Social media listening is a really useful tool to have in your toolbox. But with so many social media listening tools out there, it can be hard to figure out which ones are the best. Hopefully you will find my list helpful and you’ll find exactly what you need
The social media landscape is ever-changing. For those of us who are keenly interested in staying on top of the market, keeping up to date can seem like a full-time job. A number of tools have been developed to help us with this process. These tools are known as social media listening platforms or listening tools. While this blog post isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, it’s a good place to start before you begin your search for the right tool for you.
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.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an easy-to-use, all-in-one social media listening tool that’s equipped with practical and powerful features. It offers a unified social inbox, which lets you manage all your messages, comments, and reviews in one place. It also has intuitive publishing, which lets you plan and integrate content for all your social media channels, social listening capabilities, and access to insightful analytics.
PRICE:
While it offers a free plan, Agorapulse’s paid plans start at $79 per month (when billed annually) for Pro, followed by the Premium plan at $159 a month, and Enterprise (price available upon request), which is for companies that want flexibility and full control.
PROS:
- With add-on features for customization
- Shared calendars for collaboration
- Resources for free social media marketing tools
CONS:
- Paid Pro plan has no access to team reports and shared calendars
- No Google My Business or Pinterest integration
Sprout Social
One of the most well-known social media listening tools, Sprout Social enables teams and organizations to uncover trends and gain insights from social data. Its capabilities, which include listening, publishing, engagement, and analytics features, let you optimize your operations across different areas of your organization.
Sprout Social’s social media management and software solutions can help you make informed brand and business strategies, as well as more strategic decision-making processes. Its core features include audience analysis, consumer research, influencer recognition, campaign analysis, and competitor comparison.
PRICE:
Sprout Social’s Standard plan starts at $89 per user per month and is equipped with tools, such as a social content calendar and an all-in-one social inbox, to help you get started. The Professional plan costs $149 per user per month, while the Advanced plan goes for $249 a month per user when billed annually.
PROS:
- User-friendly platform with seamless network and business integrations
- Premium solutions, such as premium analytics and employee advocacy, can be added to any plan of your choosing
CONS:
- No free plan
- Increased costs when adding a new user, as plans are charged on a “per user per month” basis
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.
Buffer
Price: Free+
Buffer creates an omnichannel experience for your social media and community teams.
The tool makes it easy to find the conversations that matter most, join conversations right away, and delight your audience — that’s because you can post content and engage directly in the replies from one centralized dashboard through a team-shared inbox.
Buffer Features and Compatibility
- Plan effective social campaigns using the scheduling and publishing features.
- Monitor your team’s performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior with the reports and analytics tools.
- Use the story monitoring feature to record and analyze your stories on channels like Facebook and Instagram.
- Integrate social platforms that Buffer supports including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Conclusion:
If you want to get the most out of social media, you’ll want to know what it’s saying about your company. Social listening is the latest way to build deeper, more authentic relationships with customers and prospects while capturing valuable data, like where they talk and what they talk about. Plus, social media listening can improve your organic search strategy by producing targeted content that’s relevant to a brand’s online reputation or presence.