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:
Listen for specific mentions across social media platforms
Identify trending topics or phrases by tracking real-time conversations
Analyze and detail customer sentiment (positive, negative, neutral)
Organize customer information for audience segmentation and engagement
Identify thought leaders and influencers within relevant industries
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.