Best Social Media Listening Tools 2022 is a comprehensive review of the latest social media listening software and services available today. Hands down the best solutions for discovering new content, seeing how it resonates, and understanding consumer feedback from social channels. This industry guide provides a detailed look at over 100 different social listening tools, 360 degree reviews of popular providers, and case studies that explore how companies are using social media listening to connect with customers.
Social media monitoring is the monitoring of social media networks, forums, communities, and other online sites to gather information. You can then use this information to enhance or create content marketing campaigns. There are many companies that offer this service, but only about 6 that are worth considering. After analyzing each company I have selected what I view to be the best social listening tools in 2022.
NetBase Quid
NetBase Quid digs deep and grabs the metrics that will guide your brand to success. Using natural language processing (NLP), it dissects and reads between the lines of the latest lingo, capturing nuance that would otherwise be lost. It not only understands what your consumer means when they use the term ‘flex,’ but it deciphers the hidden meaning behind it, providing you a complete picture of what your consumer meant – and what s/he was feeling at the moment. Having access to NLP helps aid your brand develop more authentic and targeted messaging.
This social listening platform helps brands engage with and grow audiences by:
- Identifying topics/trends consumers care most about, to inform campaign creation.
- Revealing the best social platform to share your campaign, depending on where your audience is most engaged and active
- Following campaign and topic progress in real-time, so you can switch things up as needed
- Analyzing for terms and sentiment about your customer service , with a focus on needs that aren’t being met.
- Keeping competitor activity top of mind, to learn from their successes and challenges when seeking to win the same consumers.
And so much more, from establishing your baseline to post-purchase metrics, NetBase Quid has you covered.
Rival IQ
Rival IQ is a social media analytics company that helps brands maximize their impact with competitive benchmarking, comprehensive analytics, and automated insight generation. Their intuitive software simplifies the analysis and acquisition of billions of social posts, placing social performance in context, and providing answers to the most important social media questions.
IFTTT
IFTTT stands for If This, Then That. Essentially, this automation tool can be customized to do whatever you want, and that includes helping with your social listening endeavors. It operates using ‘applets,’ which you can use to combine social media platforms with various services. And as you can choose which applets to add to your dashboard, you can curate your own DIY social listening platform. Because it isn’t a true monitoring tool, it’s not as specific, but you can keep an eye on brand mentions, keywords and hashtags.
Awario
Platforms monitored: Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, Reddit, Instagram, blogs, forums, news articles, the web.
Features: analytics dashboard, sentiment analysis, influencer search, social selling module, Boolean search.
Pricing: starting at $29 per month, $290 per year.
Free trial: two-week free trial.
Awario is one of the newer players on the market. This fact probably influences its price, making it one of the most affordable social monitoring tools out there. At the same time, it provides all the social listening power that Enterprise-level tools have.
Awario allows you to monitor the mentions of your own brand, as well as your competitors, industry buzzwords, specific campaigns, events, products, etc. Historical data will help you identify trends in your industry.
Besides reputation management, you can use it to provide immediate customer support, find linkless mentions, monitor backlinks and so on. Moreover, it offers a sophisticated search mode based on a Boolean data type, which allows you to design intricate queries to satisfy your specific monitoring needs.
What differentiates Awario from any other tool on the market is a unique social selling module called Awario Leads. It finds people who might be interested in your brand by looking for social posts which ask for recommendations or alternatives to your competitors.
Brand24
Platforms monitored: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, news articles, Youtube, podcasts, forums, blogs, the web.
Features: mentions feed, discussion volume chart, mention analytics, influencer score, sentiment analysis, alerts, data exporting, filtering
Pricing: starting at $49 per month, $492 per year.
Free trial: two-week free trial.
Brand24 lets you monitor what people are saying about you across the Internet, engage with clients and influencers, and get more customer insights than ever before —everything you need to stay ahead of the game!
The theme of their product is to make it easy for you to access enterprise-grade data in a very easy-to-understand user interface, even if you are a beginner in using social listening tools. In doing so, Brand24 allows you to quickly get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews and more.
Brand24 supports rich functionality such as automated sentiment analysis, instant alerts, automated reporting, and rich hashtag tracking functionality.
Brand24 has a very attractive price point for its functionality and should certainly be considered when choosing a social listening tool.
Brandwatch
Platforms monitored: news sites, forums, blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.
Features: Brandwatch Analytics, Brandwatch Vizia, Brandwatch Audiences, Image Insights, Boolean search.
Pricing: starting at £500 per month.
Free trial: demo on request.
Brandwatch is a tool designed with high-level professional marketing departments in mind and aims to aid big corporations. It’s one of the most multifaceted and robust listening tools in terms of social data analytics, which leads to it being one of the most expensive ones.
Besides typical social listening features, Brandwatch offers image recognition, demographic data about your audience, trending topics in your niche, API access, and dashboards that can be exported into customizable PowerPoint presentations. Moreover, to make social monitoring even easier, Brandwatch added AI which recognizes trending topics relevant to your industry without you looking through endless amounts of data.
The tool also has a separate data visualization platform called Vizia. It lets you visualize the data collected and analyzed by Brandwatch and combines it with insights from a number of several other platforms (including Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, and Hootsuite).
Mention
Platforms monitored: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, news and blogs, the web.
Features: influencer discovery, integration of the reports.
Pricing: starting at $29 per month, $300 per year.
Free trial: two-week free trial.
Mention is one of the classical social media monitoring tools from way back then. It specifically concentrates on immediate results — after putting in your keywords and setting up an alert you’ll get mentions from the last 24 hours. Historical data is available on request under the Custom Plan only.
Mention allows integration by API for users who want to customize the tool according to their needs. It gives you access to Mention’s crawler and allows you to integrate features and collected data into already existing products.
As for data visualization, Mention offers a separate dashboard where you can present data in different ways including line charts, pie charts and bar graphs. It compiles and sends out automated reports which update you on what’s happening with your alerts regularly.
Falcon
Plans: Essentials $129/mo, Full Suite Custom Pricing. 14-day free trial.
Falcon is a social media listening, publishing, advertising, measurement, and customer data management platform. Its social listening tools give a clear picture of what’s happening and who’s involved.
You can use them to identify popular topics and hashtags to follow to better design your campaigns and content. You can keep tabs on conversations taking place around your brand and products.
Falcon.io gives you much flexibility. You can track anything from brand names, topics, and keywords to phrases, refining your queries with advanced parameters. Indeed, if you have a global audience, you can track and engage wherever you have followers. In addition, you can filter extensively, accessing and viewing data by keyword, source, demographics, influencers, and content type.
Falcon offers sentiment analysis in multiple languages, marking mentions as positive, neutral, or negative to help you prioritize engagement. Users can set notifications to alert if there is a spike in specific mentions. You can react to negative publicity before it gets out of hand. To assist with this, you can set up automated reports of trending topics and mentions, sending them directly to your inbox.
With Falcon.io, you can identify influencers who interact with your topics of interest and, as a result, create strategies for collaboration and brand growth. You can also produce audiences from any social listening project – groups of people who meet specific criteria you set.
Conclusion
The amount of customer data available on social media platforms is astounding. It’s now easier than ever to work your way through the overwhelming volume of information online to find information that is relevant and useful for your business. These best social media listening tools will help you sift through the millions of social conversations happening each day to discover what people think about your business, products, services, and industry.