Listening tools for social media include free tools such as Google Alerts, blogs and wikis. Social listening tools are used to monitor what people are saying about their brand on social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Social listening platforms include BufferApp , Mention, Hootsuite , Trackur and Twazzup .
We’ve put together a list of social listening tools with their specs and pricing so you can discover the one that fits your company’s needs. Or, if you have a certain feature in mind, click on the links above for a more in-depth review.
Falcon.io
Price: $108/per seat/month+
Falcon.io is an all-in-one social media management and customer experience (CX) platform for medium-to-enterprise-size companies.
The software has capabilities related to scheduling, engaging, social listening, publishing, advertising, and analyzing all aspects of your social media strategy. The platform makes it easy to segment and target your customers for customized social campaigns.
Falcon.io Features and Compatibility
- Use a single dashboard for all of your social media management needs (e.g. social listening, publishing, engagement, reporting, audience data management).
- Manage private messaging channels with the Engage inbox feature (which is compatible with WhatsApp).
- Enhance community management and support by creating custom response templates for your FAQs.
- Route specific messages from audience members to internal team members so they can collaborate on solutions — and keep those messages in one, customizable, and filterable inbox.
- Use Falcon.io to manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram accounts.
- Integrate Falcon.io with your HubSpot CRM to sync all customer data for social campaigns, create custom or lookalike audiences, and offer personalized and engaging customer service.
Hootsuite
Price: $49/month+
Hootsuite allows you to view and respond to all your messages, comments, and brand mentions across several social channels in a single, concise dashboard.
You can also track influencers and leads in lists that can be imported and shared with others in your company.
Hootsuite Features and Compatibility
- Manage and monitor all social media activity with native tools and features.
- Easily monitor mentions and respond directly in the platform.
- Customize paid social media campaigns with the Boost option which balances organic reach and paid advertisements to help optimize your content’s engagement.
- Measure success across a number of social platforms that are compatible with Hootsuite including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
- Add one of the many social network integrations that are compatible with the software and view them from your Hootsuite interface.
Adview
Unlike most social listening platforms, Adview is used specifically for social listening on Facebook and Instagram ads. You can use it to monitor up to three Facebook Ad Accounts across unlimited pages.
When you add Adview to your Hootsuite dashboard, you can reply to comments on all your Facebook and Instagram ads in one place.
Talkwalker
Talkwalker offers robust social listening features that analyze blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks all in one dashboard. They draw data from more than 150 million sources.
You’ll be able to monitor conversations around your brand while analyzing the engagement, reach, comments, and sentiment behind them.
Agora Pulse
Plans: Medium $99/mo, Large $199/mo, X-Large $299/mo, Enterprise $499/mo
Agora Pulse is another highly professional social media management app that includes social listening features.
It features an extremely clean and straightforward interface.
You can easily set up relevant brand-listening parameters, that allow you to listen to relevant conversations about your brand. You can further refine your YouTube, and Twitter searches by providing words NOT to include in your saved searches. Boolean operators allow you to hone in on only what you want to listen to. Add location and/or language parameters to your Twitter searches if you want to be even more specific.
Perhaps even more critical is that Agora Pulse helps you take action on what you hear. You can click on a monitoring item and like, retweet, reply, or reply in DM/PM. You can also label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client so that they can act accordingly.
YouScan
Plans: Standard $500 per 5 topics per month, Pro $750 per 5 topics per month, Insight $1500 per 5 topics per month, Ultra $5000 per 5 topics per month
Unlike most social listening tools which offer more searches on the higher plans, YouScan keeps a consistent five searches in all its plans. But each search (Topic) can be detailed, with ways to include and exclude a variety of factors (like keywords and hashtags) and apply rules to them.
You need to enter your search queries using Boolean operators. There are only a handful of operators to learn, and they all make perfect sense, but many marketers will first have to upskill their Boolean logic before they begin.
Once you’ve set the parameters of your search, YouScan will build a page showing all the mentions the platform has collected matching your search criteria. You can then filter the results down in several ways to get what’s relevant to your specific search.
A particular strength of YouScan is Visual Insights. This searches through images, and you can set detailed parameters, to find pictures showing your specific requirements. An incredibly accurate AI engine powers the image recognition. It can help you find detailed demographic and psychographic information about the people who use your brand.
You can use YouScan to find mentions of your brand by the most influential people and then see which of these has the most engaged audiences. It has Smart Alerts which you can set to notify you whenever it “sees” negative sentiment about your brand. You can even integrate their complaints directly into your Helpdesk system.
Conclusion
With a set of listening tools you can listen and engage with your customers, find and remove any negative comments, track and measure social media success, evaluate campaigns and community sentiment. In this article we will describe the different types of listening tools, give some examples of their use, explain how social listening tools work, go through the best social listening tools and provide a list of listening tools for your convenience.