Everything runs on results today. You might have made a lot of effort, but if you don’t have results to show, then you might as well have not done anything at all.
Be it ROI or likes and comments for a social media post, people want to see the numbers for their time and resources spent.
If you are a brand trying to get your audience to notice you, it is crucial that you are being talked about on social media. You might be doing a lot to build your social media presence, but how do you know if it’s working or not?
Social listening tools can help you out. “What are social listening tools?” you might ask.
Social listening tools are precisely what their name suggests. They “listen” to what people on the social networks say about your brands. Besides tracking mentions, they let the user interact and participate in the conversation straightaway.
Social media listening tools conveniently monitor all the back-and-forth from a single integrated platform for a brand manager or social media marketer. It saves a bunch of time and effort.
This blog has listed some of the most comprehensive and efficient social media listening tools. Which one would be your choice is up for discussion.
Table of Contents
1. Keyhole
Price: $99/mo
Keyhole is a social monitoring tool that provides brand and campaign monitoring, influencer engagement tracking, event monitoring, and market research. This pretty much covers all the essentials of a listening tool.
They also provide hashtag analytics, a handy feature for following audience engagement. As we can tell, people go to social media to get the public opinion on anything. And hashtags are the way they search. Hence using the right ones is crucial.
Keyhole’s AI technology helps us predict how effective the used hashtags will be. Some features worth mentioning are influencer dashboard, tracking content on multiple social media, sentiment analysis, and more. So staying on top of all these engagement metrics can help us leverage them to our advantage.
Pros
- It has comprehensible dashboards and generates reports.
- The hashtag tracker is very insightful.
- It is suitable for both agencies and larger companies.
Tasmy G
I like how easy it is to generate my analytics report for my social media channels. The hashtag tracker is particularly useful, and the insights have proven to be of great use for our campaign. I also greatly appreciate the description of each metric and how you measure it.
Cons
- The customer support takes longer to reach.
- It doesn’t integrate with LinkedIn.
- Advanced features like sentiment analysis and add-on trackers are available on higher costing plans.
Lauren F
What I find inconvenient is chat support can sometimes be delayed / not as helpful as competitors.
2. Mention
Price: $199/mo
Mention is a dedicated social listening tool that can track your brand across millions of platforms across the internet. It can go through social platforms and websites in different languages to pick out all mentions related to your brand from every corner online.
Mention has a convenient feature – Alerts. You can customize these alerts according to your preference, tuning out the keywords which are not relevant. Narrowing down your search even more, you can concentrate on specific countries and languages to fish out the results you want to see.
The tool’s dashboard has a very mail inbox kind of look and feel. You can add tags to the results to quickly sort and review them at any time. Users can reply to comments and messages through “Engage,” the tool’s communication component.
Other than this, the tool offers many more premium features like sentiment analysis, influencer data, competition analysis, custom report generation, exports, and much more.
Mention is one of the free social listening tools. Their free plan is designed to help individuals get started with the world of social media marketing. But this plan has minimal features and is not enough for multiple users.
Pros
- It can detect and monitor mentions anywhere across the internet.
- It has a straightforward but intuitive interface.
- The “mention” alerts give users real-time updates.
Deb B
Mention.com can help you track any of the brand mentions on social media, blogging websites, forums, etc. The tool is able to track any of the branded/non-branded keywords added to the tracker. We were able to resolve a few of the customer issues very quickly using the tool.
Cons
- It has limited features with lower plans.
- Customer support can be improved.
- Lack of accuracy reported by users.
Verified User
The accuracy of the reports is not always a hit. The way that mention.com “reads” the content contains other keywords that detract from the report.
3. SocialPilot
Prices: $150/mo
SocialPilot is one of the most comprehensive social media automation tools with social listening as one of its aspects. It is a complete tool, from content posting & scheduling, audience engagement, and social listening to analytics & reporting.
It supports all the major platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Google My Business, Tumblr, TikTok, and VK.
The inbox feature on the streamlined dashboard lets you access all the conversations on your pages on Facebook and Instagram and monitor the same. You can see the discussions and participate in them to reply to your target audience or answer their queries. This lessens the gap between your brand and the people.
Other than audience engagement, users can also keep an eye on the insights from audience growth, content analytics, influencer analytics, demographics, etc., through the SocialPilot tool.
Although social listening is not the main feature of SocialPilot, the whole buffet of attributes it offers makes for a very convenient tool for managing various profiles from a single space.
SocialPilot is one of the most user-friendly and comprehensive tools, with a clean user interface that doesn’t take more than a couple of hours to learn. This is why solopreneurs and agencies prefer it. It is an excellent way to cut down on the time and effort spent handling your brand’s social media marketing.
Pros
- The user-friendly interface makes the tool appealing to users.
- Social listening features provide for an interactive platform.
- Substantial content posting and scheduling is easy and streamlined.
- The content calendar is a convenient way to visualize your whole month’s planned posts at a glance.
- The bulk scheduling attribute lets you plan your social media schedule in advance.
- Insightful analytics help in monitoring the progress of the business.
- Generating branded reports and exporting them to clients is effortless.
- RSS automation and content curation tools provide fresh and relevant content regularly
- Influencer analytics gives users information regarding whom amongst them might drive engagement higher.
- It is available at very affordable prices.
- It has excellent customer service.
Kora C
SocialPilot has a simple but effective user interface, which makes it easy to learn and feel like a pro with it instantly. I love that they have a Google My Business functionality, which is unique for a social media scheduling tool. I am most impressed, however, with their fantastic customer support. First of all, prominently on every screen is a button to submit a feature request. This makes me feel like they’re interested in not just evolving but listening to their customers directly as they build new features.
Alexandra K
The scheduler function allows me to organize and post content for an entire month in advance. I can be sure that the content will be posted on time and in all different media formats. I can also edit posts after they have been scheduled to go out, posts can be re-shared, and times changed/edits made. The platform is easily navigated and easy to use. The functions work quickly across all of our business’s social platforms. The social analytics component is very beneficial and serves as a great guide to understanding how your content is doing and who exactly your audience is.
Sam D
I think they are lacking some features/functionality that other social schedulers have, but those other social schedulers are also a lot more expensive, so I understand the trade-off.
Interesting Read: Ultimate SocialPilot Review 2023 for Social Media Management & Reporting
4. Brand24
Price: $249/mo
Founded in 2011 in Poland, Brand24 is one of the best social media listening tools. It was an early entry in the market and has over time attracted some big-shot clients.
For a first-time user, the setup might be a bit confusing. For assistance, the website has a 20 minutes tutorial video that will clear the air for you. Brand24 offers one of the most intuitive AI-powered monitoring among all social listening tools.
The specifications for tracking keywords are pretty detailed, Allowing you to state which one to look for and which to ignore. Brand24 tracks keywords across platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, and Twitch.
The brand tracking options and filters are also quite detailed and allow you to narrow down your focus. Filters include influencer score, sentiment screening, interactions, visits, domains, groups, locations, etc.
Users can monitor one or multiple brands and their mentions simultaneously as @mentions, hashtags, and plain texts. These comparisons can be converted into customized reports for exporting to clients.
Pro
- It has real-time monitoring.
- Its competitor monitoring is also available.
- It is an easy-to-use platform.
- Multiple filters are available to narrow down search results.
Verified User
It gives real-time monitoring of your social media and insights into how your brand is performing and who your audience is. You can search for any brand, including your own, and check people’s reviews. Plus, it is easy to use and fast.
Cons
- The setup can be a bit complicated to grasp.
- The accuracy of historical data is questionable.
- The user interface is challenging to operate for new users.
Michele H
The grouping tool is useful here, however, the setup process is a bit challenging. Data download is not that great and another big issue is the reliability of historical data. Also, I hope that in the future I can add sentiment analysis for more languages.
Interesting Read: 5 Social Media Monitoring Tools for Staggering Engagement
5. Digimind
Price: N/A
Digimind is another big name amongst the best social listening tools. Since its inception in 1998, it has bagged some of the most prominent enterprises as its users.
It is not only one of the social listening tools but also a marketing intelligence tool. It helps in building your business and scanning the surrounding competitive environment with its powerful AI integration.
Some of its key features include social media and web coverage, sentiment analysis through positive and negative mentions, and sorting results by relevance or dates. Automatic location detection, auto-translation, finding out top influencers, picking out trending topics, custom templates, and much more. You can also generate daily/ weekly and monthly reports using Digimind. These convenient features put Digimind in the race for being one of the best social listening tools.
Pros
- It is powerful in informing strategy.
- Digimind analyses the business environment by monitoring millions of available sources.
- It is amongst the highly intuitive social listening tools.
- It helps the company’s reputation with its detailed mentions and sentiment analysis feature.
Freddy A
It is a friendly and totally intuitive software.t is a very efficient tool to collect information on specific topics and also allows you to have a complete vision of the digital reputation of your company since you can know information from social networks and digital media.
Cons
- Support is hard to get for this tool.
- The analysis is very complex, and the data is not always clearly understandable.
- So much information is not always needed, which is given by the tool.
Sophie B
The tool adds so much that you will spend a lot of time configuring and then discovering information that is not relevant to your organization. Also, among other things that I don’t like about the platform is the difficulty of looking back for information, the limited number of queries. Every now and then, I have trouble with mentions.
Conclusion
Keeping an ear out for audience opinion is always helpful in maintaining your brand’s reputation, and mapping out your next course of action will be way easier for you. Social listening tools will be a perfect way to assist you with that.
Above, we have listed some of the best social media listening tools. These are better-suited tools for agencies and smaller businesses. They are exclusively dedicated to social listening and engagement analytics. But SocialPilot works a bit differently.
It is a whole package, providing all the elements needed for complete social media management. With its post scheduling, content curation, analytics, reporting, and social listening features, it is a one-stop-shop for any of the requirements of a social media marketer. And all of this at very reasonable prices compared to its competitors.
If you want to check out SocialPilot, try its 14-days free trial. It’ll let you experience all the premium features.
Now it’s up to you which one of these best social media listening tools would be your choice.
Frequently Asked Questions
🌟 What are social listening tools?
Social listening tools monitor social media and other websites to give you information on your brand mentions and relevant topics of conversations around them. Some of the best social media listening tools also track desired keywords across the internet, which helps users keep track of the trends and competitor brands.
🌟 What is the best social listening tool?
Some of the best social media listening tools are:
- Keyhole
- Mention
- SocialPilot
- Brand24
- Digimind
🌟 What is social listening in digital marketing?
Social listening in digital marketing covers not only the quality of your brand engagement and mentions but also tracking the trends of the whole industry and competitors. This helps a digital marketer better strategize and stay ahead of the game.
🌟 How do you monitor social media?
There are dedicated tools that can be used for monitoring and listening to social media and other websites. These are called social listening tools. They keep track of all your brand mentions and other relevant topics and keywords you want.
🌟 How is social listening used in influencer marketing?
Influencers themselves are a brand. That is why a whole section of marketing has developed around them. Tracking influencer engagement and mentions can be very effective for using influencer marketing for their brands. This data can be obtained from social listening tools. They can provide you with the complete analytics needed to help you with influencer marketing.
