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Published July 14th 2024
Social listening is all about listening to what people are saying about your brand and competitors online.
Some of these mentions can be found in obvious places – like customer reviews, or social media posts addressed directly to a brand searching for customer service help.
But we'll let you in on an industry secret: social media is where some of the most interesting online conversations are happening.
This could take the form of an influencer sharing a post of them wearing an item from a particular brand, and their followers discussing the specifics of that brand in the comments. They might ask for more details about products they love, discuss whether the sizing is industry standard, or look for the details of an item that's no longer available.
Because these conversations can be spread across countless major social media platforms and multiple social media posts, it would be impossible to track them all manually.
This is why social listening tools can be a game changer.
The best social listening tools help you monitor brand mentions and track relevant keywords across social media platforms like X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit.
Whether it's X threads, Instagram comments, or Reddit discussions, your customers and future customers are telling you what they want to see from your brand. It's time to start listening!
In this guide, we'll list some of the top social listening tools for 2024, who they're for, and how they can help you build a brand your customers actually want to talk about.
Social listening is the process of monitoring digital conversations to understand what consumers are saying about your brand, industry, and competitors.
In simple terms, it involves tracking topics relevant to your business wherever those conversations may be happening.
Most commonly, this means across social media platforms, online forums, review sites, and news sites. But you can also use social listening tools to "listen in" wherever your audience is online.
By tapping into these conversations, you can get a true understanding of how people feel about your products, services, and even your competitors.
You'll know how your social media campaigns are being received, and you'll gain insights that will help you improve your social media strategy.
It's like being a digital fly on the wall, alerting you to all the online mentions you might otherwise miss.
In short, social media listening provides you with access to unfiltered feedback that you can't get anywhere else.
Social listening tools act as your brand's eyes and ears online.
Using the latest technology, they can continuously scan the web and flag anything important related to your brand, industry keywords, competitors, or pre-set topics of interest.
This could be in the form of social posts, emerging market trends, or other mentions of your brand online.
These social media listening tools use advanced algorithms and natural language processing to search social media channels, websites, blogs, and online communities for mentions of your brand, products, campaigns, or relevant conversations.
The real magic happens when social listening platforms turn all those online whispers into polished reports, visualizations, and social media analytics.
With a top social listening tool, you can track trends in customer sentiment, identify influencers, monitor brand mentions, and even predict emerging conversations before they become the hot new thing.
Using social media listening tools is like having a dedicated team working around the clock to protect your brand's reputation, amplify your message, and keep you relevant to your audience.
By monitoring social media conversations, online forums and review sites, these social listening platforms can help:
Ready to track mentions across the biggest social media channels while improving your marketing strategy and gaining valuable insights?
Without further ado, let's take a look at the biggest players in the game.
Typical role: Communications Manager, PR Manager
Company size: Mid-size to enterprise
Use cases: Track media coverage, monitor social media mentions, identify journalists and influencers for outreach.
CisionOne is an integrated social intelligence tool perfect for communications teams.
It's known for its ability to provide in-depth social listening across social media platforms such as X, Facebook, and YouTube.
CisionOne's analytics uncovers conversation insights across a range of key social metrics and comes with executive-ready, custom reports that tell the story of social coverage.
It also offers unlimited search streams and the ability to monitor mentions as they happen via a mobile app.
Users can schedule posts, publish to Facebook, X, LinkedIn and Instagram, collaborate on content and get approvals - all in one place.
It also offers an extensive global database full of contact and work details for journalists, influencers, and media outlets. Think of it as a super-powered little black book, allowing you to take those important first steps in outreach once you've identified the right connections.
And when we say super-powered, we mean it: the CisionOne social suite is backed by more than 850,000 up-to-date journalist media profiles, validated by a team of more than 120 global researchers and monitored globally in 196 countries and 69 languages.
This platform has it all - when you're ready to distribute your media releases far and wide, you can use the built-in media outreach tools to check off that task on your list, too.
Pros: Great monitoring capabilities, extensive media database, potential for extensive journalist and influencer outreach
Cons: Pricing can be high for smaller businesses, so speak to an expert to find out about free trials.
Typical role: Social Media Manager, Digital Marketing Manager, Consumer Insights Analyst
Company size: Enterprise
Use cases: Tracking brand health, campaign analysis, consumer insights, widespread social listening
Brandwatch is a great choice for consumer brands looking to analyze social media conversations, segment audiences and benchmark against the competition.
Brandwatch enables social media managers and market researchers to analyze online conversations at scale, across a wide range of social and online sources. This makes it one of the most comprehensive social listening tools on the market.
If we were to do a little social listening on Brandwatch (how meta), we'd find that one thing that regularly crops up in positive reviews of the social listening tool is its superior audience segmentation.
What is audience segmentation?
It simply means that in addition to allowing users to identify brand and competitor mentions, Brandwatch helps users slice and dice demographic data. This handy feature can be used for both in-app social audiences and brand customer lists.
Pros: AI-powered insights, deep segmentation, and comprehensive insights
Cons: Pricing can be high for smaller businesses, and a possible learning curve for those new to sentiment analysis (due to advanced analytics)
Typical role: Social Media Coordinator, Marketing Manager
Company size: Used by all sizes of businesses
Use cases: Social media management, content scheduling
Hootsuite is a well-known choice for social media teams, digital marketers, and community managers at companies large and small.
Hootsuite offers social listening capabilities through features called "Streams" and "Insights". "Streams" helps users monitor keywords, brand mentions, and hashtags across multiple locations, including all major social media platforms, Reddit, Google My Business, and review sites, while "Insights" supports competitor research through sentiment analysis and AI.
Hootsuite also recently acquired Talkwalker (another social listening tool we'll look at later) and will be expanding its social listening capabilities in the coming months.
In addition to great social listening options, Hootsuite is also highly rated by users for its social scheduling calendars and ability to juggle multiple social media accounts.
Pros: Create keyword monitoring streams, actionable insights, all-in-one social media management, team collaboration
Cons: Listening/analytics features not as robust as other dedicated social listening tools
Typical role: Social Media Manager, Digital Marketing Manager
Company size: Small businesses or agencies
Use cases: Social media management, client reporting
Agorapulse is made for social media agencies and small businesses.
It's praised not only for its social media management, but also for the clear and concise social listening reports that users can generate and share with clients or executives.
In addition to social listening tools to keep an eye on social channels, users can also monitor reviews or comments.
There's also a handy element of scheduling and approval options for various social media platforms, so your other social media efforts are covered, too.
Pros: User-friendly, both social and online data presented in shareable reports
Cons: Fewer listening capabilities than some rivals
Typical role: Business Owner, Solopreneur
Company size: Small Business or freelancer
Use cases: Brand monitoring, online review tracking
Startups, personal brands and small businesses on a budget are often big fans of Mention thanks to its affordable pricing.
Users can set up alerts for brand mentions on social media and the wider web, perform basic sentiment analysis, and track social media and industry trends.
Those who love Mention also praise it for its fast tracking of relevant keywords and its customer sentiment filters. This allows users to sort by negative, positive, or both sentiments and get better feedback on their marketing campaigns.
Pros: Affordable pricing, easy UI, helpful sentiment analysis filters, basic analytics
Cons: Less robust data and reporting compared to top social listening tools
Typical role: Social Media Manager, Community Manager
Company size: Mid-size businesses
Use cases: Social customer care, message inbox management
Sprout Social is the social media tool of choice for customer service teams.
This is mainly due to its intelligent inbox, where users can manage incoming messages, tag and assign articles, and respond directly without having to switch platforms.
Sprout Social offers social listening capabilities as an add-on to its core social media management platform.
While not Sprout's primary focus, their social listening tool allows you to monitor mentions of your brand and selected keywords across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X and other online sources.
Pros: Unified smart inbox, employee advocacy, social CRM
Cons: Listening/monitoring features limited
Typical role: Digital Marketing Manager, Brand Manager, Market Research Manager
Company size: Mid-market businesses
Use case: Omnichannel media intelligence, market research
Tailored for mid-market companies, Meltwater offers social listening and AI-powered insights in more than 190 countries.
People who use it say it's great for its automated sentiment analysis, precise Boolean queries (meaning it can filter results to include or exclude hyper-specific search terms), and level of brand customization, but these features come with a premium price tag.
Some users also find Meltwater's extensive reporting options overwhelming, so it may not be the right choice for someone new to social listening.
Pros: Customizable dashboards, accurate sentiment analysis
Cons: Expensive enterprise pricing, reports can be overwhelming
Typical role: Head of Marketing/Insights, CMO, Consumer Insights Analyst
Company size: Enterprise
Use case: Global brand health tracking, competitor benchmarking, consumer intelligence
What is Talkwalker known for?Talkwalker is tailored for large, multinational brands seeking a comprehensive consumer social media listening tool.
Its AI-powered analytics can analyze online conversations in 192 languages, giving global companies a unified view of brand perception worldwide.
Users rave about Talkwalker's AI-powered insights, which can identify emerging trends, segment audiences, and even predict future consumer behavior.
The platform also offers high-quality competitive benchmarking capabilities, so you know exactly where you stand compared to your competitors and can use this information to inform your marketing strategies.
As mentioned above, Talkwalker was recently acquired by Hootsuite, so its platform may soon evolve to reflect this partnership.
Pros: Multilingual listening, in depth analytics, competitor analysis
Cons: Expensive enterprise pricing, technical learning curve
Typical role: Market Researcher, Consumer Insights Manager
Company size: Mid-Market to Enterprise
Use case: Voice of customer analysis, market research, audience segmentation
Synthesio's claim to fame is that it allows users to build their own AI models for highly specialized business use cases.
It's probably best for someone who's already familiar with basic social listening tools and is looking for something more complex, spreading their wings across different social media channels.
To get the most out of the platform, you likely have technical skills or an in-house development team.
The platform allows market researchers to create custom classifiers to analyze unstructured data exactly the way they need it.
Synthesio's ability to combine AI models with human-validated rules provides unparalleled accuracy in categorizing conversations.
Pros: Custom AI models, human-validated rules, data visualizations
Cons: Steeper learning curve, enterprise pricing
Typical role: SEO Specialist, Digital PR Manager
Company size: Agencies, freelancers, small businesses
Use case: Backlink monitoring, online PR, web mention tracking
While many SEO specialists use Awario for its web monitoring capabilities, the tool also offers high-quality social listening capabilities at an affordable price.
Users can track brand mentions and historical data across news sites, blogs, forums and review platforms in addition to social media.
Awario is particularly useful for digital PR campaigns or SEO professionals looking to monitor backlink opportunities and manage their online reputation.
Reviewers have praised Awario for its Boolean search capabilities and easy-to-use interface.
Pros: Web & social monitoring, Boolean search, affordable pricing
Cons: Limited team capabilities, smaller data pool than top tools
If you weren't already convinced of the benefits of social media listening tools, you probably now understand how using one can optimize your social media engagement, boost your social media marketing strategy, and be a total game changer when it comes to social media monitoring.
In fact, if you get your social listening strategy right and take the time to monitor conversations among your target audience, you could transform your social media presence - not to mention improve your brand reputation.
We hope you now have a better idea of the best social listening tools for your needs.
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