15 Best Social Listening Tools to Try in 2024

Not all brand mentions on social media are valuable. Some mentions are simple noise that you need to filter out.

Similarly, some brand mentions are relevant to your brand, and as a social media professional, you must understand the underlying emotions behind these mentions. How will you act on your audiences’ emotions if you are unfamiliar with them?

These are the key reasons why social media managers desperately need a social listening tool.

A social listening tool analyzes brand mentions across multiple social platforms, organizes these mentions, removes irrelevant data, and provides comprehensive insights into audiences’ emotions to better understand the industry, customers, and competitors.

But which social listening tool is the most suitable one for your brand?

We have done the groundwork and shortlisted the 10 top social listening tools based on their effectiveness, affordability, and users’ reviews. In this article, we will share the detailed list with you.

Let’s do it!

15 Best Social Listening Tools for 2024

Before diving deeper into our list of social listening tools and their features, here’s a quick comparison table for a glance:

Tool Name	Starting Price ($)/month	G2 Rating
Mention	$41	4.3/5 (400+ Reviews)
Sprout Social	$199/seat	4.4/5 (2500+ Reviews)
Hootsuite	$99	4/5 (4000+ Reviews)
Meltwater	Custom Pricing	4/5 (1900+ Reviews)
Keyhole	$89	4.3/5 (60+ Reviews)
Mentionlytics	$41	4.9/5 (50+ Reviews)
Brandwatch	Custom Pricing	4.1/5 (800+ Reviews)
BuzzSumo	$199	4.5/5 (100+ Reviews)
Brand24	$99	4.6/5 (280+ Reviews)
YouScan	$299	4.7/5 (100+ Reviews)
Google Alerts	Free	–
Awario	$49	3,9/5 (40+ Reviews)
Sprinklr	$299	4.0/5 (800+ Reviews)
Iconosquare	$29	4.5/5 (100+ Reviews)
Digimind	Custom pricing	4,6/5 (100+ Reviews)

Mention

Mention is a powerful social listening tool for driving insights from social media platforms. It filters and analyzes these datasets to build a fool-proof strategy. Mention helps you access millions of social media conversations across different platforms and organize these discussions by applying relevant filters to eliminate noise.

Mention allows you to gauge these datasets to understand deeper user sentiments and identify the bigger picture, like what triggers the audiences and the driving factors of decision-making. You can visualize all these datasets and alerts to develop an end-to-end strategy and cover multiple user journeys.

Top Features

• Compare key trends by organizing and filtering critical conversations, focusing on user sentiments, and deriving in-depth reports that compile brand mentions, industry conversations, and competitor mentions.
• Mention’s intuitive dashboards help you visualize all data trends in a single place to access all relevant information at a glance. You can add your team members, share social listening reports, create public views for outsiders, and use the Mention API to connect with third-party tools. Mention also allows you to schedule the reports so they reach all the stakeholders’ inboxes without fail.
• Mention’s conversation analysis feature crawls different social platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Instagram to identify every discussion where your brand or product is mentioned. These qualitative insights are integrated into your social media report to build an inclusive social strategy.

Pricing per month

• Solo: $41 for one user and up to 5000 mentions
• Pro: $83 for ten users and up to 10,000 mentions
• ProPlus: $149 for unlimited users and up to 20,000 mentions
• Company Plan: Custom Pricing for unlimited users and 100000+ mentions

Start your free trial now! Or get a demo.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an AI-powered social media listening tool that unveils critical customer and competitor insights. It helps users navigate through unstructured social media noise and identify actionable learnings across all social media platforms to stand out.

Sprout Social helps you build queries to track millions of social conversations happening all over the internet without prior knowledge of programming. You can use advanced AI filters to organize these datasets and identify your key insights about target audiences’ behaviors and competitors to develop your marketing strategy. They’re also operating as a social media management platform.

Top Features

• Analyze millions of online conversations to assess audience preferences, identify industry gaps by analyzing potential customers’ attitudes toward competitors, and reach a larger group of audiences by developing a data-driven audience profile with specific details like gender, location, age, device usage, etc.

• With the help of such data, businesses can strategically engage with potential customers, tailor their content to meet specific needs, and boost sales through targeted social selling initiatives.
• Identify the top influencers and thought leaders in your industry. With Sprout Social, you can perform a detailed analysis of the appropriate brand advocates to represent your company for maximum reach.
• Track customers across different platforms to go deeper into audience research. Identify their behavior for a particular topic to build data trends in your industry. Perform sentiment research to explore their opinions and feelings, and apply these insights to your social listening strategy.

Pricing per month

• Standard: $199 per seat for five profiles
• Professional: $299 per seat for unlimited profiles
• Advanced: $399 per seat with unlimited users and AI assistance
• Enterprise: Custom pricing with unlimited users, AI assistance, and professional consulting

Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s social listening platform helps you identify actionable information about your brand presence, competitors, and industry trends. It goes in-depth to derive insights into your audience’s thoughts, feelings, and wants and shows how to act on these insights to boost social media engagement.

Hootsuite has intuitive brand monitoring features and integrates with tools like Reddit, Google My Business, and Digimind.

These integrations help you stay informed about the topics and discussions in your industry, identify and respond to customer questions to get noticed, and monitor trending hashtags and keywords to participate in relevant conversations on major social networks.

Top Features

• Use Hootsuite Streams to monitor hashtags and keywords, track mentions, and listen closely to what your audiences discuss or where their interests lie. Use these actionable insights to develop an integrated, customer-focused marketing strategy for your brand.
• Identify relevant conversations, like or reply to get noticed, and save for future content ideas. This tool is helpful for different social platforms and helps you find ways and strategies to establish your brand as an industry leader.
• Negative feedback and comments tend to shoot up quickly, causing long-term damage to your brand. With Hootsuite, you can quickly identify these comments, instantly address customers’ queries, and save your brand reputation without compromising customer satisfaction.

Pricing per month

• Professional: $99 for 1 user and 10 social accounts
• Team: $249 for 3 users and 20 social accounts
• Enterprise: Custom Pricing for 5 users and 50 social accounts

Meltwater

Meltwater is a social listening analytics tool that informs you about all the social discussions relevant to your brand. It ensures that you are aware of and actively participate in them.

While billions of conversations occur on social media as we speak, some are pure noise, while others can be relevant to you. Meltwater helps you spot those specific conversations that matter to your brand and uncover insights that could be the missing piece in your social listening strategy.

Top Features

• Meltwater’s no-limit search feature helps you cover various brand mentions and conversations to get detailed insights into ad-hoc analytics. With these trends in place for customized periods, it is easier to personalize your social marketing roadmap.
• Meltwater provides a full picture of your social media analytics, where you can deep dive into trends that go back 15 months. These insights show how your brand’s social presence has grown year after year. Identify what worked and what not to help you make solid future decisions.
• Meltwater has access to some of the leading data sources for all industries. This brand also dives deeper into television, radio, podcasts, and editorial media to present you with datasets that matter for your brand.

Pricing per month

Custom pricing

Keyhole

Keyhole is an enterprise-grade social media monitoring and listening tool to grow your brand online and create a strong presence. It helps you listen to online conversations, act on brand mentions, and integrate these insights to engage a large group of audiences.

From tracking competitors to obtaining all key social media insights in one place, Keyhole empowers your social media team with granular datasets and premium support.

Top Features

• Bird’s eye-view of brand and industry trends and audience insights in a unified dashboard that engages audiences in real time. With critical features like volume predictions, you get notified about viral social media posts in advance to take needful actions. Keyhole’s dashboard also helps you perform AI-driven sentiment analysis on your customers to understand their POV of your brand and the competitors.
• Keyhole’s QuickTrends feature helps you quickly access industry trends and best practices and is an easy-to-use tool similar to Google Trends. With QuickTrends, performing data-driven competitor analysis is simpler than ever.
• Keyhole helps you leverage community-driven marketing with specific insights related to customer conversations. From increasing followers to converting them into leads, Keyhole provides useful insights like which account to engage with and which hashtags to follow. With these insights, you can identify strategic partners and brand advocates.

Pricing per month

• Individual: $89/month for 3K mentions
• Team: $189/month for 10K mentions
• Advanced: $399/month for 50K mentions

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics helps you monitor what your customers think and discuss with its AI-driven social listening platform. It ensures you don’t miss out on a brand mention or customer query simply because you cannot navigate the excess information.

Mentionlytics claims to cut through all the social media noise, keep you informed about customer sentiment analysis, generate customizable reports with granular data on customer needs, and provide end-to-end support to each user.

Top Features

• Track your audiences and their conversations to analyze their online behavior deeply. Use advanced search filters to narrow down what matters to your audiences and how you can leverage these insights.
• Identify the hottest industry trends, build strategies to reach your audiences, and create content with high virality potential. Get insights into competitors’ marketing campaigns and insights to make your social marketing strategy even more powerful.
• Use AI-powered real-time insights and charts and get a dedicated feedback advisor for your account. With these intelligent insights, creating relevant content that targets specific demographics is easier than ever.

Pricing per month

• Basic: $41 per month for 3 keyword rules
• Essentials: $116 per month for 10 keyword rules
• Advanced: $208 per month for 15 keyword rules
• Pro: $333 per month for 25 keyword rules
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for 40+ keyword rules

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening and brand monitoring tool for large enterprises. It helps them discover the latest consumer trends with the power of social intelligence. Brandwatch’s extensive social listening data library is home to 1.4 trillion customer conversations, helping social media marketers make data-driven decisions faster.

Brandwatch adds over 500 million new online conversations to its database daily, collected from diverse data sources. It also partners with trending social media channels like X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Top Features

• Develop a 360-degree dashboard that integrates various business data sources, breaks down data silos, and analyzes social and web platforms to collect all required insights in a standard dashboard.
• Go beyond the regular customer metrics and develop a social media strategy entirely dependent on the customers and their needs, with deep customer voice analysis.
• Built-in, state-of-the-art AI tools to get your desired brand insights faster without manual data collection and analysis.

Pricing per month

Custom pricing

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is an all-in-one social media marketing tool that monitors brand mentions, industry updates, and competitor trends in a single platform. It listens to all online discussions directly or indirectly related to your brand and notifies your social marketing team with valuable insights.

Top Features

• Create keyword-based alerts so your brand will receive a notification whenever a particular phrase or keyword is used. This would include brand conversations, competitors’ posts, and other relevant topics.
• Create alerts for top influencers, bloggers, and brand advocates. Set customized triggers so that whenever they publish a new blog or content, you will receive a notification to engage with their posts quickly.
• Track all your content collaborations, monitor your growth metrics, and develop a data-driven strategy.

Pricing per month

• Content Creation: $199 per month for 1 user
• PR & Comms: $299 per month for 5 users
• Suite: $499 per month for 10 users
• Enterprise: $999 per month for 30 users

Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-backed social listening tool that measures social media mentions, identifies online conversations, news, and blogs to engage with, and connects with influencers and brand advocates to boost your brand’s reach.

Brand24 allows you to monitor 25,000,000+ online sources in real-time, including public sources, news sites, community discussion forums, and major social media platforms, to track your brand’s reach, mentions, hashtags, and over-impact created (positive and negative).

Top Features

• Monitor millions of online sources, analyze customers’ sentiments, and create detailed reports covering PR coverage to ensure you don’t miss a single brand mention.
• Track effective social media metrics to share your findings with the team, such as reaching brand awareness, filtering out noise, and automating reporting.
• Perform customer research, get to know customers better based on collected data, identify customers’ likes and dislikes, collaborate across organizations, and share relevant insights.

Pricing per month

• Individual: $99 for up to 2K mentions
• Team: $179 for up to 5K mentions
• Pro: $249 for up to 25K mentions
• Enterprise: $499 for up to 100K mentions

YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that helps you visualize real-time customer and industry insights captured from millions of customer conversations.

It is a perfect tool for social media teams to share critical data among themselves and build more robust, automated social workflows to identify social collaboration opportunities and act on them instantly.

Top Features

• Collect mentions of your brand, cut your noise, focus on unique posts, and segment your social listening datasets into relevant categories. Access 500 billion+ historical conversations to better understand your target audiences.
• YouScan helps with AI-based data segmentation that creates automated categories, understands the core subject of customer conversations, and adds intelligent tags to each conversation to develop a data-driven strategy.
• Keep a close tab on positive and negative conversations relevant to your brand to identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses. Take action against negative discussions and double down on strengths to initiate more positive conversations.

Pricing per month

• Starter 3: $299 per month for up to 30,000 mentions
• Unlimited: Custom pricing for unlimited mentions

Free Social Listening Tool: Google Alerts

If you’re looking for free social listening tools, look no further than Google Alerts, Even though it isn’t a regular social listening tool, lets you set notifications for specific keywords, topics, and conversations. You will receive these notifications through emails based on your set frequency.

Google Alerts is free and helps new businesses start their social listening journey in the simplest manner. However, it doesn’t have advanced features like sentiment analysis, an advanced dashboard, or customizable filters.

Here’s a resource to help you understand how to set up Google Alerts.

Awario

Awario is a real-time social media monitoring tool that helps brands monitor their competitors and market trends on platforms like X, Reddit, YouTube, and Blogs. It regularly adds new data sources and provides real-time and historical data on brand mentions.

Top Features

• Real-time monitoring of 13 billion daily pages all over the internet to identify relevant brand mentions and content inspirations.
• Intuitive social listening analytics to help you access critical inputs like sentimental analysis of audiences, insights into competitor activities, and identifying your ideal brand advocates.
• Generate customizable reports with compelling visual elements for detailed social media insights, downloadable into multiple formats.

Pricing per month

• Starter: $49/month with three topics to monitor
• Pro: $149/month with 15 topics to monitor
• Enterprise: $399/month with 100 topics to monitor

Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s real-time social listening tool allows you to unlock the power of online conversations and derive significant insights from unstructured data to take timed actions for your brand’s growth. With AI-powered capabilities, you will receive social insights faster from industry-leading data sources.

Top Features

• Monitor all content types, including user-generated content, visual mentions, text mentions, and videos across 30+ online sources without losing any critical insights.
• Benchmark critical social listening metrics such as brand awareness, CSAT, and share of voice on an intuitive dashboard, and compare with competitors to identify your brand’s strengths and weaknesses.
• Get real-time alerts during urgency, protect your brand reputation, and generate automated crisis management workflows to take fast action.

Pricing per month

• Self-serve: $299/seat/month for seven social channels and five review channels monitoring
• Custom Pricing: Talk to Sales

Iconosquare

Iconosquare enables social media marketers and brand managers to discover critical social insights into their industry and competitor operations by tracking brand mentions, relevant conversations, and hashtags.

Top Features

• Generate automated monthly reports to track competitor evolutions and market trends.
• Customized view by selecting relevant hashtags and identifying critical details related to corresponding posts.

Pricing per month

• Single: $29/month for a single user
• Teams: $49/month for up to 10 users
• Custom: Custom pricing for unlimited users

Digimind

The final name on our list of top social listening tools is Digimind. This social intelligence software provides detailed insights into your competitive environment, brand mentions, and market trends to help you understand what your potential audiences are talking about.

Top Features

• Digimind helps you keep tabs on customer sentiments to get detailed insights into their emotions and communicate your brand messaging in their preferred way.
• Perform predictive analytics to anticipate crisis situations with automated alerts, detect weak signals, and take action.
• Discover influencers and brand advocates in your industry, segment potential influencers based on reach, and make data-driven decisions.

Pricing per month

Not disclosed

How to Select the Right Social Listening Tool?

Wondering how to select the right social listening tools for your business? Look for the following features:

Detailed social-media coverage: A social listening tool should be able to track mentions, conversations, and user activities across multiple social platforms, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, and more.

Real-time social monitoring and timed alerts: Monitoring social media conversations in real-time and generating instant alerts specific to branded keywords, hashtags, mentions, and competitors’ posts.

In-depth sentiment analysis and insights on customer emotions: A social listening tool should be able to deeply analyze audience sentiments to identify positive, negative, or neutral emotions. It should be able to identify the exact emotion behind a post or comment to gain distinct insights into customers’ needs and expectations.

Competitor analysis and benchmarking: Tracking competitors’ social posts and trending content regularly to identify trends that can be incorporated into your social media strategy.

Intuitive social media dashboard: Social listening tools should have an intuitive dashboard to track critical metrics like mentions, engagement rate, conversation share, sentiment score, influencer impact, number of leads, etc. These reports should be shared with your team for data-driven decision-making.

Customized settings and filter management: The social listening tool should provide several customization options to define your keywords, rules, and filters and must integrate with your CRM and other marketing automation systems.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are social listening tools?

They are sophisticated software applications that monitor and analyze online conversations related to a brand or industry. For instance, Mention is revered for its sentiment analysis and protective capabilities for a brand’s digital presence.

Why do marketers need to use social listening tools?

Social listening tools are crucial for marketers because they provide real-time insights into customer opinions, trending topics, and industry movements. Such insights empower them to make informed decisions and tactical adjustments in their strategies.

What can I track with social listening tools?

You can track various online conversations, from brand mentions and customer feedback to industry trends. Tools like Mention also offer unique features, including radio & TV tracking and detecting early signs of a crisis.

What’s the difference between social listening tools and social monitoring tools?

While both tools are centered around tracking brand mentions and relevant conversations, social listening tools dig deeper, analyzing the mood and sentiment behind the data. Conversely, social monitoring tools focus more on collecting data points, such as the frequency of mentions and engagement levels.

Conclusion

Social listening tools enhance and build the foundation of your social media marketing efforts.

From identifying relevant social media conversations to providing you access to real-time insights into customer behavior, social media listening tools use their billions of real-time data sources to identify your brand’s biggest strengths and weaknesses.

Planning to use social listening tools? Start with the first name in our list – Mention.

Book a demo!