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As social media is gaining traction, businesses are seeking ways to discover what’s being said about them. With a majority of the audience spending a lot of their time online, this task could have become overwhelming, if it wasn’t for social listening tools.
Social listening tools let you access what people-your customers, prospects, competitors and the audience in general-are saying about you. So, if you understand how to word your queries and filter the results, you can uncover eye-opening insights pertaining to your brand.
In this post, we will discuss 10 powerful social listening tools that will help you garner valuable insights and ace your social media game this year. So, let’s get started.
One of the most popular social listening tools, Hootsuite covers a wide range of social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, WordPress and Foursquare.
You can use Hootsuite to monitor social media conversations, keywords, mentions and hashtags related to your brand. You can respond to multiple conversations from a single dashboard; no need to visit different social media websites.
The tool comes with awesome team management capabilities that allow you to delegate tasks when there are multiple individuals handling your social media accounts.
Hootsuite lets you follow social media influencers, prospects and brand advocates-people you can contact with reputed social media agency.
Pricing: Hootsuite has a tiered pricing structure where pricing depends on the plan you have chosen. Its Professional Plan starts at 1260 INR/month, the Team Plan at 6600 INR/month and the Business Plan at 45,000 INR/month. Hootsuite offers custom solutions for enterprises that have a unique pricing structure.
Agorapulse is another powerful social listening tool that allows you to monitor conversations around your brand on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Equipped with a clean and straightforward interface, the tool lets you set up suitable parameters for listening to conversations revolving around your brand. You can use Boolean operators like ‘NOT’ to narrow down your social media searches. You can also add location and language parameters to your searches for further refining them.
AgoraPulse also allows you to assign conversations to team members or clients so that they can take appropriate action. You can click on a conversation and like, tweet or reply from the dashboard itself. You can even identify social influencers and brand ambassadors relevant to your brand.
A built-in CRM allows you to create a list of prospects and influencers.
Pricing: Agorapulse offers a free trial wherein you have to pay at the end of the period. Their medium plan recommended for small businesses starts at $79/month. Their most popular plan Large costs $159/month while the X-large plan costs $239/month. For large teams, they recommend the Enterprise plan that starts at $399/month.
Mention is both a social media and web monitoring tool that focusses on real-time search. On setting up an alert, you will get results for the last 24 hours. Anything older than that can be made available on request.
Mention allows you to discover social influencers on Twitter and Instagram through appropriate keyword searches. You can add influencers of your choice to lists, save these lists in the form of a CSV file and import it to your CRM tool.
A distinctive feature of the tool is its Insights Center that lets you build customized reports and automate delivery.
Pricing: Mention offers a free plan that lets you tests the tool using limited features. Its paid plans start from $25/ month and go up to $450/month. Its most popular plan, Pro costs $83/month.
TweetDeck is a free social media dashboard from Twitter that allows you to manage your Twitter presence, especially if you run multiple accounts.
The tool lets you access Twitter’s search functionality and helps you refine searches using parameters like location, language, date range and negative keywords.
TweetDeck offers a neat column-based layout that keeps your feeds organized. It is a great option for beginners as it covers your basic needs as a Twitter user.
Pricing: Free
Buzzsumo is chiefly a content analysis tool that can be used for social listening as well.
It lets you search the web for any content that includes your targeted keywords. The tool does not just give you the search result; it also gives you the amount of engagement with each result.
For instance, if you set up a search for your brand name, the tool will find all the online mentions of your brand name including how many times people liked, commented on or shared posts containing your brand name.
A unique feature of this tool is its alerts feature that lets you create alerts to track brand mentions, competitor mentions, website content, keyword mentions and backlinks. You can tailor these alerts to suit your needs.
Pricing: Buzzsumo has plans ranging from $99/month to $499+/month. You can pay for these plans either monthly or annually. You can switch plans at any time after or during the trial.
Awario is another powerful social listening tool that allows you to find mentions of your brand on different networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, blogs, forums, news sites or any other webpage.
A relatively new tool, Awario makes social media monitoring affordable for small businesses. It provides users with lots of capabilities that are normally found in enterprise-level tools.
You can use it to search terms related to your brand, competitors and industry. You can refine your searches using Boolean queries.
You can also use the tool to find out plagiarized copies of your content and identify backlinks to your website.
A distinctive feature of Awario is its social selling tool Leads that’s offered for free to all users. Using this tool, you can find people who are looking for recommendations on a product similar to yours. This way you can identify and reach out to prospective customers well in time.
Pricing: Pricing for Awario starts at $29/ month for the Starter plan that includes Boolean search, 30,000 alerts/month and 5,000 stored mentions per alert. Their Pro plan costs $89/month and includes 150,000 new mentions/month, 15,000 stored mentions per alert, data export and shareable reports.
Their Enterprise plan starts at $299/month and comes with 500000 new mentions/month, 50,000 stored mentions per alert, white-label reports and account manager.
Keyhole is a robust social listening tool that lets you monitor keywords and hashtags on Twitter, Instagram, news and blogs. The tool comes with powerful analytical capabilities -you can use the tool for sentiment analysis, keyword clouds and mention maps that show the countries where you find social mentions.
In addition, the higher-tier versions of the tool provide users with features like API access to data, tracking social influencers and historical mentions.
Pricing: Keyhole’s Basic Plan costs $29/month and is suited for small organizations and agencies. Their most popular plan, the Corporate plan is for mid-sized organizations and costs $99/month. Their Enterprise Suite starts from $999/month and offers a range of premium features such as custom trackers, advanced influencer management, historical data and priority support.
Synthesio is a social listening tool that offers brands with valuable insights on their online presence. It offers advanced sentiment analysis in more than 20 languages.
Synthesio has a customizable dashboard that displays social mentions of your brand from multiple streams. These social mentions include information about the tone and author of the posts.
Using these dashboards, you can monitor likes, views, replies and shares from multiple networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Pricing: Not available on their website.
Brand24 is a social listening tool that offers in-depth insights on who all are talking about your brand. Its dashboard shows a mentions feed where you can not only track mentions of your brand but also find if these mentions were positive, negative or neutral in sentiment. You can also take action on these mentions in real-time.
Brands24 provides you with a Discussion Volume Chart that helps you track any increase or decrease in brand mentions over a period of time. The tool lets you identify the influencers in your niche, thereby helping you connect with the right people in your industry.
Pricing: Brand24 allows a free 14-day trial with no hidden charges. Its paid plans include Plus plan at $49/month, Premium plan at $99/month and Max plan at $199/month.
Sprout Social is a social media management and social listening platform that comes with robust CRM and team collaboration tools. For this reason, it’s easy to use when you are working with a team.
Sprout Social has an intuitive dashboard that offers suggestions on what you should do next. Its social listening feature allows you to monitor mentions of your brand, competitors or select keywords. Its Query Builder lets you frame complex Boolean queries to refine your searches.
A salient feature of Sprout Social is its Smart Inbox. This Inbox allows you to filter your messages based on their keywords and hashtags. You can reply to these messages, repost them, like them, etc. without leaving the dashboard.
Pricing: Sprout Social’s pricing starts at $99 per user/month for the Standard plan. Its Professional plan costs $149 per user/month while the Advanced plan costs $249 per user/month.
So, which of these social listening tools do you plan to use in the coming months? Please scribble in the comment section below. Thanks for reading.
