As more brands address social media for customer insights, social listening tools are gaining momentum. Here are our top-rated 6 picks for 2020.
As you know, in your personal life, reading people’s minds is a fantastic superpower, but the business benefits of having the ability to concentrate on people’s thoughts are infinite. And while social media monitoring is not exactly about reading people’s minds, it’s as on the brink of it as possible. Social listening gives you access to what folks are saying about your brand, industry, or competitors across social media and, therefore, the web – often without them being conscious of you listening. If you recognize how to word your queries and filter the results, you’ll find yourself with the first authentic, unbiased insights you’ll get as a business.
In this post, we’ll look at some of the incredible social media and web monitoring tools to assist you in gaining and acting on those insights in the coming year.
1. Awario
Affordable social listening & analytics with Enterprise-level capabilities.
Awario may be a relatively new tool that (finally!) makes social media & web monitoring affordable for businesses of any size: with plans begins at $29/mo, Awario provides tons of capabilities that you’ll find in Enterprise-level tools.
You can use the tool to watch mentions of your brand, competitors, industry, or maybe found out complex Boolean queries for the less obvious use cases. As an example, Awario allows you to detect plagiarized copies of your content, find linkless brand mentions that you simply can become links, and monitor new backlinks. The platform also provides a social selling tool, called Leads, as a free add-on to all or any users. The device uses predictive insights to seek out people posing for recommendations a few products like yours or trying to find an alternative to your competitors.
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://awario.com/” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Awario[/button]
Supported Networks:
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, news, blogs, and the web.
Benefits:
- A Boolean search mode to set-up flexible queries & improve the accuracy of the results.
- An Influencers report outlining the most influential folks talking about your brand, competitors, or industry.
- A free Leads addon for sales prospecting on social media.
- Enterprise-level analytics like sentiment analysis, location, language breakdown, & unlimited historical data are available in all plans.
Pricing:
Awario provides a free trial that lets you thoroughly test the app out. Pricing begins at $29/mo for the Starter plan, with three monitoring alerts that allow subscribers to find 30,000 new mentions per month. Awario’s most famous Pro plan costs $89/mo with ten alerts and 100,000 monthly mentions. Enterprise is $299/mo & includes 50 alerts & 500,000 mentions. If you prefer to go with an annual plan, you will get two months for free.
2. Agorapulse
Social media management & monitoring for a growing business.
If you’re almost able to invest during a standalone social listening or reputation management platform, Agorapulse is a superb 2-in-1 option: it provides both the scheduling & monitoring bits. The tool will find @mentions of accounts you also connect as comments on your social media posts, plus allow you to look for keywords of your choice across Twitter. The tool will enable you to identify influencers within your social media audience and assign conversations to your team during a click.
While Agorapulse does not offer web monitoring, it’s a great choice if you are mainly interested in social mentions.
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://www.agorapulse.com/” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Agorapulse[/button]
Supported Networks:
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
Benefits:
- The ability to tag essential mentions.
- It can assign conversations to team members.
- Audience insights that allow you to identify influencers and brand ambassadors.
- A built-in CRM that enables you to create lists of prospects and influencers.
Pricing:
Agorapulse has a free trial if you would like to test the app out first. The pricing begins at $49/mo for the Small plan, which comes with three social media profiles and a single user. Vast is their most popular option at $199/mo, with 25 profiles to manage and six users. Agorapulse’s Enterprise solution is $299/mo with 40 profiles & 12 users.
3. TweetDeck
A handy tool for managing various Twitter accounts & monitoring mentions.
TweetDeck is Twitter’s official social media dashboard that enables you to manage your Twitter presence as a business, particularly if you’ve multiple accounts that you regularly post to. The tool’s column layout allows you to add several.
“streams”: feeds from folk you follow, trending posts, direct messages, and mentions of any keywords of your preference.
For the latter, TweetDeck provides you access to Twitter’s search functionality, with the power to narrow searches down using language and site filters, negative keywords, and date ranges. You’ll then engage with mentions on behalf of any of the Twitter accounts you hook up with the app.
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://tweetdeck.twitter.com/” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Tweetdeck[/button]
Supported Networks:
Twitter.
Benefits:
- Built-in Twitter search filters, like location, language, and negative keywords.
- Twitter scheduling capabilities for multiple accounts.
- A neat column layout that allows you to keep your feeds organized.
Pricing:
Free
4. Keyhole
Real-time hashtag & keyword tracker for Twitter, Instagram, and the news.
Keyhole is another great 2-in-1 social media tool: it allows you to automate your posts and track keywords or hashtags across Twitter and Instagram. Besides, you can monitor brand mentions across blogs & news sites. The tool comes equipped with analytics, also, including sentiment analysis, keyword clouds, and mentions maps that show which countries your social mentions come from. Moreover, Keyhole’s higher-tier plans also include premium features like tracking industry influencers, unlocking historical mentions, and getting API access to Keyhole’s data.
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://keyhole.co” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Keyhole[/button]
Supported Networks:
Instagram, Twitter, news, and blogs.
Benefits:
- Social media management capabilities.
- Robust analytics, like sentiment analysis, keyword clouds, & mention maps.
- API access available in higher-tier plans.
Pricing:
Keyhole’s Basic plan costs $49/mo & comes with one keyword search & 5,000 monthly social media posts. The tool has four other programs, with the $599 Corporate option being the most popular with ten searches and 250,000 posts. And the highest-tier Enterprise plan can include a custom number of searches & posts, with pricing begins at $1,000/mo.
5. Mention
Real-time social media monitoring with data-rich, customizable reports.
Mention is another best social media and web monitoring tool. Its focus is on real-time search – fixing an alert will offer you results from the last 24 hours. Historical data is out there upon request under the Custom plans. Aside from social listening, Mention allows you to discover Twitter and Instagram influencers by running quick keyword searches. The tool then enables you to feature influencers of your option to lists, save your lists in CSV, then import them into your CRM tool. The Mention comes with data-rich reports available out of the box, but the vital power is within the Insights Center, where you’ll build your custom reports and automate delivery.
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://mention.com/en/” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Mention[/button]
Supported Networks:
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Reddit, news, and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- Tags that let you organize your mentions.
- Influencer discovery and management.
- An ability to build your custom reports & automate delivery.
- A Slack integration to send the latest mentions to your Slack channels.
Pricing:
Before settling on a plan, you can test-drive Mention with a free trial. The $29 Solo program includes two alerts and 3,000 mentions. The starter is offered at $99/mo and comes with five alerts and 5,000 mentions. There is also a Custom plan obtainable on request.
6. Brandwatch
Social media measurement & in-depth analytics for the Enterprise.
Brandwatch is one of the foremost powerful social listening tools in analytics, but it’s also one of the costlier ones. On top of the monitoring aspect, Brandwatch provides image recognition, demographic data about your audience, trending topics in your niche, API access, & dashboards, which will be exported into customizable PowerPoint presentations. Brandwatch even has its own data visualization platform called Vizia. The tool allows you to visualize your Brandwatch data and mix it with insights from several integrations (including Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, & Hootsuite).
[button color=”blue” size=”medium” link=”https://www.brandwatch.com” icon=”” target=”true” nofollow=”true”]Brandwatch[/button]
Supported Networks:
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Google+, Sina Weibo, VK, QQ, news and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- Demographic data, including gender, interests, occupation, & location of your audience.
- Image analysis that allows you to find images containing your brand’s logo.
- The capability to add preferred sites to collect mentions from.
- A possibility to identify popular topics in your industry.
Pricing:
Brandwatch is an Enterprise-level tool. Their affordable Pro plan costs $800 per month with 10,000 monthly mentions and 30 days of historical data. Custom Enterprise plans are available upon request.
Before you go
As more and more brands address social media for marketing research, customer insights, competitor analysis, and even sales, social listening tools are becoming increasingly powerful and affordable. Whichever social media listening tool you agree on, don’t forget that the monitoring itself isn’t worthwhile if you’re not getting to act on the info. Engage with the folks mentioning you on social and make use of your social listening tool’s analytics to identify trends and adapt your marketing, customer service, and merchandise strategies – before your competitors do.