Social media monitoring is the act of paying attention to what is being said on social media. That is, what is being said about your brand, your campaign, your competitors, your product, trending topics, etc.
In recent years, we have come to understand that social media monitoring is your brand’s first line of defense against a potential crisis.
Also, proper social media monitoring can give you a better understanding of your audience’s wants, improve your customer service, keep tabs on your competitors and find opportunities to raise awareness.
In a world where 500 million tweets are posted every day, it’s impossible to keep track of what’s being said without some help. And this is where social media monitoring tools come into place.
Social media monitoring tools allow marketers to do the following:
- Get quality audience data
- Take relevant actions, based on the data collected, to keep or build a good reputation and drive ROI
- Save time, as all your social media analytics are available to you in one platform
But which social media monitoring tool is the best for your brand?
It can be tough to pick one — with so many enticing promises from each solution.
What you need is a resource that provides you with quality insights about each tool.
Well, look no further; here’s a guide showing you the top 21 best social media monitoring tools that are worth considering:
1. Keyhole
Brands like Google, Alibaba, L’Oreal, H&M, and Mashable, trust Keyhole’s analytics. Keyhole is a social media monitoring solution allowing you to track hashtags and keywords to monitor relevant conversations online.
Keyhole’s social analytics dashboard gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like. Look deep into your key analytics like total impressions, engagements, impressions, and posts.
Looking for a tool that allows you to tap into your customers’ minds, gives key information on your brand, and turns raw data into actionable insights that inform your strategy and accelerate critical decision-making? Then Keyhole might be exactly what you need.
Best of all?
Not only does the tool allow you to track @mentions and customer conversations across social media, blogs, and forums. It will also give you key analysis into relevant topics, sentiment analysis, demographic breakdown, and surface the top influencers in the conversation.
Also, Keyhole was designed to best position our clients to succeed, and in any business knowledge is power. This includes knowing your audience and your competitors.
With Keyhole, users can monitor all their competitors at the same time, getting key benchmarking metrics as well as competitive intelligence to help them beat the competition.
The best part is how easy Keyhole makes your life. Neil Patel describes it this way: “This tool (Keyhole) does a lot of things others can’t. And as a bonus, it’s extremely user-friendly.”
Now, on top of planning a data-driven strategy, managing your social media campaigns, influencer marketing, and social listening, you can also schedule and execute your social content strategy with Keyhole’s Social Publishing.
Pros: The data reports are comprehensive, but also simple and easy to understand. It’s an affordable tool that keeps everyone in the know about ongoing conversations, brand health, and competitor performance.
Price: Custom
2. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a social listening & analytics tool that helps you dig out relevant data from blogs, forums, as well as social media and news or review sites. Basically, this tool tells you what/how your customers talk about your brand online.
You can use Brandwatch to get an overview of your brand mentions’ volume and compare it with competitors. Also, you can monitor brand sentiment in real-time, and find out who your audience (demographic) is and what topics they are interested in.
It also provides a data visualization tool that lets you bring your data to life so you don’t have to pay for an advanced WordPress social media plugin. That is, your data can be represented in the form of graphs that make hard stats and numbers easy to understand.
Pros: A flexible, highly customizable social listening tool. The data visualization feature makes data easy to understand and share.
Cons: There is a steep learning curve in getting the software running properly. Also, the loading time is reportedly slow.
Price: Starts at $1750 per month when billed annually
3. Social Champ
Social Champ is an all-inclusive social media tool with a focus on scheduling, analytics and engagement. This tool is perfect for monitoring the performance of all your social media profiles with its extensive analytics reports.
The tool also has an analytics metric that tracks how many times your page/profile has been mentioned on a social media platform. This can be especially useful in gauging your brand’s awareness on a certain platform.
Social Champ also has some nifty features like Best-Time-to-Post recommendations which tells you when you should post on a platform to achieve the highest engagement.
Pros: Detailed analytics reports, robust scheduling tool, extensive set of features, affordable compared to the competition.
Cons: No social listening.
Price: Starts at $29 per month
4. Digimind
Digimind is an intelligence software that provides a beautiful visual representation of your brand’s social performance.
This tool also allows you to monitor your own social media posts and run competitive analysis. That is, checking how your brand and/or product stacks up against industry rivals.
The platform gives you an understanding of your brand’s online reputation, as well as relevant consumer insights.
You’re also able to access your data via Digimind’s mobile app.
Pros: Monitors thousands of internet sources to collect brand intelligence.
Cons: Users reportedly find it difficult to backtrack and find previous stats and information. Also, it can become time-consuming to go through all the posts to find relevant information.
Price: Custom
5. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is super useful for you if you’re looking for a basic monitoring solution.
It scans through the web and tells you when your brand or product gets mentioned.
You can choose which sources you want to be receiving alerts for — whether blogs, news sites, or forums — and the languages you want to get alerts for.
Pros: An easy and free-to-use mention tracking solution.
Cons: Only contains basic functionalities so it’s not the most well-rounded tool.
Price: Free
6. SocialBee
SocialBee is a robust social media management tool that not only helps businesses automate their social media content publishing, but also allows businesses to monitor their brand’s presence across various social media platforms.
The Engage Module allows users to easily view and respond to comments and mentions from their social profiles within the SocialBee app.
Users can also get valuable insights into their social media activity through the Analytics Module and track performance metrics, such as engagement rate, follower growth, and post reach.
These features help you gather information you can use to optimize your social media strategy while also streamlining your social media management and improving your online reputation.
Pros: You stay on top of your social media presence, from content creation and publishing to performance tracking and inbox monitoring.
Cons: SocialBee may not offer as many advanced features as some other social media monitoring tools.
Price: Starts at $29 per month
7. Meltwater
From tracking brand mentions to monitoring campaigns in real-time, Meltwater gives you a rundown of conversations about your brand on social media.
Meltwater’s AI engine helps you listen to relevant social media conversations, and gather historical audience data to make more informed marketing decisions.
Moreover, the platform enables you to dig deeper into your audience insights. Allowing you to discover the exact segments that are engaging in conversations related to your brand, and identify significant influencers among them.
Similar to other tools on this list, Meltwater is one of the best Hootsuite alternatives that offers a social media management functionality. It enables you to plan and schedule posts and engage with your audience via a centralized inbox.
Pros: A great tool to identify media contacts and influencers in your industry.
Cons: Pricey, especially considering the limited number of users for the cost you pay.
Price: Custom
8. Mentionlytics
Mentionlytics is a web and social media monitoring tool that can track both mentions and keywords across websites, news sites, social media, community forums, etc.
It tracks relevant information pertaining to your brand, competitors, products, etc., and presents it in a user-friendly dashboard.
The platform also uses its “Social Intelligence Advisor” to give you data-driven advice and insights. For example, the most important mentions, best posting times, and identifying trolls.
Pros: The interface is user-friendly. Speaking of friendliness, Mentionlytics’ customer service has a great reputation because of their promptness and effectiveness when responding to customer questions.
Cons: Users reported some difficulties using the keyword search, which led to getting irrelevant results.
Price: $49 – $399 per month
9. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a powerful social media tracking tool that also provides a social listening feature.
The Modern Research feature helps you gain broad, historical, and deep real-time views of global conversations, topics, and influencers driving your market – all in one place.
Like many other similar tools, this software helps you benchmark your social media performance against your competitors. Even more, they help you track crises before they arise so that you are able to make informed decisions.
Pros: Great for social listening as well as to moderate comments/messages across different social media profiles and inboxes.
Cons: Paid-ads performance has to be manually added, as it doesn’t get automatically pulled and inserted into the reports. Advanced features can get pricey.
Price: Custom
10. Mention
Mention helps you monitor online conversations and track mentions of your brand, product, industry, or campaigns.
This keeps you on top of important conversations around your business so you’re able to join in on these conversations when it matters the most.
Mention enables you to filter the conversations you want to monitor by language, source, and date. Also, you can refine your alerts by adding or removing certain keywords.
You can then, visualize your marketing data, and automate your reports to share the results with key stakeholders in your business easily.
Pros: It’s easy to set up and use to find relevant conversations and brand mentions all over the web.
Cons: Tracking campaigns can be difficult to set up without extra support from a support rep. Limited functionality for lower-tier subscribers.
Price: $49 – $179 per month
11. Reputation
From social media publishing to monitoring, Reputation takes care of it all for you.
Nuvi is a robust customer experience management solution – their Listen tool allows you to monitor more than just hashtags. It helps you monitor keywords, URLs, topics, social media handles, and more.
This tool allows you to spot trends and identify opportunities to increase your reach, as well as build better experiences for your customers.
Nuvi also gets you audience data from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Facebook, VK, Stack Overflow and an ever-updating list of 3 million+ blogs and RSS feeds.
Pros: Relatively easy to use. Good sentiment analysis with an accuracy of up to 80%.
Cons: Unable to collect and analyze historical data.
Price: Custom
12. SharedCount
SharedCount tracks popular content in your industry. Just insert a URL into the tool and it will show you how many shares the content has gotten so far.
This tool also allows you to analyze URLs in bulk and export them as CSV files.
Pros: Provides an easy way to analyze the popularity of your content through URLs.
Cons: It provides limited insights.
Price: $40 – $640 per month
Read More: 10 Reasons You Should Consider Marketing On TikTok
13. Brand24
Brand24 is another social listening tool, that makes brand reputation management simpler and easier.
This tool lets you track mentions, and even gives you a visual representation of ongoing conversations about your brand using a Discussion Volume Chart.
Like most of the top social listening tools, Brand24 allows you to dig deep into your reports to analyze sentiment to determine whether your brand was mentioned in a positive or negative context
Also, it helps identify key influencers in your industry. It makes it easy for you to join in on conversations across various channels, directly from the platform.
Pros: A user-friendly tool that simplifies social listening. Customized alerts for brand mentions make it easy to stay on top of online conversations about your brand.
Cons: It may be hard to accurately predict customer sentiment and the historical data is not very reliable.
Price: $99 – $499 per month
14. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a social analytics platform that enables you to monitor brand sentiment and oversee your overall brand health.
The Conversation Clusters feature provides you with AI-based data that lets you find hidden connections between trending conversations, discover conversation drivers, and understand the core customer needs that start and move conversations in a particular direction.
Talkwalker also gives you a 360 view of your owned and earned social media content, including your brand, product or competitor mentions offline.
You can use the tool to detect emerging themes, identify market gaps and serve more relevant content and offers to your customers.
This lets you understand the best influencers for your specific brand or product. All these help you account for what exactly comms brings to the table at your organization.
Pros: Real-time social monitoring and rich social insights.
Cons: Large amounts of data make it hard to master and prioritize what insights are important. The price is also inaccessible for many businesses, hence it is wise to opt for Talkwalker alternatives.
Price: $9600 per year
15. Awario
Awario is a web and social monitoring tool that crawls 13 billion pages every day to get important data about your audience.
These insights include the number of mentions, sentiment analysis, top influencers across different channels, and status/progress analytics.
It also offers social media customer support tools that lets you be there right when your customers need your help.
Providing you with an intelligent alert system, the tool lets you know as soon as an important conversation starts gaining traction.
This helps you prioritize customer support requests based on the impact they can have on your business.
Pros: Great for monitoring brand mentions and keeping track of online conversations. Possible to track unlinked brand mentions all over the web.
Cons: A steep learning curve. Also, the price can escalate quickly.
Price: $49 – $399 per month
16. ZoomSphere
ZoomSphere is an all-in-one social monitoring tool comprising a scheduler, workflow manager, social media analytics, reporting & benchmarking, Facebook leads manager and mentions monitoring.
The tool provides over 150 different metrics related to all the major social networks. It also provides you with competitor analysis so you can see how you rank compared to your competitors.
The tool allows you to collaborate with your team and set when and where to publish your social media posts.
Pros: Covers various social channels. Shows customer interaction history and helps you benchmark your performance.
Cons: The social listening feature doesn’t include sentiment analysis.
Price: €29- €149 per month
17. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media monitoring tool, that helps brands to better understand their audience and inform their social strategy with actionable insights.
Their social dashboard feature gives you an instant rundown of what your brand’s health looks like by showing basic analytics like total impressions, total engagements, and total link clicks.
Sprout Social’s social listening feature gives you an overview of the keywords and hashtags your audience associates your brand or product with.
It also allows you to monitor sentiment and set up alerts for when critical conversations start gaining traction on social media.
Pros: Robust analytics. And it allows you to respond to mentions/messages directly from the platform.
Cons: The standard license doesn’t include the social listening feature. You can check out other Sprout Social alternatives as well.
Price: $249 – $499 per month
18. Iconosquare
Iconosquare is a social media management, analytics & scheduling platform for Facebook and Instagram.
As most other social media management & listening tools, it gives you an overview of your stats and performance across Facebook and Instagram via a unified dashboard, helps you plan and moderate conversations across your different accounts, and enables you to schedule and publish content automatically without having to babysit your content promotion all the time.
Pros: Easy to use once it’s set up. Allows you to track certain feeds/hashtags and automate giveaway entries.
Cons: Works with Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook only. The setup process can be a pain.
Price: $49 – $79 per month
Platform-Specific Tools
19. Followersanalysis (Twitter)
Followersanalysis is a great social listening tool for brands that want to dig deeper into their Twitter audience data.
You can find out anything with this tool: from who your followers are, where they’re located and the times they mostly tweet – to the most relevant influencers in your industry or niche.
Best of all? You’ll get all the info that interests you packed in amazing social graphs that allow you to immediately see a particular profiles’s Twitter performance and identify opportunities for improvement..
Pros: Allows you to analyze your presence & your competitors’ presence on Twitter. Also, it helps you understand who your followers are, and enables you to find the most suitable influencers and estimate campaign reach.
Cons: Supports only Twitter.
Price: $39 per report
20. Audiense Connect (Twitter)
This is a tool from Audiense that provides you with detailed information about your Twitter audience. Audiense also provides a social insights platform.
From creating your own custom Twitter DM chatbots to tracking your performance on the platform, the Connect tool does a great job of helping you understand your audience.
Pros: A good tool for companies that want to enhance their Twitter marketing through real-time audience insights.
Cons: The free plan comes with very limited features. It only supports Twitter and can get expensive compared to other platforms that support different social media platforms.
Price: Free – $696 per month
Read More: Top Social Listening Tools for Marketers
21. Tailwind (Pinterest & Instagram)
Tailwind is known as the number 1 Pinterest/Instagram social scheduling tool. Aside from scheduling posts, italso allows you to discover content ideas, monitor conversations, amplify your reach, and analyze your performance on Pinterest and Instagram.
An interesting and unique feature is Tailwind Tribes, which allows you to connect with like-minded people and content. This can help you grow faster and “activate your community”.
You can also automatically optimize your posts to publish when your audience is most active on Pinterest and Instagram. More importantly, this tool provides rich analytics that helps you monitor conversations and analyze your performance.
Pros: Simple, user-friendly interface. Low learning curve.
Cons: Platform-specific. The Instagram tool is still not as developed as the one for Pinterest.
Price: $24.99 – $99.99 per month
The Final Verdict
With so many social media platforms available, it can be a nearly impossible task for marketers to measure their brand performance, without the help of third-party tools that simplify social media management & listening.
Thankfully, there are a number of social media monitoring tools that automate the process and provide analytics about your audience, brand, and campaign performance.
These tools can also allow you to keep track of trending topics, and ongoing conversations, and respond to negative sentiment in a timely manner – before things get out of hand.
So now you know which are the 21 best social media monitoring tools out there. All you need to do is pick the one that suits your marketing needs and budget.
Keyhole is a real-time conversation tracker that provides keyword + hashtag analytics and profile analytics across platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a social media monitoring tool?
A social media monitoring tool is used for tracking hashtags, keywords, mentions, etc. This is useful for hopping on to important conversations with audience that otherwise go unnoticed.
What is the best social monitoring tool?
Keyhole is one of the best social monitoring tools that is affordable and easy to use. This social media reporting & analytics tool is used by global agencies and brands like Amazon, Goggle, Spotify, etc. for branding endeavours.
What are the top social media monitoring tools?
Some of the top social media monitoring tools:
1. Keyhole
2. Hootsuite
3. Sprout Social
4. Tailwind
5. Sprinklr
