11 best social media
listening tools in 2019

Social media listening goes beyond just looking at your emails and notifications for @mentions of your brand. About 30% of the tweets that mention brands neglect to use their Twitter handles.

This indicates that you missed out on looking at 30% of possible engagement for your brand. Not just that, people might have even misspelled your brand name or talked about your brand elsewhere without tagging you.

To avoid such mishaps what you need is a social media listening tool. As humans, it’s impossible to have an ear to the ground at all times for mentions of your brand, but with a dedicated social media listening tool that just might be doable.

Is there a difference between social media monitoring and social media listening?

There is! Often people consider social media monitoring and social media listening to be the same. 

Social media monitoring is the process of gathering information on your brand’s mentions, share of voice, sentiment, and more. On the other hand, social media listening is the process of analyzing the gathered information, looking for hidden patterns in the sentiment, comments, and so on.

Insights on what people are saying about your brand will not only help tweak your social media strategy but also help you make more informed business decisions.

How important is a social media listening tool for brands?

Social media listening tools can do a whole lot of things to boost your brand’s performance on social. With social media listening tools, you’re constantly in the loop of what is being said about your brand, competitors, industry, and even a particular keyword or hashtag that’s trending.

In this article, we’ve put together a list of some of the best social media listening tools that offer a plethora of features to help you take your social media strategy to a whole new level.

1. Awario

Awario offers an array of features to get you ticking on social. The tool monitors for mentions of your brand on both the web and social media. Instant alerts of your brand mention along with sentiment analysis help you react to them with real-time insights. The tool also teases out meaningful customer insights to help you understand your audience better and create more compelling content. Awario Reach helps you sort mentions that have the highest impact in terms of reach to help you tweak your marketing efforts and reach a bigger audience faster.

Awario Leads, the tool’s lead generation feature, scouts for questions asked by consumers for product recommendations like yours to help you answer them instantly. By doing so, you turn potential prospects into leads by being the first to offer solutions for their queries.

Pricing:	Starting from $29 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.1

2. TweetDeck

TweetDeck, owned by Twitter, is a social media dashboard that helps you manage multiple Twitter accounts in an organized manner. The tool allows you to customize your Twitter feed by streamlining what’s relevant to your business.

By adding columns on your dashboard, the tool allows you to see the Twitter feed of the people you follow, your clients, competitors, employees, industry, influencers, and much more. This will give you a broad view of who’s talking about you, what your competitors are talking about, and what’s trending in your industry. In addition to that, you can also schedule your tweets in advance and stay more efficient in optimizing your Twitter strategy.

Pricing:	Free
G2Crowd Rating:	4.2

3. HubSpot

HubSpot isn’t a social media listening tool. It’s a marketing automation tool with a listening feature that helps increase your brand’s visibility and engagement on social media. It also helps you monitor mentions of your brand across all social media networks and allows you to reply to comments and mentions within the app. It even poses as a publishing tool to help push your content at the optimal time.

Using HubSpot, you can even schedule content for later, and get suggestions to post at the best time to get the maximum interactions from your audience.

Pricing:	Starting from $560 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.3

4. Synthesio

Synthesio is a dynamic tool with a plethora of features. The tool sources social listening data in over 80 languages. The mentions tracked via the Synthesio Social Listening Platform are enriched with robust metadata about the content, author, and tone. Synthesio provides engagement data such as tracks views, likes, favorites, replies, retweets, and shares across Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

In addition to that, you can measure, benchmark, and analyze your brand health, content performance, and much more using the Synthesio social media command center. The tool gives you real-time insights on feedback from your audience on your brand’s campaign performance.

You get a breakdown of the hashtags, tweets, and URLs that are driving the most engagement from top social networks. In addition to that, you also get insights on your brand’s keyword mentions on top social networks to help you determine the influence of each user. All in all, Synthesio is a fully integrated tool that delivers key metrics and insights critical to your brand’s performance on social media.

Pricing:	N/A
G2Crowd Rating:	4.4

5. Mention

Mention’s use cases go beyond social media listening. This tool also houses social media publishing, media monitoring, competitive intelligence, and crisis management functionalities. 

Using Mention, you can receive real-time alerts of mentions of your brand, analyze sentiment, and respond to the alerts from within the Mention Dashboard. You can also find related topics and monitor specific keywords to see what else your audience is talking about to help you find content ideas. Mention’s dashboard also has an influencers tab to help you collaborate with influencers and boost your brand awareness. Mention has a free plan with basic features, but for more access to brand mentions and alerts try their advanced plans.

Pricing:	Starting from $25 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.4

6. Clarabridge

Clarabridge is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that delivers solutions built to enhance the customer experience. The tool gathers and analyzes your brand mentions from any social media source and any online review site, including Facebook, Twitter, TripAdvisor, and Booking.com, among many others. Not just that, Clarabridge provides deep analytics to understand the context of these mentions of your brand. The tool also helps understand your global audience by listening to what they are saying about you and how you can and should react to them.

Pricing:	N/A
G2Crowd Rating:	4.2

7. NetBase

NetBase helps you gather insights on what your customers are saying about you across all social media sources. The tool’s next-generation Artificial Intelligence analyzes and determines the behaviors, emotions, attributes, people, and hashtags from social posts. This helps you in understanding your customer’s emotions and behaviors to make more informed business decisions and better customer experience initiatives.

You also get a complete overview of your brand’s owned, earned, and partnered content performance on social media. The tool gives you instant notifications of your brand mentions to help you react in real-time and avoid a crisis by responding to them instantly.

Pricing:	N/A
G2Crowd Rating:	4.1

8. Brandwatch

Brandwatch helps you collect, monitor, and analyze billions of conversations of what your customers are saying about your brand. The tool searches for mentions of your brand across all social networks, blog articles, and reviews sites. The tool then categorizes them into segments relevant to your brand. It further analyzes the mentions to give you insights on how to react to them in real-time. 

Pricing:	Starting from $800 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.5

9. Sysomos

Sysomos, now a Meltwater solution, helps you get complete visibility on mentions of your brand across all social networks. The tool gives you instant alerts every time there is a mention of your brand allowing you to react to them instantly. You even get canned responses to help maximize your efficiency in responding to your consumers in online forums.

Pricing:	N/A
G2Crowd Rating:	N/A

10. Brand24

Brand24 monitors and gives instant access to mentions of your brand. Brand24 is a great tool to help you reach potential customers and influencers. You can detect sales opportunities by using the app’s listening tool. In addition to that, the tool gives you real-time social insights on sentiment analysis and mention analysis. The tool even offers a view of real-time mentions of your brand online allowing you to react to consumer queries instantly.

Pricing:	Starting from $49 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.6

11. 76Insights

76Insights provides you with insights on your brand’s best-performing posts on social media, articles, and other forms of social objects. You can measure the resonance of your social content and also get a resonance score breakdown by social networks.

You can also view your content performance in a graph or card view layout to help you visualize content that is most resonating with your audience.

Pricing:	N/A
G2Crowd Rating:	N/A

You could also consider

Unmetric

Unmetric is an AI-powered, brand-focused social media intelligence platform that helps companies gather reliable social media data to perform better on social.

This means creating more engaging content, getting more certainty around your social strategy, and automating tedious tasks like reporting.

There’s a host of features that will help you analyze your brand’s social media performance and make better marketing decisions.

• You can dissect which type of your posts garner more engagement and at what time.
• Using the tool’s hashtag tracker, you can discover the most engaging hashtags used by your brand.
• You can also benchmark your social media performance against competitors from your industry. 

 But here’s my personal favorite functionality:

Unmetric’s latest feature is the outliers detection functionality that helps reduce time to insight and find the insight needles in the data haystack. You can detect posts that garnered the most number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, and much more to help you discover the kind of posts/tweets that work in your industry. Now, how cool is that?

Here’s an interesting use case video on how the Red Socks Company created a hit campaign by researching what other brands did around Lost Sock Day using Unmetric.

Pricing:	Starting from $1000 per month
G2Crowd Rating:	4.2

Conclusion

Social media listening is not just about listening to what your customers are saying about you. You also need to listen to what your competitors are up to and what your industry is buzzing about. Social media listening tools will help you deal with crisis management, find you influencers to collaborate with, help analyze your past performances, and also get competitive intelligence.

Based on your needs and what fits your budget best, you can take a call on which one of these tools will boost your performance on social.

If we missed your favorite tool, send us a tweet @unmetric and we’ll add it to the list!

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