Social listening tools: find out what people say about you

Social listening tools allow you to listen to updates and conversations relaunched on social networks. Why is it important? Because you need to know the conversations concerning your brand and the opportunities that are hidden behind updates that could affect your business.

In addition, social listening is essential to do a good customer care service activity and to intercept the needs. Customers leave questions and criticisms on social media and demand your attention as a company as quickly as possible. This means that you need to be ready to interact and answer clearly.

In this article, you will learn what are social listening tools, how to use them and which are the best ones on the market.

What are social listening tools?

Social listening consists of tracking social media platforms for mentions and conversations related to your brand. In this way, you can then analyse the data shown by social listening tools to discover opportunities to act. Therefore, there are two steps to consider:

Monitoring: monitor social media channels for mentions of your brand, competitors, products, and keywords related to your business.
Analysis: analyse the information to take an advantage, for example by responding to a happy customer or shifting your entire brand positioning.

If you are not using social listening tools, you are creating your business strategy without caring about your customers. Real people actively talk about your brand and your industry online, so it is in your best interest to know what they have to say.

Before listing the best tools, however, we would like to give you some tips.

Social listening tips

Here are some tips to really learn how to give a boost to your social media channels by using social listening tools:

Find out what kinds of words people tend to use when they talk about your business and your industry;
Learn where customers have conversations about your brand;
Use more advanced search techniques to filter your results;
Listen closely to your competitors and what other people say about them online;
Share what you learn with every team within your company;
Analyse patterns and trends over time, rather than just individual comments.

Are you ready now to start using social listening tools? Let’s get to know the best ones!

Our shortlist of the best social listening tools

Social listening tools will make it much easier for you to implement an effective social listening strategy and create a community around your brand because you will always be updated on what your customers need and would like to obtain from your products or services. Let’s see which are the best 10 tools!

Awario

Awario is one of those social listening tools that give brands access to insights on their customers, market, and competitors. Its mission is to make social listening, social media analytics, and competitive intelligence affordable for businesses of any size because every business has the right to have access to data about their market and customers.

Advantages:

Campaign analytics
Competitive analysis
Configurable alerts
Customer engagement
Impact measurement
Influencer tracking
Multi-channel marketing
Reporting/Analytics
Reputation management

You can choose among the free version or 3 subscription plans:

Starter: €24 per month
Pro: €74 per month
Enterprise: €249 per month

Brand24

Brand24 is one of the best social listening tools to protect your online reputation, improve customer satisfaction, measure your marketing efforts, and track your hashtags. On the website, you will find a lot of resources to improve your social media strategy and learn more on this tool.

Advantages:

Audience targeting
Brand tracking
Campaign analytics
Campaign management
Collaboration tools
Competitive analysis
Competitor monitoring
Configurable alerts

You can choose among the free version or 4 subscription plans:

Individual: $49 per month
Team: $99 per month
Pro: $149 per month
Enterprise: $249 per month

BuzzSumo

Since 2014, BuzzSumo allows you to monitor your competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates and makes sure to send you alerts to catch important events. In fact, you can create alerts for the topics, brands and keywords that have an impact on your business. Today, thousands of businesses use this tool to monitor their brand and industry.

Advantages:

Campaign analytics
Content management
Engagement tracking
Multi-channel marketing
Reporting & Statistics

You can choose among a free trial of 30 days, a free version or 3 subscription plans:

Pro: $99 per month
Plus: $179 per month
Large: $299 per month

HipSocial

HipSocial is part of the 500apps Infinity Suite and one of the most complete social listening tools because it offers many additional features such as social analytics, content scheduler, social media planner, etc. It even allows you to manage multiple social media accounts at one place.

Advantages:

Automated publishing
Contact management
Content management
Multi-account management
Post scheduling
Reporting/Analytics
Support with specialists

It has a free version or two subscription plans:

Infinity: $14.99 per month
BYOS: price is to be requested

Hootsuite

Hootsuite has the scalable platform, deep expertise, strong industry partnerships, and bold vision to help your organization deliver top experiences to your customers at every stage of their journey and to find out what they are really looking for. It even gives you access to industry leading certifications, training, and coaching.

Advantages:

Communication management
Content management
Mobile access
Reporting/Analytics
Single Sign On
Social media integration
Social Sharing
Survey/Poll management

You can choose among a free trial of 30 days or 4 subscription plans:

Professional: €39 per month
Team: €109 per month
Business: €669 per month
Enterprise: price is to be requested

Mention

Mention counts over 750,000 users in 125+ countries, positioning it among the most known and used social listening tools. By tracking a brand, competitor, or industry topic, it allows you to compare and analyse online conversations, as well as create content based on important social and web insights.

Advantages:

Audience targeting
Campaign management
Competitive analysis
Configurable alerts
Customer engagement
Reporting & Statistics
Reputation management

You can choose among a free trial, a free version or 4 subscription plans:

Solo: €29 per month
Pro: €99 per month
ProPlus: €199 per month
Company: price is to be requested

Oktopost

Oktopost allows to measure your brand equity, monitor customer feedback, and track discussions around specific topics across all social channels. In addition, you can also monitor and analyse social media accounts of your competitors and see how your online presence stacks up against industry leaders.

Advantages:

Audience Targeting
Brand Tracking
Campaign Analytics
Campaign Management
Competitor Monitoring
Content Management
Editorial Calendar
Engagement Tracking

You can make a free demo, while the price is to be requested.

Onlypult

Onlypult is among the most incredible social listening tools because it allows you to figure out how healthy your brand is and improve your marketing strategy. It uses a variety of metrics, including the number of fans of a brand or mentions of it, the engagement rates with a variety of posts, likes, comments, the number of discussions about it, etc.

Advantages:

Automated publishing
Brand tracking
Campaign management
Collaboration tools
Content management
Multi-account management
Post scheduling
Reporting/Analytics

You can choose among a free trial of 7 days or 4 subscription plans:

Start: $10.50 per month
SMM: $17.50 per month
Agency: $34.30 per month
Pro: $55.30 per month

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is considered one of the best social listening tools because it is the only digital-first solution powered by a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform, helping you engage with customers across 30+ channels and scale service with a human touch.

Advantages:

AB testing
AI/Machine learning
Alerts/Notifications
Automated publishing
Behaviour analytics
Campaign analytics
Campaign management
Campaign planning

You can choose among a free trial of 30 days or a demo.

Talkwalker

Talkwaler is one of the most intelligent social listening tools because its technology goes beyond anything you can imagine. For example, with the image recognition technology, it can tell you if your brand was mentioned in a picture even if you are not mentioned in any text related to that picture.

Advantages:

Campaign analytics
Campaign management
Competitor monitoring
Keyword filtering
Multi-channel data collection
Performance metrics
Reporting/Analytics

You can make a free demo, while the price is to be requested.

The full list of the best social listening tools

If you are not fully satisfied with our shortlist and you want to discover more social listening tools, keep reading! Below, you will find the full list of the best tools selected by us for you.

Conclusions on social listening tools

Social listening helps you understand why, where, and how conversations about your brand occur and what users think even when they don’t tag or mention your brand directly. You just need to choose which one of the social listening tools suits you best and start the journey!

Be curious! Do not limit yourself and do not stop at our proposal of tools! Check out our article Software Discovery platforms: the top 9 for us to find the one that best suits your needs.