Social listening tools are meant for tracking social media conversations about specific keywords, hashtags and topics, as well as trending content in real time. A thorough analysis of these mentions can help you gain insights into your brand’s profile and highlight issues that you may be unaware of.
Here, we have compiled a list of free social listening tools that will enable you to track social media conversations in the most convenient way possible.
TapInfluence
The boom of influencer marketing has created a need for social media tools specifically tailored for influencer campaigns.
Enter TapInfluence, an analytics platform which removes many of the “what-ifs” related to influencer marketing. This includes metrics such as reach, engagement rate and the potential price tag behind any given influencer.
In short, TapInfluence highlights relevant influencer metrics in black and white so brands can better understand whether or not a potential relationship makes sense prior to outreach.
Influencer campaigns shouldn’t be a black hole of ROI. In addition to individual influencer metrics, the platform also measures the performance of overall campaigns against industry benchmarks.
BuzzSumo
Although not strictly a social tool, BuzzSumo is an awesome resource for analyzing the social engagement of any given piece of content.
If you want to see how many shares your latest blog post received on Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest, BuzzSumo can provide you with that data. You can also monitor the performance of content competing for relevant industry keywords, allowing you to see how your content marketing campaigns are stacking up against the competition.
Social media remains one of the top distribution channels for content. By analyzing social shares, you can see which types of posts receive the most engagement and use that data to inform your own content strategy. BuzzSumo can also help you understand variables in top-performing content such as length, publish date and headline type.
Snaplytics
The popularity of ephemeral content on social media speaks for itself.
Snaplytics focuses solely on analytics for Snapchat and Instagram Stories. The platform looks at metrics such as open and completion rate, allowing brands to see where story engagement peaks and likewise at what point viewers drop off.
The need to optimize story-based content is something that modern brands should overlook at their own peril.
Although Snapchat might have fallen out of favor for some brands, bear in mind that the network still boasts hundreds of million active users among millennials and Gen Z.
Meanwhile, Stories represent one of the most-engaged methods of Instagram promotion. Going beyond native analytics is a smart move for brands who want to craft more compelling Stories or eventually run story-based ads.
Curalate
More and more brands are trying their hands at direct social selling.
Platforms such as Curalate serve as a hybrid storefront and analytics tool for companies looking to maximize their sales from Instagram
Chances are you’ve seen a branded or unbranded “Like2Buy” link in the wild. Major brands like Bose take advantage of Curalate for social sales – take a peek at their Instagram bio.
Upon clicking through, we’re led to a social storefront where users can shop directly.
Curalate’s platform empowers businesses to understand which products score the most clicks and sales. This can directly inform your future campaigns and product strategy as you learn which sort of posts click with customers.
Additionally, Curalate tracks product tags and mentions, making it a cinch to spot and analyze the performance of user-generated content campaigns.
CoSchedule
At Brand24, we use CoSchedule as our editorial calendar – it never let us down and we can surely recommend it to all small, medium and large businesses.
The cool thing about CoSchedule is that it analyzes the performance of your social media posts and, on this basis, suggests improvements and recommends particular actions across all your social media channels, for example:
- Best day to post
- Best time to post
- Best type of content to post
What’s more, CoSchedule provides analytics of your social media posts, including:
- Social engagement analytics: Analytics of interaction your social media posts receive
- Social campaign report: Tracking across multiple platforms the performance of a campaign
- Audience insights: In-depth reports about performance of your social media channels
- Social message analytics: Tracking engagement for particular posts
- Social share analytics: How many times your link has been shared across social media
- Top projects reports: Analysis of top 100 posts
Pros:
- Great for scheduling social media campaigns.
- Creates social media reports.
- Good for task tracking.
Cons
- Can be a bit pricey for smaller companies.
- The UI can be difficult to use for some people.
Sprout Social
Another all time best social media analytics tool is Sprout Social. It’s comprehensive social media management tool you can use to track your performance in social media.
The platform offers plenty of features to analyze social media performance, engagement, post social media messages or listen to social media conversations about your company. Sprout Social has a plenty of features. To make users’ lives easier, they offer solutions:
- By business type:
- For enterprise
- For agencies
- For small businesses
- By need:
- For social management
- For social marketing
- For customer care
- For employee advocacy
- By network:
- Google+
Pros
- Great social media reporting tool.
- Good solution for social media marketers – includes advanced social media management and analysis options.
- You can track social media campaigns inside the tool.
Cons
- Can cause problems with Instagram posting.
- No integration with YouTube or TikTok.
- Expensive.
Keyhole
If you’re interested in the hashtag game, Keyhole is a nice tool to learn a bit about the hashtags you use. Keyhole supports also account, keyword and URL tracking on the Web. What’s more, you can use Keyhole to track mentions about social media profiles, keywords and URLs.
Importantly, you can request historical data from Twitter and Instagram including information about the number of posts, users, engagement and influencers. There are 5 pricing plans and the highest one includes:
- Historical data
- PDF reports
- Real time data
- Twitter analytics
- Instagram analytics
- Facebook analytics
- Youtube analytics
- Sentiment analysis
- API access
- +more!
Pros
- Ability to measure influencer impact & ROI.
- Tracking and analysing competitors in social networks.
- Hashtag tracker.
Cons
- Hidden pricing. Might be too expensive for some companies.
- Not easy for first-time users.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is one of the best social media monitoring and analytics tool out there.
It collects online mentions from all over the Web: social media, discussion forums, blogs, news sites and other publicly available sources. Also, it has plenty of features that allow in-depth analytics of your online mentions. Some of the features include:
- Demographics: Data about authors of mentions, including gender, interests, profession or location
- Image analysis: Detect images that contain your company logo
- Influencers: Find top influencers mentioning your keywords
- Locations: Discover where do your mentions come from
- Automated reports: Get your data directly to your inbox in HTML or PDF formats
- +more!
Pros
- Provides valuable marketing data and custom reports.
- Great tool to collect brand mentions.
Cons
- Pricey
- Offers too much data for just a social media marketer. It’d be wise to use it for more than just social media analysis.
Quintly
Quintly can help you with social media analytics including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and blogs. There’s plenty of features for each platform but the most important features include:
- Competitive benchmarking: Find benchmarks for your social media channels and discover what content works best for you
- Centralized analytics: Discover over 250 social media metrics and track your performance
- Smart reporting: Get reports based on your custom dashboards and pick any parameters you want
- Custom dashboards: Create custom dashboards including metrics of your choice
- Overall metrics: Track specific KPI’s and measure social media performance across all major networks
- Key influencers: Get data about the most influential social media profiles
- Data exporting: Export your data to CSV or Excel and download any metric as JPG, PNG, PDF, PPTX
- Customer care: Monitor Facebook and Twitter to track customer queries
- + more!
Pros
- You can track your social media efforts with automated reports and customized dashboards.
- Easy to track social analytics.
Cons
- Too expensive for smaller brands, custom plans start from $300 a month.
- The gathered data is too general, nod good for in-depth social analytics.
Audiense
Audiense is one of the best Twitter analytics tools. What’s cool is that it’s free if you have less than 5k followers.
It gives you a unique insight into your followers:
- Interests
- Location
- Languages
- Influence
- Best time to tweet
Pros
- Dedicated to Twitter analytics – great tool if your brand is focused on this social media channel.
- Allows to identify nano influencers and micro influencers.
Cons
- Very simple tool with limited possibilities.
HeyOrca
HeyOrca is a social media planner designed for quick and easy collaboration with clients. It offers not only publishing, management, collaboration, but also analytics of social media content across various platforms.
It’s a great choice for agencies that cooperate a lot with customers and present them with social media content for approval.
Some of the features HeyOrca offers include:
- Accounts Organization
- Social Media Planning
- Internal Collaboration
- Client Approvals
- Direct Publishing
- Performance Analytics
Pros
- Important social media analytics tool that allows advanced collaborations for agencies.
- Tracking social media campaigns made easy.
Cons
- Doesn’t provide in-depth media analytics.
- Limited capabilities in terms of integration.
Mention.com
Mention is a social media mention monitoring tool that tracks social media conversation across the web, blogs and social networks.
It’s a very simple way to see what people are saying about your brand or industry, especially considering you’ll be able to track keywords, competitors and even specific employees–all for free!
Note: at the time of this writing all social media mentions were limited to 1000 mentions unless you have a paid account. Also note that only 3 projects can be created with this version.
After you’ve signed into your account, you can add social media keywords as projects.
How it works:
When adding a social media keyword project on Twitter, you’ll want to include the social network name and mention frequency type . Then enter your keyword once on both screens.
To set up social monitoring of your brand or competitors, click on ‘Social’ from the top nav bar and then select ‘Brand Monitoring.’
You’ll want to specify which social networks you’d like to monitor (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Blogs). Then decide what kind of mentions you’d like to follow:
- Mentions Only
- Favorites Only
- Mentions & Replies (recommended).
READ 5 Best Keyword Analysis Tools for SEO
TweetDeck
TweetDeck is a social media listening software that allows you to organize social profiles and social conversations in one dashboard.
How it works:
First, connect your Twitter account by clicking on the ‘Add Account’ or ‘Connect’ button under the social accounts heading.
After connecting social web profiles, you can view recent activity directly on each social network page.
Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a social listening platform that allows you to receive media notifications on keywords and topics.
How it works:
First, create your Google Account.
Next, click the ‘Create alert’ link under the ‘Alerts’ heading (this will navigate you to a page where you can set up social accounts).
In the dropdown menu for social networks (in this example we’re using Facebook), select a social network or list of social accounts that you’d like to monitor.
This social media monitoring platform also offers RSS feeds for each subscription so you can view recent activity from blogs or websites – this feature comes in handy if you want to track social media mentions from an individual blog post or web page.
Twilert
Twilert is social media listening software that sends email notifications when specific terms are mentioned online.
These email alerts help keep you informed of what’s being said about your brand or business.
How it works:
To get started with this social media monitoring tool, first sign up for a free trial and log into the social media listening software.
Next, enter your social network name and social media keywords (separated by comma).READ Writing a Mission Statement that Inspires: 3 Tips
After setting up a keyword alert, you’ll be able to configure the parameters for email notifications (which social networks will receive the alerts? Which social accounts will they come from?) and selecting an email address that you’d like to send them to.
As with many social networks, mention frequency type, social networks and frequency can all be changed as needed.
Twitter Advanced Search
Twitter Advanced Search allows you to find recent tweets containing specific words or phrases.
How it works:
The interface is fairly intuitive – log into your Twitter account, then click on ‘Advanced search’ link in the top right of the social media dashboard.
Here, you can enter a keyword or phrase that you’d like to monitor (Twitter will only return results containing your keywords).
Conclusion
Now that you’re aware of the best social listening tools, you can better listen to the needs of your target audience and get them talking about your brand. Start with one tool and begin to see how it could benefit you or your business. Then move onto another tool and expand your sphere of influence.”