features

  • Identify emerging trends in TikTok content that are affecting your niche
  • Deep dive into niche topic areas and discover an overview of related videos, conversations, influencers, and social media metrics
  • Get a deeper understanding of your audience, including how they perceive your brand, product, industry, and competitors

23. Audiense

Price

  • Social intelligence tool costs $1,499 per month
  • Pricing unlisted for other Audiense products

Summary

Cards on the table: strictly speaking, Audiense isn’t actually a social media listening tool.

However, it applies some of the core concepts of social listening to help brands gain a deeper understanding of their communities and wider industries, so it was worth including.

Audiense serves 2,000+ agencies and brands and pulls data from various platforms, including X/Twitter and Meta, as well as specialist digital intelligence tools like Affinio, Soprism, and Tweetbinder.

Key Features

  • Use data to understand audience affinities, demographics, and more to create more accurate, detailed personas
  • Leverage the power of machine learning to analyze who makes up your target audience, including who and what they like, tweet, and follow
  • Get insights into how content is being shared and the audience segments discussing it.

24. Mentionlytics

Price

  • Priced from $41 per month

Summary

Mentionlytics is a web and social media monitoring tool that uses AI to track online conversations involving your brand, products, or competitors. It’s used by some of the biggest agencies and brands, including Eurobank, Lidl, and Ogilvy.

Key Features

  • Track online mentions of your brand using advanced filters and boolean searches to hone in on the most important conversations.
  • Stay updated with your competitors’ latest promotions and product launches to help inform your strategy.
  • Get real-time insights from an AI-powered “social intelligence advisor” to measure the impact of your social media campaigns.

25. Iconosquare

Price

  • Starts at €49 per month for five social profiles

Summary

Iconosquare is a social media analytics and management platform for brands and agencies. It offers a range of tools covering social media listening, publishing, collaboration, and more across five social channels — Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Key Features

  • Input your competitors to get a side-by-side comparison of your social media performance.
  • Select relevant hashtags and explore analytics for each, including number of published posts and content types.
  • Set up automated monthly reports that track your competitors’ activity and conversations involving your target hashtags.

26. Sprinklr

Price

Summary

Sprinklr is much more than “just” a social media listening tool — it’s a customer experience management solution offering a wealth of content marketing, social media, paid advertising, and website management-related functionality.

Many high-profile brands use the platform, including Acer, IKEA, and Uber.

Key Features

  • Identify trends and insights with real-time monitoring of over 30 digital and social channels.
  • Monitor user-generated content and brand mentions in visual content like images and videos.
  • Track your most important social media metrics — including brand awareness and share of voice — across all major social channels.

27. Critical Mention

Price

Summary

Critical Mention is part of Onclusive, a media monitoring and analysis tool for PR and communications professionals. However, it offers social media listening as part of its feature set. High-profile users include McDonald’s and the NBA franchise Orlando Magic.

Key Features

  • Use social media listening tools to keep on top of customer feedback.
  • Track your brand’s coverage across Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and X/Twitter in real-time.
  • Build and share reports across all your key metrics, including audience values, share of voice, and volume of mentions on specific social platforms.

28. Reputation

Price

Summary

As the name suggests, Reputation is an online business reputation management platform helping brands analyze and understand consumer feedback from the acquisition stage to advocacy. It has an impressive client list, including Costco, General Motors, and Kaiser Permanente.

Key Features

  • Monitor thousands of digital channels to understand your current and future customers’ discussions
  • Get real-time notifications on brand-related activity, including mentions, hashtags, and trending keywords
  • Compare yourself to your biggest rivals across various social media metrics, including reach and share of voice

Are there any social media listening tools you’d add to this list?

To learn more about social media listening, marketing, and building an engaging online presence, check out one of our upcoming social media strategy conferences.

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