Top 10 Social Listening Tools to Ace Brand Monitoring in 2022

Have you ever thought that your customers want to be heard? Brands must build a solid reputation and follow social media to attend the brand awareness that they desire. Social listening is the monitoring of your brand’s social media channels for any customer feedback and direct mentions of your brands and topics regarding specific keywords.

Social media is the hub for all kinds of marketers. Your target audience is on social media and social media is flourishing all set to lead the global market with a 15% annual growth to 2024 (Zenith report).

According to a report by Business Insider social media ad spends are all set to reach $177 billion in 2022, overtaking television at $174 billion.

In this blog, we will tell you about the tools that will help you pay attention to what others say about your business, product, or competitors online and then analyze the results to understand why they are making those remarks. These tools will help you get a competitive edge as you fuel your brand monitoring endeavors strategically.

Social listening is both an art and a science. For brands social listening is all about defining their vision, the personality of their brands, shaping the narrative, and staying on the message to make their target audience groups feel absorbed and listened to. There needs to be enough weightage on what you project and not what you absorb and that’s where the credibility and value of a brand and its projects are reflected.

Learn More – The Philosophy of Social Listening

An important advantage of social listening is that it allows marketers to do things beyond the usual stuff that they love doing. The marketers can tap into the sentiments about them on the social media channels and can accordingly revamp their social media marketing (SMM) strategies.

Daymond John, CEO of FUBU and the Shark Group describes the importance of social listening as follows:

“The first thing that you can do with social media is to find out and understand why people like or dislike your brand … you actually get to see the reality of what people think about you.”

With social media, the customers can easily spread their praises or can make you appear like an incompetent demon. It’s always good to know what others are saying about you on social media channels so that you not just can react but respond after doing the necessary tweaks with your social media marketing (SMM) strategies.

Learn More –How to Create an Effective Social Media Content Strategy

Here’s a list of the top 10 social media listening tools for 2022 to help you discover your social media mentions, irrespective of the size or level of your competition:

1. Falcon

This platform facilitates social media listening, publishing, advertising, measurement, and customer data management. The platform offers a social listening tool that gives a clear insight into what’s happening and who’s involved.

The essentials start at $129/month which comes with a 14-day free trial.

Social media listening tools from Falcon.io give marketers much flexibility and allow them to identify brand names, topics, and keywords to phrases, refining your queries with advanced parameters. For the brands having a global audience, one can keep a track record of and engage with their target audience groups as and when required. Marketers can also filter data extensively, accessing and viewing data by keyword, source, demographics, influencers, and content type.

Falcon offers sentiment analysis in multiple languages, making mentions as positive, neutral, or negative to help marketers prioritize engagement. The end-users can also set notifications to alert if there is a spike in specific mentions. Marketers can also react to negative publicity before it gets out of control. Marketers can set up automated reports of trending topics and mentions, sending the messages directly to their inboxes.

Falcon.io allows influencers to identify the target audience who interact with the topics of their interest and as a result, allows them to create strategies for collaboration and brand growth. Marketers can also produce audiences from any social listening project, i.e. the groups of people who meet the specific criteria you set.

2. Brand 24

This tool provides you with social insights into what people say online about your brand. Unlike some of its competitors, Brand 24 targets businesses of all sizes and the basic package for small or new businesses starts at $49/month.

Plans: Plus $49/month, Premium $99/month, Max $199/month. The tool comes with a 14-day free trial.

The mentions feed allows you to discover what people say about your brand and take action in real-time. Marketers can join in and engage in discussions directly from Brand24.

A Discussion Volume Chart graphically depicts your brand’s mentions so that the marketers can easily see any surges in brand mentions. Marketers must discover if there’s any problem that exists. The tool provides a wide array of mention analytics, allowing you to better understand who is talking about your brand online and what those talks are.

Brand24 has developed its own influencer Score to help pinpoint the influencers of your industry. Being in touch with influencers allows marketers to stay in touch with people who matter the most in your niche.

The tool also facilitates sentiment analysis and allows marketers to track the mentions of their brands. Also, the marketers can deduce whether the mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.

3. AgoraPulse

Plans: Medium $99/month, Large $199/month, X-Large $299/month, Enterprise $499/month

Agora Pulse is a highly professional social media management app that includes social listening features.

The tool has an extremely clear and straightforward interface.

Marketers can easily set up relevant brand-listening parameters that allow marketers to listen to relevant conversations about their brands, Marketers can further refine their YouTube and Twitter searches by including words that aren’t included in their saved searches. Boolean operators allow marketers to hone in on only what they want to listen to. Marketers can also add location and/or language parameters to their Twitter searches if they wish to be even more specific.

Agora Pulse also helps marketers to act proactively on what they hear. They can click on a monitoring item and can like, retweet, reply or reply in DM/PM. This functionality is even more critical and allows marketers to label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client so that they can act accordingly.

4. YouScan

Unlike most of the social media listening tools, that offer more searches for higher plans, YouScan provides a consistent number of five searches in all its plans. Each search topic can be detailed, with ways to include and execute a variety of factors (like keywords and hashtags) and apply rules to them.

Plans: Standard $500 per topic per month, Pro $750 per 5 topics per month, Insight $1500 per 5 topics per month, Ultra $5000 per 5 topics per month

One can enter search queries using Boolean operators. There are only a handful of operators to learn, and they all make perfect sense. Many marketers need to first have to upskill their Boolean logic before they might get started.

Once the parameters of a search have been set, YouScan will build a page showing all the mentions the platform has collected matching your specific requirements. An incredibly important AI engine powers image recognition. The tool can help marketers find detailed demographic and psychographic information about the people who wish to connect with a brand.

YouScan can be used to find mentions of your brand by the most influential people and then see which of these has the most engaged audiences. It has Smart Alerts which can be set to notify you whenever it “seems” negative sentiment about your brand. You can even integrate their complaints directly into your Helpdesk system.

5. Digimind

Plans: Contact Digimind for pricing. Prices are based on estimates of total monthly mentions with unlimited queries/topics and of the total number of queries required per year with unlimited mentions. Demos are available on request.

Digimind provides all the content one needs to make sense of social and online data and transform it into actionable business insights. It offers two products: Social Listening and Market Intelligence. Both are impressive tools with a wide range of features.

With Digimind’s social listening tools, one can:

• Monitor specific terms and topics
• Analyze mentions
• Share content and engage audiences
• Generate reports
• Measure ROI for owned media (paid and organic)
• Leverage search data for reputational management

Digimind’s tools enable one to see the conversations that matter the most for your brand, in real-time, across millions of online sources. Marketers can gain valuable insights that they can use to drive and improve your marketing strategy.

Marketers can analyze and benchmark an unlimited number of social accounts simultaneously with Digimind Social Analytics. However, marketers can go beyond social networks to see their brand based on Google search behavior. With Digimind’s Top Reputation module one can follow what your customers want to know about you and their competitor brands, products, people, and more, all in real-time.

6. BrandMentions

BrandMentions searches virtually every section of the internet to find all relevant mentions about any of their clients (or any other that interests them).

Brands can use it to monitor everything that is being said about their company or product on all the channels that matter, be it web or social media.

Plans: New Business $49/month, Growing Business $79/month, Company $299/month. The tool offers a 14-day free trial.

BrandMentions covers all the essential channels where people talk about brands. It offers comprehensive sentiment analysis, finding out the tone of the conversations.

You can also use BrandMentions to spy on your competitors. One can use it to reveal your competitors’ marketing strategies. Indeed with the help of this tool marketers can quickly research and gain insights on any brand or any topic from any market.

7. BuzzSumo

Buzzsumo is primarily a content analysis tool that acts as a social media listening tool. Buzzsumo allows marketers to comb the web for any content that includes your search term. Buzzsumo doesn’t just give you search results, it also allows you to look for an ample amount of engagement associated with each search result. For example, those who set up the search for their organization find its online mentions. However, to be successful marketers must figure out what is being written about them including what is negative or deteriorative being talked of about them as well. Using BuzzSumo, marketers can come to know the number of times their articles have been shared on several social media platforms or how many times they have been talked about. So, even if there’s some breakdown it can be handled well in time.

Plans: Pro $79/month, Plus $139/month, Large $239/month, Enterprise $499/month

This content analysis cum social media tool provides engagement features for Facebook, Pinterest, and Reddit. The tool also provides the total number of links that each search has received.

Buzzsumo provides a useful alerts feature that allows marketers to create alerts to track brand mentions, competitor mentions, content from a website, keyword mentions, backlinks, or an author. Marketers can also set parameters for their alerts to tailor them to your needs.

8. Sprout Social

Sprout social is a high-end professional social media management app. Most of the app features relate to social media management and optimization. Sprout Social provides you with an immensely attractive social media management and optimization feature and also includes social CRM tools. This is an excellent tool to work with and excel with a team.

Every time a user enters Sprout Social, they are presented with a Dashboard, that offers them suggestions of what they should be doing up next.

Plans: Standard $99/user/month, Professional $149/user/month, advanced $249/user/month

Sprout Social comes with a dashboard that offers marketers suggestions of what they should do next. Amongst the most user-friendly features of Sprout Social is its unified Smart Inbox. One can reply to his messages, retweet/repost or repin content, like items, etc., all from within Sprout Social. One can group all of their messages in any way they desire. One can also filter their inbox multiple ways including the keywords and hashtags.

The social listening feature of Sprout Social works similar to the Smart Inbox and one can track the mentions of his brand, their competitors, or selected keywords. One can also quickly build complex queries, using Boolean phrases in the Query Builder. They can make their queries visual and obvious. Marketers can even refine their searches to ensure that most of the mentions that they get are genuinely about their firms.

9. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is amongst the best-known social media management platforms. Social listening is not part of their well-known Hootsuite platform. However, Hootsuite has a separate product called Hootsuite Insights for social listening.

Hootsuite Insights Comes With a Custom Pricing

Hootsuite Insights allows marketers to gauge the social sentiment around their brand. One can easily filter results by location, language, or gender – for a multi-dimensional view of their market segments. One can spot a trend in a specific segment. So one would know even if someone is badmouthing about his brand in a foreign language or praising him in a foreign language.

One even isn’t limited to the social channels of his brand. Hootsuite Insights allows marketers to tap into the conversations happening on news sites, blogs, forums, and other public places. Indeed with the help of Hootsuite Insights, one can access real-time data from over 100 million sources. This data is available in more than 50 languages for more than 25 social networks and other platforms.

Marketers can get access to real-time data in their dashboard and can even set alerts to notify themselves instantly of unusual spikes in volume, sentiment, or other procedures.

10. Meltwater

Meltwater comes with AI-driven insights and covers several aspects of enterprises’ activities. A significant aspect of this social media monitoring and engagement software involves emphasizing analytics and focused engagement.

Meltwater can be used to set up searches, find key influencers and track your online performance. Meltwater comes with multiple dashboards, including the ones that monitor, benchmark, and analyze your activity across the web. The dashboards can be customized to suffice your needs better.

The Price of the Tool Might Be Customizable as It is Not Displayed on the Website

Meltwater is more than a social media tool that helps marketers examine millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites. The tool filters out irrelevant mentions and focuses on sentiment to the mentions that might interest your target audience groups.

The tool can be used to set up searches, find key influencers, and track your online performance. The tool includes multiple dashboards, including the ones that monitor, benchmark, and analyze your online activity.

With Meltwater three keywords are allowed per search and marketers can even add several filters to refine the pieces of content being served. The tool carries out a sentiment analysis on the results, determining whether each mention is positive, negative, or neutral.

Wrap Up

The benefits of social media listening tools are immense. Brands can monitor their keywords and mentions, understand more about their target audience groups and industry, and can engage with their target audience groups to see what they are talking about. Optimizing your campaigns according to the areas of interest of your target audience groups is an excellent way to discover more potential leads and convert them into paying customers. One can also learn how their brand is being perceived by their target audience groups, customer, and stakeholders and can compare it with how their competitors are being looked up to by the different segments of the target audience groups.

We at Valasys Media help B2B marketers build a solid understanding of exactly how their campaigns are being received and perceived by their target audience groups. We help them understand how different audience segments have reciprocated to their marketing and advertising endeavors. Pioneering the B2B social media space we research immensely on different aspects of Public Relations (PR) and how your brand is being perceived on different social channels. Our prime B2B services viz. Lead Management, Data Solutions, Sales Pipeline Management, and Business Intelligence Solutions are directed to help you discover the key customer insights, design targeted campaigns, track brand awareness, reputation, and campaign conversions, develop authentic and personalized brand experiences, and finally optimize your conceived new product or service ideas to the fullest potential. Want to understand more about concepts such as social media listening or social influencer marketing, or do you have any marketing or advertising campaigns to optimize? Don’t hesitate to reach out to us. Do drop us a line at [email protected] or visit our ontact us page, and we will be happy to help.