Social media is often praised as an amazing marketing channel for small businesses, but the truth is, for corporations, it might be even more important. Think about your preferred channel of communication with companies: it’s either email or social media.
Nowadays, social media is a place for networking, raising brand awareness, finding new clients, and more. Even B2B companies are now prioritizing social media: look at how active Wells Fargo is on Twitter or marvel at the Instagram profile of WeWork, an office space rental company.
Remember when we still worked from offices?
However, keeping an eye on all the social media profiles of a big company can be quite challenging. Answering hundreds of mentions can already be overwhelming, but there’s more to do on social media than simply interacting with your customers. You can use this channel for all sorts of marketing activities from audience research to managing your reputation. To do that, you need a social listening tool that will take the toll of managing hundreds of mentions manually of you at the same time.
Social listening is the process of gathering and analyzing online data based on the keywords and keyword combinations you put in. Although it’s primarily focused on social media, most enterprise-level social listening tools also cover news, blogs, and websites, so you can take care of traditional and social media with just one tool.
Social listening platforms give you access to a vast amount of data generated by your target audience. Here’re some of the ways to use social listening:
- Reputation management
- Social media customer support
- Campaign monitoring
- Target audience analysis
- Competitor monitoring
- Influencer marketing
- PR
- Content marketing
All of this can be done with just one tool — and this list is far from being complete. Social listening tools provide you with a large variety of different ways to analyze data and draw valuable insights, and even though they are similar in purpose, they each have their own advantages. This top 10 will give you an understanding of the social listening market and hopefully help you choose a tool for your company.
1. Awario
Sources covered
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, news, blogs, the web.
Price
Once you sign up, you get a free trial that offers the same capabilities as the Starter plan.
B2B companies and larger brands will probably benefit from Awario’s Pro plan which costs $89/mo. You can also invest in the Enterprise plan ($299) if you need more Team members or access to API. The most affordable option is the Starter plan for $29.
Awario is a great option if you’re looking for an affordable social listening tool with Enterprise-level capabilities such as in-depth analytics, visual reports, Boolean search mode, and more.
The Boolean search mode lets you create monitoring queries for any marketing goal and Awario’s real-time search allows you to track all the mentions of your company without any delays and engage with them right from the app. With the Sentiment analysis, it is easy to prioritize negative mentions and deal with unhappy customers. You can sort mentions by Reach to address the most influential users first, nipping a potential PR scandal in the bud. Email and Slack notifications ensure that you stay in the know even when you don’t have the tab with the tool open.
The vital social listening metrics are presented in your Dashboard. There you can see the graphs with the number, reach, sentiment, and sources of the mentions; the location, languages, gender, and age of the users mentioning your keywords, the prominent influencers, and the words associated with your keywords.
The reports tabs will allow you to dive deeper into your analytics. Awario offers three types of reports: Mention Statistics, Alert Comparison, and Influencers. The Mention Statistics report shows you a thorough analysis of one or several topics you’re monitoring.
Alert Comparison is your main competitor analysis hub: here you can find out your online share of voice and benchmark your performance against other players on the market.
Finally, the Influencers tab shows you the most prominent voices mentioning your keywords, but they don’t all have to be Instagram models: you can identify influential publications and media in your industry as well as find authoritative pundits.
The reports can be shared through email or downloaded in PDF. You can also integrate Awario’s data with your own tool or website through the API.
What makes it stand out
What’s unique about Awario is its Leads add-on, which is basically a social selling tool. It lets you find potential clients on social media by monitoring for conversations relevant to your industry and identifying buying intent. The process is fully automated, all you need to do is add several keywords that describe your service, and Awario will find you leads.
2. Brandwatch
Sources covered
Brandwatch sources data from a wide variety of platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Sina Weibo, VK, Tencent QQ, news and blogs, the web.
Price
The pricing is revealed after the demo since it largely depends on the volume of data you need, but the starting cost is around $1,000.
Brandwatch is somewhat the veteran of the industry being one of the first social listening companies. Currently, the company owns several consumer intelligence products including content marketing tools and tools to conduct surveys on the Internet, but its first development is Brandwatch Consumer Research.
Brandwatch supports real-time monitoring and provides access to historical data. In addition to that, it offers image analysis i.e. the ability to recognize your logo on the pictures shared on social media; audience demographics, and customizable data categorization, which allows you to create your own clusters of data based on the characteristics you choose.
The UI of the platform is extremely flexible: you can choose how you want the data to be visualized and which metrics you want to see. For some platforms, you even get behavioral data: for example, you’re able to see which topics generate the most buzz on Twitter and which topics Twitter users in your segment are prone to follow.
What makes it stand out
Brandwatch heavily uses AI and machine learning to boost its analytical capabilities. Its AI Analyst is called Iris and it’s able to identify and explain trends in your social listening data.
3. Sprinklr
Sources covered
Sprinklr covers 26 social channels including the major ones such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter.
Price
Contact Sprinklr’s sales team for pricing.
Sprinklr is a software company that specializes in customer experience management. It’s used by such corporate giants as Amazon and Wells Fargo and is generally regarded as one of the most advanced (and expensive) marketing analysis tools.
Social listening is a part of Sprinklr’s Modern Engagement platform. It covers a range of sources, both social media as well as rating and reviews websites. In addition to that, Sprinklr offers a solution that covers print and TV sources as well. The tool allows you to write complicated queries and combine keyword clusters with the help of the Topic Builder.
Sprinklr’s data engine analyzes collected mentions and presents actionable insights visually. The notifications the tool sends out are powered by AI, which means not only you’re able to receive notifications regularly, you’ll also get an emergency notice if something goes wrong based on the number and sentiment of your mentions.
What makes it stand out
The greatest thing about Sprinklr is the ability to integrate the social listening insights it provides with all other sorts of data concerning customer engagement. Besides, you can use Sprinklr to schedule posts, manage private messages, set up advertising campaigns, and more.
4. Mention
Sources covered
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, news and blogs, the web.
Price
Mention offers a free version, and three main plans: Solo $29/month, Starter $99/month, Company – $450+/month. Some features such as a scheduled report, historical data, and API access are only available in the Company plan.
Mention is a social listening company based in France that offers social media data analytics to a variety of companies from small businesses to corporations. It focuses on a real-time search. Historical data is available in the Custom plan only.
The tool offers a user-friendly way to organize data by tagging and sorting documents out in Smart Folders. You can use an extensive range of filters by source, language, and date to find the particular mentions you’re interested in.
The insights Mention provides include demographic data, location data, and sentiment analysis. You can customize your reports with visual data and share them with your colleagues, clients, and stakeholders. The tool also offers API access, through which you can embed its reports in your own tool or website.
What makes it stand out
Pulse alerts notify you whenever there is an unusual data trend discovered. For example, if there’s a sudden spike in negative mentions which is atypical for your keywords, Mention will send you a Pulse alert to let you know.
5. Meltwater
Sources covered
The tool monitors over 15 different sources including Twitter, Facebook, blogs, comments on news articles, and product reviews.
Price
The pricing is shared upon request.
Meltwater specializes in social media management and analysis powered by AI technologies. It sources mentions from social media as well as blogs and review sites, and offers both real-time and historical data.
The analytics include sentiment, topic and conversation, and competitive analysis. You can also segment your audience by creating user lists or audience types and get behavioral analytics specific to them.
The reports Meltwater provides are clickable, which means you can click at any data point to see the raw data behind it. The tool offers multiple dashboards for data analysis and you can also build your own customizable dashboards that present the insights you’re interested in. All insights are shareable through online or PDF reports, or Meltwater’s API.
What makes it stand out
Meltwater’s Explore database is a repository of more than a trillion documents sourced from Twitter, Reddit, Dow Jones, and other partners. Around 500 million documents are added to it daily.
6. Synthesio
Sources covered
Social media data is collected from Facebook, Twitter, Sina Weibo, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, discussion forums, customer review sites, and news sites.
Price
The pricing is shared upon request but the start price is allegedly around $1,200.
Synthesio offers several products dedicated to marketing analytics and social media management. It features Social Listening dashboards, AI powered trend analysis and Social Media Command center, which allows you to engage with data found in real-time.
You can track the engagement stats, behavioral and demographic data from 195 countries and more than 80 languages. Synthesio’s Noise Reducer filter automatically removes irrelevant mentions from your feed and data set.
The tool also utilizes AI technology to assist you in drawing actionable marketing insights: not only it notifies of the spike in the number of mentions, it also analyzes statistically relevant shifts in conversations and general trends for your alerts including daily posting patterns of your audience and trending images.
You are able to create your own visual panels to make sense of all the insights and apply the KPI framework suggested by Synthesio to evaluate your performance.
What makes it stand out
Signals is a dashboard dedicated to trend analysis. It is able to notify you about the emergence of a new competitor, a change in your brand’s perception, changes in consumer needs or preferences and more.
7. Hootsuite Insights
Sources covered
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Tumblr, news, and blogs.
Price
Hootsuite Insights is a custom feature that is available as an add-on in Business ($599 a month) and Custom plans.
As you might be aware, Hootsuite is a social media management platform that also offers some social listening capabilities. Hootsuite Insights allows you to gauge the social sentiment around your brand. You can easily filter results by location, language, and gender—for a multi-dimensional view of your market segments.
The social listening Hootsuite provides is focused on real-time data, and you’re able to engage with the mentions right from their platform. You’re also able to filter out the data based on date, demographics, and location.
The tool offers scheduled reports as well as alerts, which are triggered whenever there’s a sudden spike in mentions.
What makes it stand out
You can combine the data from Hootsuite Insights with other metrics provided by Hootsuite such as your own social media performance or the data around customer interactions for a comprehensive look at your social media marketing strategy.
8. Talkwalker
Sources covered
In addition to social media platforms and websites, Talkwalker also analyzes print and TV/radio content.
Price
Talkwalker offers two free tools: Talkwalker Alerts (basically, Google Alerts with mentions from Twitter) and Free Social Search, which allows you to quickly check conversations around your keyword. The pricing starts at $9,600 a year.
Talkwalker is an advanced social listening tool that allows you to track mentions of your keywords all over social media and the Internet. In addition to that, it’s able to analyze data from print media, TV and radio.
Talkwalker supports real-time monitoring and provides 2 years of historical data so you can see your insights in a perspective. It goes beyond words, analyzing images that feature your or your competitors’ logos, depending on your monitoring goals.
The tool’s powerful analytics provide valuable consumer insights including demographics, interests, behavior on social media and more. The Conversation Clusters feature visualizes data in such a way that you’re able to see white spaces and discover content ideas at a glance. It also maps the topics within the conversations you’re tracking and shows you the connections between them.
All these insights can be shared with your team and stakeholders via Talkwalker’s reports. There are 30 report templates based on the possible use cases, but you can also build your own report with the data you want to present.
What makes it stand out
Video analysis. Talkwalker is able to recognize your logo in videos even if your brand name is not tagged or mentioned neither in the name nor description of the video.
9. Digimind
Sources covered
The tool tracks all the major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and news.
Price
Digimind offers customized pricing available upon request.
Digimind is a platform that combines social listening and market intelligence. Once you start the software, it immediately finds relevant data to analyze and engage with. You can interact with mentions without leaving the tool and tag and organize mentions as you see fit.
The tool categorizes conversation around your keywords, making it easier to see valuable data and get customer insights. You can also use it to benchmark your own social media performance against your competitors or industry leaders. Moreover, it combines social listening data with the data on Google search behavior to give you a well-rounded image of the topic you’re monitoring.
What makes it stand out
Digimind offers multiple possibilities for integration with other tools. You can combine your social listening data with Google Data Studio, Salesforce, Hubspot, Zendesk, and many more tools.
10. Keyhole
Sources covered
Keyhole sources data from Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and media websites.
Price
You can test the software for free for 7 days. The available plans range from $99 a month, to $699+ a month.
Keyhole, similarly to Hootsuite, allows you to both manage your own social media profiles and analyze social listening data. Its main strength is hashtag tracking and analysis. The app shows you the total number of posts, the engagement rate, and the total reach and impressions your hashtags have generated.
The analysis capabilities vary depending on the plan: high-tier plans offer advanced sentiment analysis, historical data, influencer research and management, Trend Analysis, and more. Trend Analysis is an extremely useful feature, which breaks down your data to see which topics are gaining traction and which are falling behind and becoming less popular.
The reports allow you to combine social listening data with the metrics from your own social media profiles to get the full picture.
What makes it stand out
The ability to see engagement for certain hashtags comes in handy for social media campaigns.
As you see, the market of social listening tools is quite diverse: there are tools that straight-up specialize on gathering and analyzing data from social media; insights platforms that aim to provide you with all types of marketing analytics, and software that wants to fulfill all your social media needs. By defining your marketing goals and deciding on a budget, you should be able to choose a tool that brings your company value.
Read more: Advanced Social Listening