If you’re looking for a social media listening tool in particular—one that can track what people are saying about your brand—then you’ve come to the right place.

To make your search for the right social listening tool easier, we’ve compiled a huge list of the best tools in the industry, including research on the pros and cons of each tool.

Here’s a full roundup of the top social listening tools for marketers and agencies:

1. Keyhole

Keyhole helps marketers measure the impacts of their marketing campaigns. Keyhole offers campaign monitoring, influencer tracking, brand mention monitoring, and powerful competitor research tools that make it easy to benchmark your campaigns against your competitors’.

Keyhole offers social media listening and analytics for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other online media sources all in one easy to use dashboard.

Take it from Neil Patel: “This tool [Keyhole] does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”

You can also use Keyhole to conduct social listening and identify which online accounts or influencers are talking about you or your brand.

Using social listening, you can conduct in-depth sentiment analysis and understand how your audience feels about your brand, certain features, or if there’s anything noteworthy.

Pro: Keyhole has an attractive, real-time analytics and mentions dashboard that can easily be exported to client-ready PDFs.

Pricing: Custom

2. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the longest-standing and most popular social media management platforms. While it’s best-known for its social media publishing features, it does possess a suite of social listening features, branded as Hootsuite Insights Powered by Brandwatch.

Hootsuite has useful features to help you track brand mentions, identify thought leaders and influencers, and track brand sentiment.

Pro: Hootsuite has a robust set of end-to-end features for pretty much anything you would ever want to do on social media, from publishing, to advertising, to tracking.

Con: Hootsuite’s big feature set comes with a big price tag, and the social listening features are only available for their Business and Enterprise-level plans.

Pricing: Hootsuite’s social listening features are a paid add-on to their Business and Enterprise plans, starting at $739.

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one stack of marketing, sales, and service tools. HubSpot offers everything from a CRM, to a CMS, to a customer service platform.

As part of their marketing stack, HubSpot offers social media monitoring to create custom keyword monitoring streams, email alerts to track mentions, analytics tools to compare performance across social channels, and HubSpot integrations with phone systems, email marketing platforms or bulk email services, content management systems, and other apps & tools.

Pro: If you prefer all of your tools in one place, HubSpot has nearly every marketing tool you could ever need.

Con: Because HubSpot does so many things, their social listening features aren’t as deep as some of the other tools on our list, and the 

Pricing: HubSpot’s social listening features are included in their Professional and Enterprise plans, starting at $800 per month.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a popular content discovery tool, allowing marketers to track content that’s trending for certain topics or keywords.

Although not exactly a social listening tool in the sense of some of the other tools on our list, with BuzzSumo, you can track competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates.

Pro: BuzzSumo is extremely useful for tracking trending content and influencers.

Con: BuzzSumo doesn’t offer as much when it comes to tracking your social media accounts.

Pricing: BuzzSumo starts at $119 per month.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a full social media management platform, allowing you to track engagement, manage your publishing schedule, measure analytics, and perform social listening.

Sprout Social has tons of useful social listening features like audience demographic analysis, customer sentiment tracking, influencer identification, campaign analysis, and competitor comparisons.

Pro: Sprout Social offers an all-in-one social inbox to track Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn in one place.

Con: The Standard pricing tier has limited social listening features.

Pricing: Sprout Social pricing starts at $249 per user per month.

6. Mention

As the name suggests, Mention lets you track all of your brand mentions online. Mention offers a variety of social listening and publishing tools to monitor online media, analyze your competition, and manage your brand.

Mention offers real-time mention tracking and detailed analytics on your industry competitors.

Pro: Mention provides daily recap emails with key info as well as alert emails when your mentions suddenly spike.

Con: Their pricing model limits the number of mentions you can track per month.

Pricing: Mention’s paid plans start at $29 per month.

7. Brand24

Brand24 offers brand mention tracking across social platforms, news sites and blogs, video sites, review platforms, and more.

Brand24 features include a mentions feed, a discussion volume chart, marketing analytics, influence score, sentiment analysis, alerts, and reporting features.

Pro: Brand24 has some extra bonuses like a Slack integration and a mobile app.

Con: Online reviews mention a sometimes-challenging user interface and a thinner feature set than similarly priced tools.

Pricing: Brand24 pricing starts at $79 per month.

8. YouScan

YouScan is another social media listening tool that offers monitoring of social media, blogs, forums, reviews, and other online media.

YouScan offers some unique AI-powered listening features like logo recognition and object and scene detection to help brands track pictures as well as brand mentions.

Pro: YouScan’s Visual Insights feature is a game-changer for brands that want to track when their products appear in a post.

Con: YouScan has a huge price tag, so it’s cost-prohibitive unless you’re a major global brand.

Pricing: YouScan pricing starts at $12,000 per year.

9. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is another full social media management platform, comparable to Hootsuite, Sprout Social, or Buffer.

On top of publishing and analytics tools, Agorapulse offers basic social media listening features like brand mention monitoring on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

Pro: Agorapulse offers some unique collaboration features like the ability to label important posts or assign a post to a teammate.

Con: Because Agorapulse is a full social media management tool, its social media listening tracking features aren’t as robust as some of the dedicated tools.

Pricing: Agorapulse pricing starts at $69 per month.

10. SocialBee

With its robust social inbox feature, SocialBee empowers users to proactively engage and nurture their online community. By monitoring social mentions, comments, and messages, users can stay in touch with their audience, respond to inquiries, and foster meaningful connections.

But SocialBee’s value doesn’t stop at social inbox management. The platform provides a wealth of insights through its comprehensive analytics capabilities. Users gain access to analytics for multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Google Business Profile.

Pro: SocialBee’s capabilities extend beyond social listening and include powerful content creation and scheduling features.

Con: SocialBee may not offer an extensive range of social listening features compared to specialized social listening tools.

Pricing: SocialBee plans start at $29 per month with a 14-day free trial.

11. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is another social media monitoring tool that offers standard features like brand monitoring, competitor tracking, sentiment analysis, and reputation management.

Pro: BrandMention also allows you to integrate website traffic monitoring into your analytics reports.

Con: In online reviews, some users report difficulty filtering down a large number of social media mentions.

Pricing: BrandMentions starts at $99 per month.

12. Meltwater

Meltwater is a full marketing and social media suite offering social media monitoring, online media monitoring, social engagement reports, influencer management, newswire distribution, media relations tools, and more.

They allow social media monitoring for 15 different social networks, and offer tracking through a mobile app.

Pro: Meltwater is a powerful PR tool and offers a robust media database.

Con: Meltwater constantly adds new features, but they often require add-on pricing and can be overwhelming for users, according to online reviews.

Pricing: Meltwater doesn’t post pricing publicly, but according to Prowly, pricing starts at $8,000 per year.

13. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management (CXM) platform. Sprinklr is quite different than many of the other tools on our list, as its bread and butter is allowing you to engage with customers and monitor their experience with your product or service.

That said, as part of its offering, Sprinklr allows you to perform audience profiling, identify influencers, benchmark against competitors, and measure custom metrics.

Pro: Sprinklr allows you to unify your customer experience management with your marketing activities.

Con: Sprinklr is an enterprise platform that isn’t suitable for small and medium businesses.

Pricing: Sprinklr does not make its pricing available online, but its pricing is reportedly modular based on which features you add.

14. TalkWalker

TalkWalker is primarily a social media listening tool, with standard features like mention tracking, report creation, and automated alerts.

TalkWalker also has more advanced features like brand image detection, a Virality Map, and other AI-powered features.

Pro: On top of standard social media and online mention tracking, Talkwalker also allows you to monitor TV and radio content.

Con: TalkWalker’s pricing is catered only to larger businesses.

Pricing: TalkWalker pricing starts at $9,600 per year.

15. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a fairly standard social media monitoring tool for business of all sizes. They also offer social intelligence and publishing tools.

Mentionlytics allows you to track mentions on social media, online news, and other online platforms. It also allows you to reply to tweets or posts in real-time. You can also monitor keywords and competitors to identify sales opportunities.

Pro: Mentionlytics has AI-powered features to help you identify fans, ambassadors, and even trolls.

Con: Users have reported an outdated UI design.

Pricing: Mentionlytics pricing starts at $49 per month.

16. Digimind

Digimind is a social intelligence tool offering solutions for brand reputation, competitive intelligence, consumer insights, influencer identification, trend tracking, and marketing campaign analysis.

Digimind’s social listening tools include geolocalization, automatic sentiment and translation, topic clustering, and “marked as read” capabilities.

Pro: Digimind’s Top Reputation module allow you to track what people are searching for when they research your brand.

Con: According to online reviews, the tool can be quite cumbersome for beginners.

Pricing: Digimind does not make its pricing publicly available. Contact to discuss.

17. Zoho

Zoho is a cloud software suite with many SaaS applications for businesses. On top of social tools, they offer a CRM, email and document platforms, and financial tools.

Zoho’s social tools include publishing, monitoring, and reporting. Their listening tools allow you to monitor brand mentions in real time.

Pro: Zoho allows you to create your own monitoring dashboard.

Con: As Zoho isn’t a social platform at its core, the tool is fairly limited in features outside of mention tracking.

Pricing: Zoho’s pricing starts at $45 per month.

18. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is an Instagram analytics, management, and scheduling platform for brands and agencies.

Iconosquare is one of the most powerful Instagram analytics tools, offering competitor analytics, hashtag analytics, promoted posts analytics, industry benchmarking, conversation tracking, scheduling, Excel and PDF reports, custom dashboard, and more.

Pro: Iconosquare offers some unique Instagram features, like tracking of individual comments, photo tags, and mentions and tracking of content types like photos, videos, and carousel images.

Con: Iconosquare only allows tracking for Instagram and Facebook, unlike most of the other tools on this list.

Pricing: Iconosquare starts at $49 per month.

19. Awario

Awario is another popular brand monitoring tool. Awario tracks brand mentions and keywords in real time and offers additional features like sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, boolean search, white label reporting, and email alerts.

Pro: Awario has a social selling feature that tracks competitor complaints or recommendations for your product category, allowing you to identify leads on the fly.

Con: The abundance of information in Awario gives it a steep learning curve compared to its competitors.

Pricing: Awario starts at $39 per month.

Read More: 9 Essential Social Media Metrics To Track In 2024 [+ 6 Best Tools]

20. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management and tracking tool that includes features for planning, collaboration, engagement, and analytics.

Sendible’s listening capabilities include mention alerts and hashtag and keyword monitoring. 

Pro: Sendible monitors Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Con: Sendible has a wide feature set, but its listening capabilities are fairly shallow.

Pricing: Sendible starts at $29 per month. 

21. Reputation.com

As its name suggests, Reputation.com is a complete reputation management tool. Its capabilities include online review monitoring, business listing management, directory management, surveys, and social tools.

Their social listening tool includes mention tracking and sentiment analysis.

Pro: Reputation.com has a huge suite of reputation management tools.

Con: Reputation.com is less useful for those looking for social media insights.

Pricing: Reputation.com does not publish its pricing online.

22. Oktopost

Oktopost brands itself as the social media management platform for B2B enterprise. It features tools for social media management, social employee advocacy, and social media promotions.

Oktopost’s social media listening tools include keyword, mention, and competitor tracking, primarily aimed at customer support.

Pro: Oktopost offers the unique ability to amplify your social posts through your employees’ social accounts.

Con: Oktopost is more focused on B2B promotion than social listening.

Pricing: Oktopost does not publish its pricing online.

23. Statusbrew

Statusbrew is a tool for social media management, marketing, monitoring, and customer care.

Statusbrew provides live mention and conversation tracking, advanced keyword queries, sentiment analysis, lead profile building.

Pro: Statusbrew integrates with Google Drive, Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Dynamics 365, and other popular tools.

Con: Statusbrew is comparably more expensive than some of the similar listening tools on our list.

Pricing: Statusbrew starts at $89 per month when billed annually.

24. Sentione

Sentione is an AI-based social listening and conversational bot tool. Sentione provides tools for online data analytics, chatbots, voicebots, and other automation-powered customer service tools.

Sentione’s social listening capabilities include audience insights, comparative research, automated alerts, and AI-based anomaly detection.

Pro: Sentione’s social listening tool allows for unlimited keyword tracking.

Con: Sentione is quite a bit pricier than other listening tools.

Pricing: Sentione’s basic social listening plan starts at $300 per month.

Read More: 20+ Best Social Media Sentiment Analysis Tools For 2024

25. Determ

Determ is our final brand monitoring tool. Mediatoolkit provides website and social media monitoring on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, forums, blogs, and review platforms like TripAdvisor.

Determ offers deep search capabilities, including location and language filters. They also offer sentiment analysis, influencer tracking, and custom PDF reports.

Pro: Determ offers mobile and Slack notifications.

Con: For a tool that only provides social tracking, its pricing is quite high.

Pricing: Determ starts at 49€ per month.

Start your social listening analytics journey

If you’ve made it this far, you’re either the world’s biggest fan of social listening tool, or like to weigh all your options before selecting a social listening tool. We would recommend you Keyhole because let’s be honest. Social listening is just a tiny part of your marketing arsenal.

You need many more tools. But with Keyhole, you can track any trend, schedule to multiple poss, do competitive analysis along with social listening features.

The post 25 Best Social Listening Tools In 2024 (For Brand Monitoring) appeared first on Keyhole.

For instance, have you ever wondered who’s dominating the social space between Burger King, Subway and MacDonald’s? Or L’Oréal and Garnier? How do businesses determine where they are in relation to their competitors? And in turn, how do they determine the areas in which they need to improve?

That’s where social listening for competitive analysis comes in. 

Social listening is a simple-to-use and highly effective technique for competitor analysis. Many brands are already using it to listen in, collect crucial information, and answer those questions that we asked above. 

In this blog, we’ll explore the concept of social listening and explain how you can use it to gain key insights into your competitors. 

Ready to tune in?

​Understanding competitors through social listening

Screenshot taken from lush.com

In any market, knowing your competition is half the battle. Take a look at the example above, Lush consistently demonstrate the quality and uniqueness of their products by highlighting how only Lush provides fresh and natural cosmetics. 

So, how well do you know your competitors and how do you tune into these insights?

Social Listening is your spyglass. It lets you listen in on your niche to gain key insights on your competitors and audience. It can help answer questions such as: 

• Who is making waves in my industry? 
• What techniques are they using? 
• What kind of content are they producing and where are they publishing it? 

Today, Social Media Listening tools like Keyhole let you gather vital metrics such as how often your brand or your competitors are mentioned. You can also check how often certain keywords crop up. All of these can help you start to build a picture of where you stand amongst the competition. 

Analyzing competitor strategies

Competitor strategies are gold mines of insights. What are they doing right? Where are they falling short? Social listening gives you answers. By actively listening in, you can uncover nuggets of information to get the upper hand.

These nuggets can be collected as data to inform future campaigns of your own. With the aid of social media analytics tools, collecting this data is now a breeze. ​

There’s never been a better time to leverage these digital ears, hone in on what competitors are up to, and steer your strategies with informed decisions.

4 Benefits of social listening for competitive analysis

1. Informed strategy development 

By understanding the audience and competitor landscape, you can tailor strategies that hit the mark. It’s about making data-driven decisions that propel your brand forward.

Additionally, investing in UX improvement for your chosen social listening tools can enhance user experience, making it even more effective for your competitive analysis.

2. Enhanced brand reputation 

Monitoring and addressing mentions can help improve your brand reputation. Timely responses to both concerns and praise online show a brand that cares and engages.

3. Competitor benchmarking 

Benchmark your brand’s performance and reputation against competitors to find areas of improvement. Knowing where you stand helps in setting realistic yet ambitious goals.

4. Trend identification

Stay ahead by identifying and adapting to industry trends emerging from social chatter. Being on the pulse of trending topics can position your brand as a thought leader.

Some software can assist you with this. For instance, Keyhole’s QuickTrends feature allows you to enter two keywords, hashtags, and brand names and see which is more popular. 

5 ways to use social listening for competitive analysis

1. Tuning into competitive conversations

The digital realm is full of people giving their opinions or experiences. Sifting through this vast ocean of information requires a focused approach. Social Listening allows you to tune into conversations that matter.

To do this, just set up alerts for any mentions of your brand, competitors, or industry keywords. What this does is essentially filter out the noise. You’ll be able to cut through the clutter and home in on discussions that are highly relevant to your competitive analysis.

2. Strategic competitor monitoring

Moreover, integrating call scheduling software can provide additional insights into their customer engagement strategies through analysis of scheduling patterns and response times, especially if they use social media for customer service or sales outreach.

You might find, for instance, that many competitors in your industry employ cloud based call center software to handle their customer service. You can then consider doing the same, particularly if customer service is something you want to streamline or improve. 

3. Sentiment benchmarking

Exploring customer sentiment allows for a comparative analysis of how the audience feels about your brand versus others. How does it work?

Well, sentiment analysis tools seek out mood-related vocabulary and categorize each one it finds as positive, negative, or neutral. Monitoring sentiments around specific topics can provide insights into potential areas of concern and help in improving brand reputation.

Once you learn how to master brand sentiment analysis, you’ll start getting to the core of what your audience wants. 

4. Content strategy dissection

Dissecting your competitors’ content strategy is about understanding what topics resonate with the audience, the type of content that drives engagement, and the posting frequency that keeps the audience coming back for more. 

This includes analyzing their use of influencer marketing, which can provide valuable insights into how they leverage influencers to connect with their target audience. 

When you analyze elements like this, it lets you refine your own content strategy. For example, if you analyze a competitors’ inbound blogging strategy, you can use this as a basis for your own blog. 

5.    Voice share analytics

Analyzing Share of Voice (SOV) helps you get a grasp of how frequently your brand is being mentioned compared to your competitors. It’s a metric that indicates your level of visibility and influence in the digital arena.

Read More: Social Listening Vs. Social Monitoring: What’s The Difference?

5 ways to perform social listening

 1. Take advantage of social listening tools

If you want to track how often people are talking about your brand or important business-related keywords, tools like Keyhole will let you do that across various social platforms. For instance, a bakery could track mentions of keywords like “gluten-free” or “celiac” to monitor discussions around gluten-free offerings among local competitors.

2. Get those alerts set up

Configure alerts for specific keywords so you can stay updated on relevant discussions and mentions as they happen. For example, a tech startup could set up alerts for discussions around a newly released product or feature.

3. Check out the competition

Regular monitoring of your competitors’ social media channels is a great way of tapping into their engagement strategies. Let’s say you run a fitness center. You could monitor the social channels of nearby competitors for promotional offers or new class announcements.

4. Don’t forget industry forums and communities

Participate in relevant forums and online communities to stay abreast of trends and discussions. This can be a great way to remain in the know about what others are doing and may even be a place for you to identify potential sales leads ahead of competitors. 

5.  Analyzing hashtag performance

Monitor hashtag trends to analyze the performance and reach of specific hashtags used by your brand and competitors. If something is trending that you don’t currently have content for, you can tailor a new campaign to target it and capture the audience. 

Read More: 8 Social Listening Examples: How Brands Are Thriving Digital Landscape

5 Things to avoid in Social Listening

1. Ignoring negative feedback

Negative feedback, although tough to swallow, often holds valuable insights for improvement. Don’t filter out the negatives; use them to your advantage. 

2. Over-automation

Image Sourced from Linkedin.com

Automation can streamline social listening but relying on it excessively can lead to impersonal interactions or, like the example above, even some quite obvious mistakes. It’s essential to maintain a personal touch, showing your audience that there’s a human behind the screen.

2. Misinterpreting data

The data gleaned from social listening is only as good as your interpretation. Ensure your data is accurate, organized, and reliable. 

3. Neglecting real-time engagement

Social listening isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it activity. Any time you see it necessary, make sure you engage with your audience in real-time. Capture that buzz.

4. Overlooking competitor strategies

Ignorance isn’t bliss when it comes to competitor strategies. Stay updated on what competitors are doing to ensure you’re not falling behind. Keep ahead of the game. 

Conclusion

Social Listening is more than just a buzzword; it’s a vital compass in the tumultuous waters of the competitive business landscape. By tuning into the digital dialogue, brands not only keep a finger on the pulse of their audience but also stay a step ahead in the competitive analysis game. 

However, like any strategy, it’s not devoid of pitfalls. But as long as you steer clear of common missteps and make the most of effective Social Listening practices, you should be fine. In fact, you’ll enjoy all the benefits of better-informed decision-making, stronger audience connections, not to mention a notable competitive edge. 

So, ready to tune in? Contact us. 

The post 5 Ways To Use Social Listening For Competitive Analysis appeared first on Keyhole.