14 social listening tools for effortless brand monitoring

Social listening is the practice of using social tools to monitor what people are saying about your brand online. It’s also an important form of competitor research.

Social listening tools are some of the most important for any social media marketer to master. Why? Simply because of the vast amount of data they provide about your brand, your target audience, and your competitors in real time.

Here, we break down 14 of the best social media listening tools so you can choose the one that makes the most sense for your current needs.

Bonus: Discover the best way to gather insights and intel from your audience, competitors, industry, and favorite aspirational brands in our complete guide to advanced social listening.

What are social listening tools?

Social listening tools search across multiple social platforms and compile all relevant social data in one location so you can get the full picture of what people are saying in just one screen.

Want to dive deeper into this subject? We’ve got a whole blog post on what social listening is and why it matters so much for brands.

And if you’re wondering about social listening vs. social monitoring, we’ve got a guide for that too (handy!).

Why do marketers need social listening tools?

One of the greatest benefits of social media for marketers is the ability to understand what people are saying and thinking in real time.

Here are some key reasons to add social listening tools to your social marketing toolbox:

1. Understand your brand reputation. You already know what customers say in posts where they @mention you. What do they say in posts where they don’t tag you? Learn more about their customer experiences to get more customer feedback.
2. Find opportunities for authentic engagement. Thank people who mention you or jump in with a useful suggestion. Or just keep an eye on the conversation to understand the social communities where people talk about your brand.
3. Identify pain points and new product opportunities. What are people asking for that they can’t find? Maybe you can provide the solution.
4. Track social sentiment in real time. If the conversation about your brand starts to skew towards negative sentiment, you can take action before things reach crisis level.
5. Identify potential creators to partner with. Social media listening software helps you understand who the big players are in your niche.
6. Spot competitor marketing campaigns as they launch. This gives you the chance to analyze potential opportunities and threats just as they start to emerge.
7. Get in early on trending topics. From memes to larger social trends, social listening platforms are like an advanced alert system for what’s happening in the social sphere.

The main reasons for using social listening tools are to monitor brand health and campaign performance, conduct competitive analysis, and gain valuable audience insights. Also, these tools play an important role in crisis management and prevention.

Paige Schmidt Social Engagement Coordinator at Hootsuite 14 best social listening tools for 2024

There are a lot of options out there. Here are our top social listening tools picks for 2024.

See what others have to say:

What are the best social media monitoring/listening tools?
byu/perplexedoutlier insocialmedia 1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite actually offers a couple of different social listening features depending on the size of your brand and how much social data you need to analyze. (That’s on top of comprehensive social media management tools, including scheduling to all major social networks, easy performance tracking, and audience engagement tools.)

Listening

Every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.

Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.

You can track what people are saying about you, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last 7 days.

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Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:

• Key metrics. Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
• Top themes. How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
• Results. Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.

Pricing: Starting at $99/month; 30-day free trial.

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics

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Hootsuite Advanced Analytics is primarily a tool for tracking the ROI of your social marketing strategy and the business impact of your social media posts.

But it also contains a competitive analysis component that earns it a spot in our list of social media listening tools.

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics allows you to analyze your competitors’ audience and content strategy on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Key social data sources include their audience stats, engagement, and hashtag use.

Advanced Analytics is available as an add-on to Hootsuite Enterprise plans. Pricing is available on request.

2. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Source: Talkwalker

Talkwalker’s social data library includes more than 150 million sources. With more than 50 advanced filters, you can segment your social data and identify the right audience to monitor.

This powerful social listening tool allows you to understand the full impact of your online conversations by measuring engagement volume, reach, sentiment, and more. It incorporates Blue Silk GPT for AI analysis. For insights on how to effectively implement social listening, check out this social listening strategy.

Pricing: Starting at $800/month.

3. Brandwatch

Source: Brandwatch

Brandwatch uses a library of 1.6 trillion historical conversations going back to 2010 to help brands track industry trends online. More than 500 million new conversations are added every day.

Brandwatch provides access to conversations from more than 100 million sites and has the capability to integrate your own customer data. You can track key social listening metrics like brand awareness, social sentiment, and social share of voice.

4. Brand24

Source: Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that covers the major social platforms as well as blogs, news sites, and other online sources. It allows you to track trends in reach and brand awareness, and to set up alerts for critical notifications.

You can also gain valuable insights into social sentiment. Influence score allows you to identify top influencers and creators in your niche.

Pricing: Starting at $99/month; 14-day free trial.

5. Digimind

Source: Digimind

Digimind expands social listening to 850 million sources, including blogs, forums, and offline sources as well as the major social media platforms. It works in more than 200 languages and features automatic translation.

This social listening tool incorporates AI to analyze trends in mentions and sentiment analysis.

Pricing is available on request.

6. Mentionlytics

Source: Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics monitors keywords in multiple languages across both social and web sources. This social listening tool identifies positive and negative mentions with advanced sentiment analysis.

You can filter your social listening results by keyword, source, country, and language. Mentionlytics also identifies the top influencers in your niche. Mentionlytics integrates into Hootsuite so you can assign and reply to mentions directly from the Hootsuite dashboard.

Pricing: Starting at $49/month; 14-day free trial.

7. Meltwater

Source: Meltwater

Meltwater allows unlimited searches over a rolling 15-month archive so you can identify trends and yearly cycles. Beyond social and web sources, Meltwater data includes TV, radio, podcasts, and other media sources.

Within Meltwater, you can build custom dashboards, analyze sentiment, and take advantage of image recognition tools.

Pricing is available on request.

8. Sprout Social

Source: Sprout Social

Sprout Social helps you track conversations about your brand, understand your audience demographics, and identify important influencers in your niche. Hashtag and mention monitoring are baked into the solution, along with sentiment analysis. More detailed social listening is available with an add-on.

See how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.

Pricing: Starting at $249/month; 30-day free trial.

9. Mention

Source: Mention

Mention tracks more than a billion data sources across the web, including Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can create and save filters to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

This social listening tool includes sentiment analysis and visual reporting. You can track mentions of your brand or any topic up to two years in the past and set up alerts for unusual activity.

Pricing: Starting at $41/month; 14-day free trial.

10. Quid

Source: Quid

Formerly known as NetBase, this social listening tool uses generative AI to identify customer needs and expectations from the social conversation. It tracks millions of data points in dashboard form so you can view trends and insights.

This tool is specifically focussed on using social listening data to predict and anticipate future needs and trends, rather than responding to the conversation right in the moment.

Pricing is available on request.

11. Ipsos Synthesio

Source: Ipsos Synthesio

This is another AI-powered social listening tool with trend analysis. Synthesio divides data types into social-declarative data and digital-bevavioral data.

The trend detection here is designed to alert you to statistically relevant changes in the social conversation, topic pairings, and trending images.

This is particularly useful to spot new competitors and shifting brand perception.

Integrate Synthesio with Hootsuite to more easily engage with the social content this tool surfaces.

Pricing is available on request.

12. Audiense

Source: Audiense

Audiense takes a different approach to social intelligence. It’s not strictly speaking a social listening tool according to the narrowest definition of the term. But it does use social listening concepts in its offering, so we think it belongs on this list.

Rather than focusing on conversations about your brand, Audiense uses social data and conversations to help you understand who your audience is and what they care about. It’s about who’s driving the conversation more than what’s being said.

Audiense primarily pulls its data from X (formerly Twitter) and Meta (Facebook and Instagram). It also integrates with Hootsuite.

Pricing: Starting at $1,499/month.

13. Keyhole

Source: Keyhole

Keyhole offers a social listening tool that tracks keywords, mentions, and hashtags across multiple platforms. It graphs trends over time along with social share of voice. It tracks the sentiment in every mention, along with changes over time.

It’s also helpful to identify key influencers in your niche and compare the performance of the various influencers you identify.

Pricing: Starting at $79/month; free trial available.

14. HubSpot

Source: HubSpot

HubSpot’s social listening tools allow you to create keyword monitoring streams and set email alerts for specific keyword mentions. Since HubSpot also includes a CRM, it links social conversations with customer data.

HubSpot works well for social listening on X (formerly Twitter) but has limited functionality on other platforms. You can add the Hootsuite integration to HubSpot for additional features.

Pricing: From $800/month; free trial available.

Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor social media conversations and keywords, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.

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