and the distribution of digital products.
6 Social Listening Tools and What They’re Best for (With Alternatives)
Social listening is the art and science of monitoring what your buyers and potential customers are saying about:
- Your brand
- Your competitors
- Topics related to your product or service
Staying “in the know” about all these simultaneously is no easy feat. This is where social listening tools come in. They help you monitor brand mentions on major social media platforms, identify emerging trends in your niche, and package these online conversations into actionable insights for your social media strategy.
In this article, I’ll share a list of six social listening tools (with alternatives) to help you choose the best software for your needs.
Quick summary of the 6 best social listening toolsClick on one of the tools below to jump to a section, or scroll for a big-picture overview in the table.
- AnswerThePublic
- Exploding Topics
- SparkToro
- Mention
- Brand24
- Brandwatch
- Understand audience search behaviors.
- Supports platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more.
- Organize and present research using high-res images or export as CSV.
- Spot trends before they go mainstream.
- Discover niche markets for your products.
- Receive trend alerts for emerging topics.
- Understand audience interests and search behavior.
- Discover influencers and content preferences.
- Identify popular social media channels for your audience.
- Track online conversations across multiple channels.
- Analyze sentiment of brand mentions.
- Compare your brand’s analytics with competitors.
- Monitor mentions and detect negative sentiments.
- AI assistant for trend identification and actionable insights.
- Track media coverage across social media, news, blogs, and podcasts.
- AI assistant for actionable insights.
- Access 1.7 trillion historical data points dating back to 2010.
- Upload custom data for monitoring trends.
The perfect social listening tools will help you track brand mentions and online conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry in the most relevant channels.
Social media listening tools monitor social media conversations in major social networks. Some social listening tools extend this to include news sites, blogs, and forums.
Which social listening tool you need depends on the channels your audience is most active in. For instance, you don’t need to invest in a social listening tool monitoring that tracks news sites if most of your buyers express their sentiments on social media. A social media listening tool would suffice in this instance.
After you know which channels are the most important to you, it’ll be easier to narrow down the best social listening tools for your needs.
1. AnswerThePublicBest social listening tool for practicing affordable social listening
Free plan/trial: Free for three searches every day. You can also take a free 7-day trial of the paid plans.
Price: Pricing starts at $5/month for 100 searches.
Top features:
- Gain valuable insights about your audience by understanding what they’re searching for
- Available for major social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), search engines (Google, Bing), and third-party websites (Amazon)
- Organize your research into folders and present them beautifully using high-resolution images, pruning search results that aren’t relevant conversations, and exporting results to CSV
AnswerThePublic is a website where you can enter a topic, your brand name, your competitor’s name, or your product to get valuable insights about the questions people are asking on your query. Let’s say you sell skincare products that cure acne, now this is what your potential buyers are asking, according to AnswerThePublic:
Now, you can create content around all of these questions to answer your audience’s pesky queries. AnswerThePublic isn’t a fancy tool with all the bells and whistles, but it’s the perfect choice for beginners and for those on a tight budget. It can help you add social listening into your social media plan without overwhelming you with tons of features.
Alternatives:
- You can set up Google Alerts as your social media monitoring tool to track relevant online conversations and stay up-to-date with your brand reputation. It’s also the easiest way to find trending topics in your niche.
- Answer Socrates is also a great alternative for AnswerThePublic, but it only monitors online conversations on Google. It combines valuable consumer insights from Google Alerts, too.
Free plan/trial: Free plan available with limited functions. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial for $1.
Price: Plans start at $39/month, billed annually.
Top features:
- Find trending topics before they go mainstream
- Discover lesser known markets where your product can be valuable
- Trend tracking and alerts to know when a product or topic is about to become popular
Exploding Topics is a social listening tool dedicated to helping you find trending topics. You can use it to spot new competitors before they’ve become popular or the pain points of your customers before your rivals catch on.
With the database of Exploding Topics, they also claim to discover emerging trends before anyone else.
Alternatives:
- Trendwatching is another AI powered social listening tool that can help you uncover trends before they become common knowledge. Trendwatching leans more toward consumer trends, while Exploding Topics has social listening data in everything – including social media platforms, online conversations, etc.
- TrendZeer can be a good alternative if you need a social listening tool with a free plan. It does pretty much everything that Exploding Topics does, but the UI & UX is a bit outdated.
Free plan/trial: Free plan available for five searches per month.
Price: Paid plans begin at $50/month.
Top features:
- Uncover insights about what your audience is searching for and what they’re interested in
- Discover the key influencers your audience follows and the content they consume
- Learn which social media channels are popular amongst your audience
SparkToro is one of the best social listening tools for conducting audience research on your ideal customer profile. It can help you understand the channels your target audience is most active in, which keywords they’re searching for, what podcasts they’re listening to, and which subreddits they’re browsing.
All you have to do is enter a website your audience visits frequently or type in a keyword they search for. SparkToro’s benefits go beyond social listening. It can help you gain valuable insights about your audience that can aid in improving everything from your social media campaigns to your overall marketing strategy.
Alternatives:
- BuzzSumo is one of the best replacement social media listening tools for SparkToro. Its focus isn’t on audience intelligence but more on helping you track mentions of your brand, identify the latest industry trends, and monitor competitor strategies.
- Talwalker is also a great alternative to SparkToro as a social listening tool. It can help you safeguard your brand reputation by conducting a sentiment analysis, finding trending topics in your niche, and monitoring customer sentiment in online conversations. It’s acquired by the social media management platform Hootsuite, so you can also combine those two tools to implement your marketing strategy with a single tool.
Free plan/trial: No free plans. 14-day free trial available on paid plans.
Price: Plans start at $49/month for tracking up to 5,000 mentions.
Top features:
- Tracks online conversations in different social media channels — including Facebook, X, Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube
- Get a sentiment analysis of the positive and negative mentions of your brand online
- Obtain in-depth social media analytics of your own brand compared to a competitor
Let’s get one thing out of the way right away: Mention isn’t one of the beginner-friendly social media listening tools. It’s designed for social media managers who have dedicated resources to invest in social listening.
Mention can help you set up alerts for specific keywords and you can get historical data on those keywords for up to two years. You can monitor the mentions of these keywords in news sites, blogs, forums, Reddit, review sites, and even Radio & TV in the highest-tier plan.
Lastly, you can also find key influencers and media mentions of your brand, identify emerging trends, and generate a comparative report against your competitors.
Alternatives:
- Keyhole is one of the best social media listening tools for advanced analytics, just like Mention. You can set up alerts for social media posts with brand mentions & industry keywords to practice a proactive sentiment analysis. Keyhole also spots industry trends so you can take advantage of topics while they’re popular.
- Mentionlytics is another popular AI powered social listening tool that can be a great alternative to Keyhole. It also analyzes social media conversations, helps you identify trending topics, and scans review sites to pinpoint any negative sentiment.
Free plan/trial: No free plan. 14-day free trial on all paid plans.
Price: Plans start at $149/month.
Top features:
- Monitor brand mentions and detect negative sentiments to protect brand reputation
- AI powered assistant to help you identify emerging trends, gather actionable insights, and more
- Track media coverage across a wide variety of channels, including social media, news sites, podcasts, blogs, etc.
Brand24 is one of the most comprehensive social listening tools in the market. It claims to monitor your brand mentions, industry keywords, etc., from over 25 million online sources — including social media, podcasts, newsletters, blogs, videos, and forums.
The whole tool is AI powered, so you can get reliable and actionable insights in real time. You can even track the impact of your social media campaigns if you’ve used specific hashtags in them. Brand24 can also give Brandwatch a run for its money because it can help discover key influencers and assign them a score based on their impact.
The biggest disadvantage of Brand24 is its price. To access the most prized features, you need to upgrade from the Individual plan to the Team or Pro plan. It mostly makes sense for agencies who can justify the cost of an investment of this range.
Alternatives:
- Meltwater is the slightly more powerful (and costlier) alternative social listening tool for Brand24. Its online sources aren’t limited to social media channels and news sites. Like Brand24, it also includes podcasts and blogs. In fact, Meltwater also monitors brand mentions on TV and radio to help you get the full picture.
- SentiOne is a smaller version of Brand24 when it comes to social listening tools. SentiOne has over five million online sources and offers unlimited keyword monitoring.
Free plan/trial: Not available.
Price: Not publicly available.
Top features:
- AI powered assistant — Iris — to turn the actionable insights you gather into an easy read
- 1.7 trillion historical data — conversations that date back to 2010
- You can upload your own data to monitor trends
Brandwatch is a one-of-a-kind social media listening tool because it also offers a social media management software and an influencer marketing tool under its umbrella. So it should be no surprise that while its plans aren’t publicly available, it comes with a hefty price tag. Think of it as spending money on the convenience of combining three tools into one.
Specific to its social listening tools, Brandwatch has a four-step process:
- Collect online conversations about your industry trends, keywords, and brand mentions
- Segment it into categories like feedback, complaints, opinions, etc.
- Use Brandwatch’s AI powered abilities to conduct an overarching sentiment analysis of your categories
- Equip your marketing strategy with the insights you’ve gathered
Brandwatch’s UI can take a bit of a learning curve, but after that initial hump it’s all roses and data. Lots of data.
Alternatives:
- Awario is one of the best social listening tools in the market and a good alternative to Brandwatch if you aren’t looking to combine social media management and influencer marketing features. Awario crawls 13 billion webpages daily (social and online data) to help you gain valuable insights about your potential customers.
- Quid also has a suite of AI powered products that make it one of the most powerful social listening tools. Quid Monitor can help you with social media monitoring, Quid Discover can help you uncover insights about your customers that are buried deep, and Quid Predict can help you spot trending topics.
Social listening appears simple on the surface: Find what customers are talking about. However, it takes more than a tool to keep up with the ever-changing expectations and pain points of your target audience.
You have to use social listening tools in conjunction with real 1:1 customer conversations, staying part of relevant communities & forums, and having content sources to always have an ear to the ground.
Looking to understand how you can add a social listening strategy to your overall marketing strategy? Read our guide on how to practice social listening.