This list of best tools for social media listening will help you monitor, grow, and engage in conversations on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Google+, Instagram and blogs.
Looking for social media monitoring companies or social listening tools? This post is for you! I’ve put together an overveiw of the most important aspects to focus on when examining social media listening platforms and tools.
HubSpot Social Media Management Software
Price: $890/month+
With HubSpot, you have the power to easily monitor interactions, conversations, and audiences on social media. You also have the necessary tools to manage day-to-day interactions and engagement on social and target specific audiences using context from the contacts database in your free CRM to better understand what these people mean to your business.
What does that mean for you — the user? You can manage your entire social strategy — from planning to sharing to analyzing — from one, central location.
You can handle all of your social accounts from the tool as well as easily turn your content offers into social posts. With HubSpot, you don’t need to worry about logging into your social profiles to post content — rather, you can schedule posts weeks in advance on all of your profiles from within the tool to free up valuable time.
You can also post to social from anywhere — whether you’re in HubSpot, on a specific social platform, or on another social tool that you connected to HubSpot. And how you post won’t ever affect your ability to report on the success of those posts.
Don’t worry about having to open specific platforms to converse with your audience either — instead, reply to anyone who commented on posts you published through HubSpot.
Lastly, on Twitter specifically, HubSpot helps you stay up to date on what’s current and trending by monitoring specific keywords you deem as important to your brand — this way, you never miss a beat when it comes to the things that matter most to your business and audience.
HubSpot Features and Compatibility
- Prioritize social engagement.
- Integrate your social tool — which comes with Marketing Hub Professional — with your Contacts Database and CRM.
- Schedule social posts in advance, cross-platform.
- Report on your video strategy with YouTube reporting if you’re an Enterprise user.
- Manage social profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn from one tool.
Sprout Social
Price: $89/per user/month+
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management platform that provides powerful solutions for social listening and analytics, customer care, and employee advocacy.
Sprout Social Features and Compatibility
- Monitor and manage engagement across social networks in the unified Smart Inbox.
- Map out a content strategy and schedule posts with the Publishing tool.
- Uncover trends in social conversations, learn about your audience, and gain actionable insights to inform your marketing strategy with the integrated social listening tool.
- Integrate Sprout Social with your HubSpot software to collect accurate social reports all in one place.
Hootsuite
You may not be surprised to learn that we think Hootsuite is one of the best free social listening tools out there. You can use Hootsuite to set up social media streams that monitor conversations, keywords, mentions, and hashtags.
You can monitor and respond to conversations or mentions immediately from one dashboard—instead of logging in and out of various social platforms.
Hootsuite also allows you to keep an ear to the ground in your industry by monitoring the competition and building relationships with social media creators (a.k.a. influencers) and potential brand advocates.
Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch
Hootsuite Insights goes even further and gives you data from 16 billion new social posts every month, added in real-time. Boolean search logic can help you find meaningful trends and patterns you might miss by monitoring keywords and hashtags alone. You can then filter your searches by date, demographics, and location to find the conversations most relevant to you.
Hootsuite Insights also makes it easy to track brand sentiment with intuitive word clouds and meters that gauge your sentiment and brand awareness against the competition.
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.
Brand24
Plans: Plus $49/month, Premium $99/month, Max $199/month. 14-day free trial.
Brand24 provides you with social insights into what people say online about your brand. Unlike some of its competitors, Brand24 targets businesses of all sizes, with a $49/month package for small or new businesses.
It shows you a mentions feed, where you can discover what people say about your brand and take action in real time. You can join in and engage in discussions directly from Brand24.
It shows you a Discussion Volume Chart, graphically depicting your brand’s mentions, so you can easily see any surges in brand mentions, and discover if there is a problem. Indeed, it provides full mention analytics, giving you a better understanding of who is talking about your brand online.
Brand24 has developed their own Influencer Score, to help pinpoint your industry influencers, so you can begin making contact with the people that matter in your niche.
It also includes sentiment analysis – not only can you see mentions of your brand, but it gives an indication of whether these mentions were positive, negative, or neutral in tone.
Conclusion
The first step in social media monitoring is selecting the most appropriate tools for your needs. This post explores some of the top social media monitoring companies, explains key terminology and highlights some of the most frequently used listening tools.