7 Best Social Listening Tools for Growing Business

Social media has revolutionized the way brands connect with consumers. With 4.62 billion active social media users worldwide, these platforms have become the digital hub where people express opinions, share experiences, and influence purchase decisions.

For businesses, social listening is no longer just a nice-to-have. It‘s a must-have competitive advantage.

Social listening provides incredible consumer insights that can directly strengthen your marketing strategies and growth. In fact, 92% of marketers say social listening has improved their business decisions and goals.

But what exactly does social listening entail? And how can you get started picking the right tools?

In this comprehensive guide, I‘ll share:

A data-driven analysis of the top 7 social listening tools
Key metrics and considerations for evaluating each platform
Real-world examples and use cases of social analytics in action
Expert tips to maximize your listening capabilities

By the end, you‘ll have the knowledge to take your social listening and competitive intelligence to the next level. Let‘s dive in!

Before jumping into the tools, it‘s important to level-set on what social listening is and why it‘s valuable in today‘s digital landscape.

Social listening refers to monitoring and analyzing conversations happening about a brand, keywords, products, competitors, or industry across social media and the wider web.

It provides powerful consumer and competitive insights you simply can‘t gather on your owned channels alone.

Here are some key reasons social listening should be part of your strategy:

Listen to Your Customers

Hear the voice of your customer – Social conversations provide candid, unfiltered feedback you won‘t find in surveys or focus groups. Listen beyond your owned channels to tap into the broader social web.
Identify opportunities – Spot customer pain points, desired features, or gaps in your market from social discussions. Then build products and services to meet these needs.
Improve customer service – Monitoring social conversations allows you to proactively address issues before they escalate. You can also better understand FAQs to improve help content.

Optimize Marketing

Plan campaigns – Use trending topics and conversation patterns to ideate and create relevant social campaigns that resonate.
Benchmark performance – Track engagement metrics around campaigns like impressions, reach, clicks to continuously improve.
Monitor influencers – Identify key partners who can amplify your message to the right audiences.

Increase Competitive Advantage

Track competitors – Listen to their social strategy, engagement levels, product launches and more to stay on the cutting edge.
Conduct market research – Identify "white space" opportunities where competitors may be missing the mark. Spot emerging trends in your industry faster.
Benchmark your brand – Compare your share of voice and sentiment versus competitors to better position your brand in the market.

The data and insights uncovered from social listening can help strengthen every area of your business from marketing to product development and customer experience.

Many tools claim to offer social "monitoring" but have limited listening capabilities. So what exactly is the difference?

Social media monitoring focuses on tracking your owned social media channels – your website, blogs, social profiles, etc. The goal is to manage inbound inquiries and comments that require a response.

Social listening takes a much wider view of the entire social web including public online conversations on open networks like Twitter, Reddit, forums, blogs, news and more. It allows you to learn from conversations happening about your brand and industry overall – even those beyond your owned domains.

While monitoring and listening are complementary, I always emphasize to clients not to confuse the two. Robust social listening provides a holistic pulse on your brand, competitors, campaigns, and market – critical business intelligence you simply won‘t get from monitoring owned channels alone.

Now let‘s explore some leading tools purpose-built for social listening. I‘ve compiled key metrics to help compare capabilities.

Tool	Starting Price	Number of Sources	Alerts	Sentiment Analysis	Competitive Benchmarking
Sprout Social	$99/mo	30+ networks	✅	✅	✅
Brand24	$49/mo	25M+ sources	✅	✅	✅
Mention	$29/mo	1B+ sources	✅	✅	✅
Zoho Social	$15/mo	Major networks	✅	✅	✅
BrandMentions	$29/mo	Web, social, news	✅	✅	✅
Keyhole	Custom quote	Millions of sources	✅	✅	✅
Reputation	Custom quote	Major networks	✅	✅	✅

These represent some of the top dedicated social listening tools available based on data sources, features, and enterprise adoption. Let‘s explore each in more depth.

Sprout Social is an established leader in social media management, with robust analytics capabilities. Their platform monitors over 30 major networks including Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, and more.

I like Sprout Social for large brands who want an integrated solution for publishing, engaging, and listening. Some of their key social analytics features include:

Custom listening streams to track different topics, keywords, hashtags,handles, etc.
Prioritization by tags and folders so you never miss important brand mentions
Real-time alerts when VIP topics or handles are detected
Audience analysis to understand follower demographics, interests, and behavior
Competitive benchmarking to compare performance metrics
Sentiment analysis to detect positive, negative, or neutral conversations
Integration with Google Analytics and CRM platforms like Salesforce and Zendesk to enrich data
Scheduled listening reports delivered by email

One D2C fashion retailer client tracks over 1,500 brand and product terms with Sprout Social. When a spike in negative reviews around fit for a new dress emerged, they quickly identified the root cause and improved sizing guidance – before returns escalated.

Sprout Social starts at $99/mo for their Standard plan. It‘s best suited for medium to large brands who want an integrated platform with engagement, analytics, and reporting. For SMBs who just need listening, the cost may be prohibitive.

2. Brand24

Brand24 is a social listening veteran, launched in 2011. Their tool tracks brand mentions across the social web including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blogs, forums, news sites and more. With over 25 million online sources covered in 100+ languages, Brand24 provides extensive reach.

I recommend Brand24 for its ease of use and purpose-built focus on listening. Key capabilities include:

Monitoring your brand name, product names, keywords, competitors
Real-time customizable alerts when your terms are mentioned
Sentiment analysis to categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral
Tracking brand share of voice and awareness metrics versus competitors
Integrated image monitoring and analytics
Scheduled email reports as PDFs or Excel
Affordable pricing starting at $49/mo

One automotive client uses Brand24 to monitor all brand and model mentions across vehicle forums and Q&A sites. They uncovered an emerging issue with their new EV model‘s charging time and range. By quickly addressing consumer complaints, they minimized negative brand impact.

Brand24 is a cost-effective solution for SMBs who want easy setup and reporting. The tool focuses specifically on listening vs. social engagement.

3. Mention

Mention is another long-standing social listening tool, founded in 2012. They monitor over a billion online sources across 42 languages.

Mention makes it simple to track brand, product, and keyword mentions in real-time. Useful features include:

Custom alerts when your keywords are detected
Analysis of brand sentiment and perceptions over time
Competitive benchmarking to compare against other brands
Tracking influencer profiles and campaign hashtags
Image monitoring to detect logo and visual content use
Scheduled and on-demand reports on metrics
Pricing starts at $29/mo for SMBs

I like Mention for their focus on listening metrics versus social engagement features. Their real-time alert dashboard makes it easy to stay on top of brand mentions and respond quickly.

One retail client uses Mention to monitor product and SKU mentions across reviews. They gained early signals around fit and quality issues on 2 new clothing lines before inventory scaled up.

Mention is best for startups and SMBs who want an affordable, dedicated listening tool with plug-and-play setup.

Zoho Social offers an integrated social media management and monitoring platform.

For social listening, Zoho Social can track:

Brand, product and keyword mentions
Competitor keywords and profiles
Relevant hashtags, URLs and trending topics
Campaign performance
Influencer content and conversations

You can analyze the listening data to see sentiment, share of voice, follower interests and engagement. Their dashboards make it easy to visualize key social metrics.

Some other Zoho Social strengths:

Affordable pricing starting at $15/mo
Real-time listening alerts
Audience analysis for follower demographics and interests
Competitive benchmarking
Built-in publishing and engagement

I recommend Zoho Social for SMBs who want an integrated platform to manage, listen, and engage – at a reasonable price. It covers the end-to-end workflow nicely.

One software company client uses Zoho to monitor competitors‘ launch announcements and product updates on social media and news. This allows them to rapidly respond with competitive content and messaging.

5. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a targeted social listening tool focused on brand, keyword, and competitor tracking.

They monitor millions of online sources including social networks, news, media, forums, and blogs. I like BrandMentions for their listening precision across both social and web.

Notable features:

Customizable real-time alerts based on brand, product, competitor mentions
Sentiment analysis to detect positive, negative, neutral perception
Tracking share of voice against competitors
Influencer analytics by topic and content type
Integrated image detection to analyze visual brand content
Automated scheduled reports
Pricing starts at $29/mo

BrandMentions is purpose-built for listening making it easy to setup and act on data. One ecommerce company uses it to monitor product reviews across Reddit, specialty forums and Amazon. They uncovered serious customer dissatisfaction around a new checkout experience and quickly iterated based on feedback.

I suggest BrandMentions for startups and direct-to-consumer brands who want cost effective but powerful listening capabilities.

6. Keyhole

Keyhole provides an enterprise-level listening and analytics platform for large brands.

Keyhole is highly customizable – clients can request demo datasets to model the software against their unique needs.

Some of the platform‘s more advanced capabilities include:

Historical volume analysis to predict future spikes
Natural language processing for deeper text analysis
Filter conversations by demographics, psychographics, purchase intent
Integrate listening data with marketing automation platforms
Competitive benchmarking and side-by-side tracking
Custom reporting with data exports
Pricing based on custom quote

A food delivery service client uses Keyhole to analyze trending food hashtags and conversations around new menu launches. This provides an early gauge on which new items are resonating or need improvement.

Keyhole is best suited for large brands who want enterprise-grade listening power. The platform warrants a demo to experience the customization.

7. Reputation

Reputation provides an integrated platform for social media management, engagement, analytics and reporting.

Their social listening capabilities include:

Monitoring keywords, brands, hashtags
Real-time and scheduled mention reports
Sentiment scoring to detect brand perception
Competitive benchmarking
Conversation analysis by demographics
Integrations with business software like Salesforce, Slack, Tableau

I suggest Reputation for enterprise brands in highly-regulated industries like finance and healthcare where reputation management is critical. Their team has expertise specifically in regulated spaces.

Pricing is customized based on number of profiles, locations, and reviewers. They offer 24/7 support and services like PR crisis assistance which appeals to large brands.

Key Evaluation Criteria

As you assess social listening tools, I recommend looking at these key factors:

Sources and Reach – The more sources of data the better – social networks, news, web, forums, etc. Look for tools that cover millions of sources to capture more conversations.

Real-Time Alerting – Alerts when your brand, product, or campaign is mentioned allows you to respond rapidly.

Sentiment Analysis – Critical to categorize social conversations as positive, negative or neutral towards your brand. Prioritize tools with accurate natural language processing.

Competitive Benchmarking – Compare your metrics and share of voice against competitors and industry.

Customization – Tailor keywords, sources, reports, tags, and alerts to your business goals.

Integrations – Ability to connect with your other marketing, sales and support software.

User Experience – Intuitive interfaces to easily interpret listening data for action.

Budget – Some offer free trials. Pricing varies based on included sources, features, and targeting of SMBs vs. enterprises.

Here are my top recommendations for making the most of social listening based on proven results with clients:

Combine listening with engagement – Don‘t just listen, engage your followers and customers in conversation. Direct message users who express issues to provide support. Reply to relevant mentions sharing your perspective. Listening informs better engagement.

Listen to competitors – Monitoring competitors is one of the most useful applications of social listening. Pay attention to their product launches, campaigns, engagement levels, promotions and more. This provides an incredible market intel advantage.

Go beyond social networks – Activate monitoring for news, industry forums, review sites. This wider net provides more holistic insights.

Create alerts for important topics – Be proactive by setting up real-time alerts for your brand, executives, products, big campaigns. Never miss critical brand mentions.

Analyze periodically – Schedule weekly or monthly reporting to analyze metrics over time – share of voice, sentiment, competitors. Spot trends.

Share insights across teams – Collaborate with colleagues in sales, customer success, product on your listening initiatives. The insights can benefit the whole company.

Listen to the voice of the customer – Social data provides candid opinions and feedback you won‘t find anywhere else. Use it to directly improve products and experiences.

Turn listening into action – Analyzing conversations is just the first step. Develop processes to act on insights – address customer issues, capitalize on opportunities, optimize campaigns.

Start Tuning Into Your Market

With the explosion of social media, forums, and review content, social listening is more valuable than ever. These tools empower you to tap into rich consumer conversations, track competitors, identify influencers and optimize your marketing strategy.

But remember – technology alone is not enough. To maximize business impact, it‘s critical to have sound processes for actually acting on the insights uncovered through social listening.

Hopefully this guide has provided a helpful starting point for evaluating tools and applying listening across your organization. The brands achieving real competitive advantage today are the ones who are truly listening to their market and customers.

Now it‘s your turn. Grab a free trial of a couple tools that align to your business goals. Set up some initial alerts and reporting. Then expand from there based on the value you uncover.

Here‘s to more insightful listening! Let me know if you have any other questions.

Why Every Business Needs Social Listening

Listen to Your Customers

Optimize Marketing

Increase Competitive Advantage

Social Listening vs. Social Media Monitoring

1. Sprout Social