Identifying Social Media Listening Tools

What is social listening?

Social listening refers to monitoring and analyzing your social media profiles for customer feedback; direct mentions of your brand; and any conversations with relevant keywords, topics, competitors, or industries. You can use social listening to uncover insights that help determine the best ways to improve your social media strategy, brand perception, positioning, and social presence.

What are social listening tools?

Social listening tools help you monitor several social media platforms in one place by aggregating brand mentions, posts with relevant keywords, and direct feedback you receive through tags or direct messages (DMs).

To make your search easier, I’ve explored a wide variety of solutions — from free tools to comprehensive social media management platforms — and compiled a list of the best social listening tools of 2024.

Benefits of Social Media Listening Tools

1. Enhanced Customer Engagement: Enables timely responses to customer feedback and inquiries.

2. Crisis Management: Identifies and addresses potential issues before they escalate.

3. Competitor Insights: Provides valuable data on competitors' performance and strategies.

4. Trend Spotting: Identifies emerging trends and conversations to stay ahead of the competition.

5. Improved Product Development: Gathers feedback to refine products and services.

Social Listening Tool

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social listening tools give you a comprehensive look into conversations that are relevant to your brand. Track conversations related to your brand across all major social networks and other online sources. Sprout’s tools automatically sift through millions of data points to uncover insights relevant to your brand.

You can learn about audience preferences and how they feel about specific products, campaigns or topics. This helps you stay on top of the latest industry trends and identify untapped business opportunities. Discover key influencers and thought leaders who are leading the conversation so you know whom to engage.

Brand-specific conversations give you more visibility into customer experiences and brand sentiment. Set up custom alerts to anticipate an upcoming brand crisis, giving you ample time to fix it before it gets out of hand. Plus, with powerful social media management tools built in, you can easily manage these issues all in one place.

Sprout’s AI features further streamline your social listening efforts. Summarizing with AI Assist saves you the trouble of having to read through lengthy messages. It creates a summary of Listening messages with over 800 characters, allowing you to quickly zero in on essential insights.

Meanwhile, Analyze by AI Assist takes the guesswork out of social listening. It automatically analyzes your Listening messages to find the insights that matter. This includes metrics related to words, phrases, emojis and hashtags. So you can easily forecast trends if certain topics see increased engagement.

General social listening tools

If your brand maintains a presence across a variety of social networks, you need a tool that’s appropriate for all major platforms. Let’s look at the top social listening tools that are suitable for general use.

2. Brandwatch

It extracts valuable conversational insights from millions of sources. It analyzes both historical and real-time conversations to identify current trends and how they change over time. This gives you a better understanding of your market and audience, so you know what’s trending and popular. You’ll be able to see the top topics they’re talking about and identify relevant brand mentions. 

3. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness and reach. It lets you track conversations from 25 million online sources to gather valuable consumer insights. This gives you a better understanding of what people like or dislike, especially when it comes to your brand. You can even measure brand sentiment and quickly identify reputational risks.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive listening tool that specializes in content discovery and research. The platform lets you track trending topics and popular content to inspire you. You can use the monitoring features to track mentions and trends across leading social networks. It lets you set up alerts for brands, topics and keywords to help you stay on top of the latest conversations. 

5. Keyhole

It offers enterprise-grade social listening to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. It provides insights to identify who they are and get a better sense of what they like. You can use the platform to track specific hashtags and keywords as well as identify relevant influencers. The volume predictions feature lets you anticipate when your posts are going viral, allowing you to come up with a game plan. 

6. Meltwater

It helps you cut through the noise and uncover the conversational insights that matter to your brand. It provides you with a full picture by capturing historical data to help you research changes in trends over time. The platform gives you a better understanding of your audience and allows you to analyze their sentiment. This helps you monitor brand mentions in real time and stay on top of upcoming crises to quell them on time. 

7. YouScan

YouScan is one of the top social listening tools that comes with image recognition capabilities. It gives you access to AI-powered visual insights to gain a better understanding of your buyer persona. The platform identifies upcoming trends so you can align your marketing strategy accordingly. It tracks brand sentiment and consumer perceptions to show you how people feel about your brand. It even detects possible threats to your brand reputation in real time. 

8. HubSpot Social Media Management Software

HubSpot Social Media Management Software lets you create custom keyword monitoring streams. This makes it easy to surface interactions that could turn critical and manage them on time. You can also set up email alerts, allowing your sales team to follow up when prospects mention specific keywords. It even provides AI-generated recommended actions to speed up your analysis. 

Social listening tools for Twitter (X)

X is a place where all the trending conversations take place. It’s where people go when they want to complain about a brand or discuss a trending topic. As such, Twitter listening can uncover valuable insights into your target market.

So let’s take a look at the social media listening tools that specifically focus on X.

9. X advanced search

X’s built-in advanced search tool is highly robust for listening in on relevant conversations. You can track conversations containing specific words, phrases and hashtags. It even lets you narrow your search by excluding certain words.

To get even more specific, look for posts from one specific account to another. The tool gives you plenty of additional filters to help you narrow your search by engagement, date range and so on.

Social listening tools for TikTok

12. Exolyt

It gives you comprehensive insights into TikTok conversations and trends. You can use the tool to monitor what people are saying about your brand and how they feel about it. It lets you track specific TikTok accounts, hashtags and videos to gather granular insights. Also, discover trending sounds, hashtags, effects and accounts to inform your content strategy. 

Free social listening tools

13. Answer the Public

It pulls up search volumes and trends for a given topic, brand or product. It gives you a breakdown of the associated search terms. So it shows you what questions people are asking about it and what comparisons they’re making. This gives you a better understanding of their needs and pain points as well as their interests. 

Listen, learn and grow on social

Social listening tools empower you to learn what makes your audience tick. They give you actionable insights to inform what content you create and how you engage with your audience.