Best Social Media Listening Tools
Social media listening tools provide functionality for listening, tracking, and gathering relevant content across social media. These tools are used by social media, marketing, and communications teams to identify trends, track competitors, and understand customer sentiment. Researchers can leverage social media listening tools to analyze social trends and media outlets use them to identify breaking news.
Social media listening software enables marketers to personalize content for specific users or demographics, identify thought leaders or influencers, and respond to positive or negative mentions. Many of these products also support monitoring across multiple languages and countries, allowing businesses to localize advertisements effectively. As a result, these tools help organizations gain demographic insights, measure social media presence, detect negative mentions, engage with users, and improve brand reputation.
Social media listening tools often enhance social media analytics software by providing data. While these tools can be found as standalone products, their monitoring functionality can also be found within social media management software and social media suites as a feature. Additionally, many media monitoring software solutions include social listening capabilities.
To qualify for inclusion in the Social Media Listening category, a product must:
Best Social Media Listening Tools At A Glance
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Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management solution designed to help businesses effectively engage with their audiences, streamline content publishing, and derive actionable insights fro
Sprout Social is a social media management platform that allows users to monitor messages, mentions, and keywords across all networks within a single workflow, and provides features for scheduling posts, tracking performance, and generating reports. Users frequently mention the convenience of having all messages, mentions, and comments from various social platforms consolidated into one stream via the Smart Inbox, and the detailed, customizable reporting capabilities that provide valuable insights into post performance and audience engagement. Reviewers noted that the platform can be expensive, especially for small teams or individuals, and some advanced features require time to fully understand and set up, with certain functionalities and insights only available on higher-tier plans.
116,468 Twitter followers
Too many brands suck at social. Yours doesn’t have to. It starts with the right tools. Thousands of brands rely on Hootsuite’s platform and solutions to launch brilliant social campaigns, deliver 5
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows users to schedule posts, manage multiple accounts, and analyze performance across various platforms. Users like Hootsuite's ability to manage multiple social media accounts from one dashboard, its scheduling features, and its analytics and reporting tools which help evaluate performance and optimize content strategy. Reviewers mentioned that some advanced features and detailed analytics are locked behind higher pricing tiers, the interface can feel complex at times, and there can be occasional issues with platform integrations and performance lags.
6,180,006 Twitter followers
Meltwater empowers companies with a suite of solutions that spans media, social, and consumer intelligence. Since 2001, we’ve helped organizations harness the world’s data in real time to fuel smarter
Meltwater is a media monitoring and analytics platform that provides insights into brand perception, media coverage, and social media performance, and also offers features for scheduling posts across multiple platforms and generating reports. Reviewers like the comprehensive coverage Meltwater provides, its user-friendly interface, the ability to schedule posts across multiple platforms, the robust database of reporters, and the responsive customer support. Users mentioned that Meltwater can be difficult to navigate, the AI features are not impressive, the initial setup can be challenging, and the platform sometimes scrapes irrelevant data, causing data quality issues.
24,911 Twitter followers
Brandwatch empowers over 5,000 of the world's most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social. Its Consumer Intelligence solution offers AI-enriched data from ove
34,300 Twitter followers
BrandMentions is the ultimate AI-driven solution for monitoring your brand’s presence across the digital landscape. As one of the most comprehensive social listening tools on the market, BrandMentions
1,595 Twitter followers
Vista Social is a modern all-in-one social media platform. Expertly crafted social media management tools to help you exceed your goals. Features include publishing and scheduling, reports and analyti
Vista Social is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers features such as real-time DM interactions, personalized DM automation, content scheduling, and a listening tool for data analysis. Reviewers appreciate the platform's user-friendly interface, its ability to consolidate multiple social media tasks into one platform, and its unique features like real-time DM interactions and a listening tool for data analysis. Users experienced minor issues such as occasional slow loading times, glitches during peak usage, and a somewhat steep learning curve for more advanced features.
2,747 Twitter followers
Reputation is the only platform that empowers companies to fulfill their brand promise by measuring, managing, and scaling their reputation performance in real-time, everywhere. Functioning as a busin
Reputation is a centralized platform that collects and manages user ratings and reviews from various platforms, offers real-time review monitoring, and provides insights from marketing campaigns. Users like Reputation's ability to centralize reviews, its real-time review monitoring system, and the insights it provides from marketing campaigns, which guide users in SEO improvements. Reviewers noted that Reputation lacks a strong social media presence and management, and its reporting often lags, causing confusion in reviews navigation.
10,939 Twitter followers
Stay organized, save time, and easily manage your social media with Agorapulse’s inbox, publishing, reporting, monitoring, and team collaboration tools. Agorapulse supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagra
13,069 Twitter followers
YouScan is a next-generation, AI-powered social listening platform designed to help users gain deep insights into customer behavior and sentiment. This innovative solution caters specifically to marke
451 Twitter followers
Brand24 Brand24 is one of the most advanced social media monitoring tools with AI-powered reports and insights. Thousands of companies of all sizes use Brand24 to identify and analyze online conversat
23,612 Twitter followers
Brandwatch empowers over 5,000 of the worlds most admired companies to understand and engage with customers at the speed of social. Brandwatch Social Media Management, previously Falcon.io, is a leadi
Brandwatch is a social media management tool that provides analytics, audience sentiment analysis, and brand mentions tracking across various platforms. Users like Brandwatch's ability to handle multiple social media accounts, its scheduling feature, and the ease of sharing content with clients, which improves communication and collaboration. Users experienced issues with the platform's complexity, steep learning curve, high pricing, and occasional technical glitches that affect its reliability and functionality.
34,300 Twitter followers
Sprinklr Social’s industry-leading platform empowers enterprise teams of all sizes to deliver a consistent brand experience across 35+ digital and social channels to drive engagement and revenue, with
Sprinklr Social is a platform used for managing social media marketing activities, including publishing, scheduling, and reviewing engagement dashboards. Reviewers frequently mention the platform's robust automation capabilities, customizable dashboards, and the ability to manage multiple social channels in one place, saving significant time and improving efficiency. Reviewers experienced a steep learning curve with the platform, finding it complex and not always intuitive, with some reporting issues with slow performance when handling large datasets and occasional support or bug issues.
38,182 Twitter followers
Founded in 2013 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 Faceb
48,809 Twitter followers
Onclusive Social is a cutting-edge social media intelligence platform that empowers marketing, PR, and communications teams to turn social media data into strategic insights. Our platform helps organi
3,695 Twitter followers
The fastest, most reliable all-in-one PR and earned media platform featuring global media monitoring, a media contact database and robust analytics. Search results are easily analyzed, turned into act
3,695 Twitter followers
Social Media Monitoring Tools Features
Cross-Channel Monitoring – Cross-channel monitoring features allow you to simultaneously track activity from your accounts across various social media channels. This centralizes data collection and tracking and improves the efficiency of social media monitoring. If your company has many social media accounts, utilizing cross-channel monitoring features can help you easily manage them. Listening to users across all networks will paint an accurate picture of how they perceive your social media posts and brand.
Analytics – Social media management software tools typically offer features that help analyze the trends you observe and search efficiently for data. These tools allow you to optimize internet searches to find facts faster. Some products can create reports that visualize data, making it easier to analyze results and measure the effectiveness of your social media strategies.
Social Reporting – Social reporting allows your company to access custom reports and dashboards to measure social activity and engagement opportunities. It also allows users to export data and graphs into PowerPoint, Excel, and other useful data-reporting programs. This feature provides great visuals for you to present data in meetings.
Sentiment Scoring – Sentiment scoring determines whether social mentions of your brand are positive, negative, or neutral. This feature helps you monitor whether certain products are performing well and if marketing changes need to be made to keep customers happy.
Influencer Identification – Influencer identification helps identify who is talking about your brand along with their influence over social communities. This feature can help bolster your company’s reputation by having popular social media bloggers feature your brand on their own social media accounts.
Publishing – Most social media monitoring software offers a publishing feature that allows users to auto-schedule social media posts. Users can schedule posts for months into the future, which can save your company plenty of time. Publishing features also automatically post blogs from your website onto social media. This is a great way to bolster the views on your blogs and generate more traffic back to your website.