Are you looking for a way to transform your marketing strategy and find new opportunities? If so, social listening tools are a great way to gain insight into your audience’s preferences and use that information to create outstanding campaigns.
Social listening tools help businesses monitor social media platforms and understand what their audience says about them, their competitors, and their industry. That way, companies can identify key features customers love or dislike and use this information to improve their marketing game.
💡 Read Social Listening Guide: Proven Hacks, Strategies, and Tools
We should not underestimate the importance of social listening. That’s why in this blog post, we’ll walk through the top 7 social listening tools available today that will help revolutionize your marketing process.
What are the Best Social Listening Tools?
Determ
Determ is a social listening tool that helps businesses monitor and analyze conversations on social media platforms. With its advanced features, Determ can provide insights into what people say about you and your products.
Key Features
Real-time Monitoring
Determ allows you to monitor different activities, like comments, brand mentions, or hashtags, on social media in real time. This means that you can respond quickly to customer queries or complaints before they escalate.
You will get a notification whenever there are events that require your attention, so as soon as anything happens, you’ll be informed via your inbox, Slack, and phone.
Read Branded Keywords: How to Monitor Them and Why
Sentiment Analysis
Determ uses natural language processing algorithms to analyze if the customer’s sentiment is neutral, positive, or negative. This helps you understand whether customers are happy with your product or service and is essential for effective social data analysis.
Competitor Analysis
With Determ, you can also track your competitors’ web and social media presence and get an overview of their performance. This information can help you identify areas to improve to stay ahead of the competition.
Competitor analysis also helps with measuring brand visibility and understanding position in the market. Determ assists you with getting insight into your competition by generating specialized reports.
Customizable Dashboards
Determ lets you customize charts and dashboards or create custom ones to get unique insights into all the most critical metrics.
You can, for example, create an entire, separate custom dashboard containing every available sentiment chart. That way, you can track the general attitude of your mentions.
AI Assistant Synthia
Synthia is an AI assistant powered by ChatGPT that can help you spot emerging trends, save time on data analysis, and plan your next steps just in a few clicks. Synthia can be used, for example, in generating competitor summaries and getting an instant overview of their activities and customer feedback.
Mobile App
Determ also offers a mobile app so you can get regular updates wherever you are and receive real-time push notifications about important topics, and never miss a single mention. You can also use it to get a quick overview of all your online mentions.
Bottom Line
Determ is a user-friendly and efficient social listening tool that provides many opportunities to gather insight. You can use it no matter if you are an owner of a large business, marketing agency, marketer, or freelancer.
If you’re unsure whether this tool is right for you, there’s no harm in giving the free trial a go. You have the option to cancel it at any time, so it’s definitely worth considering.
Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a tool for managing social media that helps businesses improve their brand presence and engage with customers on different platforms. It offers features such as publishing, engagement, analytics, and social listening.
Sprout Social lets you see which types of campaigns are working in real-time. It also gives quick feedback, allowing you to make appropriate adjustments.
Key Features
Engagement
Sprout Social’s engagement tools enable you to automate tasks, accelerating your response times.
This feature lets you connect with your customers quickly and efficiently, building greater brand loyalty. Their unified Smart Inbox also streamlines all your social messages, helping you manage and resolve customer issues effectively.
Read Online Reviews: the Ultimate Guide on How to Track and Handle Them
Publishing
Sprout Social offers user-friendly tools for publishing and scheduling social media content that can improve business outcomes.
The platform provides recommendations and engaging content to reduce the time and effort spent on the manual execution of social media campaigns, freeing up your team to concentrate on developing effective strategies and building deeper connections with customers.
Analytics
Sprout Social’s analytics tools make collecting and sharing data easier, so you can concentrate on the most critical performance indicators. This information helps shape strategies and shows the return on investment of social media efforts – the analytics lead to smarter business decisions.
Social Listening
Sprout Social offers powerful social listening tools that use advanced technology to access global conversations. With its easy-to-use workflows and unique AI-driven tools, it helps users uncover important insights that drive their business forward.
Employee Advocacy
With Sprout Social’s Employee Advocacy platform, you can effortlessly expand your social media presence. The platform integrates social media management and employee advocacy, providing a centralized location where you can share approved content, which your employees can then post on their social networks. This amplifies your brand’s reach and voice.
Bottom Line
Sprout Social is a handy platform for managing social media, packed with many useful features. It’s perfect for businesses looking to boost their social media game and efficiency and gain valuable insights with the help of powerful social listening tools.
Sprout Social is also user-friendly and easy to get started with. The onboarding process should be quick and straightforward. Plus, you can give it a try for free before deciding to subscribe.
Buffer
Buffer is a social media management platform businesses widely recognize and use to effectively manage their social media presence. It allows you to visually plan and schedule your social media content and campaigns, which helps increase engagement on your social media channels.
Key Features
Post Scheduling and Publishing
Buffer is great for scheduling and publishing social media posts at the best possible times. You can plan your content in advance, which helps you maintain a reliable online presence, react quickly to trending topics, and manage your brand image more effectively.
Engagement Tracking
With Buffer’s engagement features, you can keep track of your social media conversations and communicate with your audience. This allows you to easily address customer inquiries, comments, or complaints and build stronger relationships with them.
Performance Analysis
Buffer’s performance analysis tool uses data analytics to measure how successful your social media marketing efforts are. It evaluates metrics such as likes, shares, comments, clicks, and reach to provide a comprehensive overview of your post’s performance.
Start Page
Start Page is a feature that helps you build a landing page that allows you to share all your top content through a single link in your social media bio. It’s a helpful feature you can use to highlight the best of your brand in one convenient location.
Buffer AI Assistant
Buffer offers an AI assistant that enhances content creation by assisting with idea generation and repurposing of existing content. It’s especially great for brainstorming and faster writing. For instance, you can quickly convert a LinkedIn post into a Twitter thread.
Bottom Line
If you need a single platform for managing your social media content scheduling, engagement tracking, and performance analysis, then you should consider Buffer. It is a versatile and robust tool that also offers a free trial to test before choosing a paid plan.
And it’s also great for social listening. Buffer provides all the analytical tools you need, freeing you up to focus on doing what you love in your business.
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that helps businesses organize, schedule, and report on their content across different social media channels. It also has powerful social listening features that allow you to monitor what people say about your brand.
Key Features
Multi-platform Management
Hootsuite lets you handle multiple social media networks together – Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. It’s very convenient to manage your social media and helps you keep track of all your interactions in one place.
Advanced Analytics
With Hootsuite, you can access analytics that will help monitor your social media performanc. The platform provides customizable reports that showcase engagement metrics, sentiment analysis, and other data, giving you a more comprehensive understanding of your social media strategy.
Competitor Analysis
You can keep track of your competitor’s social media activity by monitoring their mentions and audience growth. It’s also possible to compare their social media engagement with your own to gain valuable insights into your market positioning and identify opportunities for improvement.
Real-time Monitoring
Hootsuite can monitor the various mentions of your brand, keywords, and hashtags related to your industry, allowing you to keep tabs on ongoing conversations. Then you can use these insights to create a plan that focuses on the needs and wants of the customers, which will result in increased sales.
OwlyWriter AI
Hootsuite provides an AI that simplifies social media posting. You can use it to create captions and develop effective post ideas for every platform. This tool can help you quickly fill your content calendar and re-share existing content without any duplication.
Bottom Line
Hootsuite is a social media management platform that can help businesses simplify their social media tasks and monitor social discussions related to their brand.
Hootsuite is perfect for scheduling social media posts and responding to customers. But it’s also great for social listening and different types of analysis. It’ll help you engage more with your audience and take advantage of critical details that could help your business succeed and keep your customers coming back.
If you’re unsure if Hootsuite suits your needs, you can try it out for free to check its features.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch aims to provide businesses with a social listening and analytics platform that helps them understand and use online discussions to their advantage. By using Brandwatch, you can explore social media and acquire important information about your brand, industry, and competitors.
Key Features
Powerful Topic Building
Brandwatch is particularly good at creating complicated search parameters that let you gather and study conversations. This means you can keep track of references to your brand, keywords related to your industry, and other relevant information for a thorough analysis of social media activity.
Image Recognition
Image Recognition can assist you in gathering and analyzing numerous images featuring your brand that are shared every day. The technology can identify logos on different surfaces, such as clothing, graffiti, billboards, and even tattoos.
Competitor Analysis
Brandwatch provides powerful competitor analysis tools that allow you to thoroughly analyze your competitors’ performance. You can measure your share of voice, set up benchmarks for your competitors, and analyze product reviews to gain insight into their strengths and weaknesses.
Effortless Dashboard Building
Brandwatch offers easy-to-use templates that enable you to create impressive dashboards. You can customize these templates by adding, resizing, and reorganizing each widget to meet your requirements. This way, you only need to set them up once and can revisit them regularly to report on the most recent data.
Customer Intelligence
Brandwatch provides data enriched with AI from more than 100 million online and social sources. This helps organizations that rely on data to gain better insight into how consumers perceive their brands, products, and industry trends.
Bottom Line
Brandwatch’s automation rules and numerous other features make this a comprehensive tool for social listening. Brandwatch also updates almost daily and regularly adds new features, proving it to be a dynamic platform that never stops learning about its customers’ needs.
To decide if it’s right for your company, you can schedule a demo to see its detailed insights in action.
Brand24
Brand24 is a user-friendly and effective social media listening tool that provides real-time insights into your brand’s online reputation. It allows you to monitor and respond to mentions about your brand, industry, or competitors across various digital platforms.
Key Features
Mentions Feed
With Brand24’s Mentions Feed, you can easily track what people say about your brand in real-time on different platforms like social media or blogs. Using this feature allows you to quickly engage with your audience and respond to their questions or issues. This will help to improve your brand’s online presence and reputation.
Discussion Volume Chart
The Discussion Volume Chart is a tool that can assist you in detecting sudden changes in discussions about your brand.
This is important because it can help you identify potential issues before they become more serious and take advantage of positive attention. By keeping an eye on these shifts, you can safeguard your company’s reputation and capitalize on opportunities as they emerge.
Alerts
The alert feature in Brand24 makes sure you get notifications of any changes in conversations about your brand. You have the option to personalize these alerts based on your preferences. For example, you can receive notifications through email or in-app when there are unfavorable references to your brand on high-traffic blogs.
Filtering
Brand24 offers various filtering options that can assist you in refining and concentrating on the most significant outcomes. You can easily filter by mention source, sentiment, number of visits, and more to obtain precise analysis.
Data Exporting
You can export your social listening data in formats such as automated PDF reports, .xls files, or infographics. This will allow you to use and share your insights on other platforms besides Brand24.
Bottom Line
As you can see, Brand24 is a versatile and one of the efficient social listening tools suitable for businesses of all sizes. It offers robust features to track and analyze your online reputation and engage with your target audience more effectively. And you have the option to try it for free and explore its functionalities before committing.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a platform that businesses can use to optimize their social media strategies. It offers real-time social listening and analytics, giving you in-depth insights into your brand’s online presence, industry trends, and the effectiveness of your social media marketing strategy and campaigns.
Key Features
Social Listening
You can use Keyhole’s social listening tool to keep track of online conversations that can help you expand the impact of your brand. By monitoring competitors and industry trends and listening carefully to social media conversations, you can gain valuable consumer insights and stay ahead of the competition.
Publishing and Scheduling
Keyhole provides a simple way to plan and manage your social media presence. Using Keyhole’s Social Publishing, you can schedule, publish, and improve all your social media content in one location. Also, you can leverage social media analytics to enhance the effectiveness of each post in meeting your marketing objectives.
Profile Analytics
With Keyhole’s profile analytics, you can track and enhance your social media accounts in one place. It gives you valuable insights that you can utilize to establish precise industry benchmarks and monitor your competitors’ accounts. The Profile Analytics feature is compatible with different platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
Quick Trends
With Keyhole’s Quick Trends feature, it’s easy to access vast internet data. You can perform advanced market research using Boolean operators, filtering, and AI-based trend analysis and forecasting to gain a thorough understanding of any online conversation.
Influencer Tracking
You can use Keyhole’s Influencer Analytics to measure the impact and ROI of your influencers, relying on reliable data. Keyhole assists you in identifying authentic influencers, examining their accounts before committing to any agreements, and evaluating their organic performance.
Bottom Line
Keyhole is a powerful social listening and analytics tool that helps brands optimize their online presence and better understand their audience.
This platform is particularly effective at measuring the true impact of your social media campaigns. It simplifies the process of calculating engagement from key influencers and estimating the total reach generated.
Keyhole provides in-depth insights, and you can explore its extensive features with a free trial before deciding to commit.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of observing social media platforms to gather information about what people are expressing about a brand, product, or service. This requires keeping track of discussions, references, and hashtags associated with your business or brand.
By using social listening, you can gather data from media monitoring and then use it to identify growth possibilities and react appropriately.
This practice has become increasingly important as social media grows in popularity. It’s not just about collecting the data but also learning the meaning behind this data and understanding its significance.
What Features Should Social Listening Tools Have?
As you can see on the list above, there are a lot of different social listening and monitoring tools, and it can take time to decide which one will suit you the best. So, it can be a good idea to consider which features are the most important to you before selecting:
- Real-time analytics: It is crucial to have a real-time social media monitoring tool to quickly detect and handle negative feedback. It should immediately notify you whenever someone mentions your brand.
- Broad Coverage: The tool needs to monitor various social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other online platforms, where your audience may discuss your brand or industry.
- Sentiment Analysis: To better understand how people talk about your brand, the tool needs to analyze the sentiment of the mentions it finds. The sentiment analysis can help determine whether the comments are positive, negative, or neutral.
- Competition Analysis: Competitive analysis is another essential feature of some social listening tools. It lets you monitor what people say about your competitors and gain insights into their strengths and weaknesses.
- User-Friendly Interface: The tool must be both user-friendly and customizable to meet your organization’s requirements. As you will probably spend some time using it, the interface should not be overly complicated.
Read How to Use Social Media Listening to Humanize Your Brand
Final Words
Social listening in your marketing strategy is essential to stay ahead of the competition. With the right social media listening tools and effective use of their features, you can gain valuable insights into customer behavior and improve your overall marketing efforts.
To effectively practice your social listening strategy, you should collect data but also analyze and utilize it strategically. Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of which tool will help you drive your business forward.
Kajetan Domagała, the founder of kajetandomagala.com, delves deeply into the fascinating world of AI, technology, and programming while navigating various other technical topics. He aims to inspire and empower his audience by delivering compelling and informative content through his articles.
