Social media is a mess. There are so many popular networks, profiles, communities, viral opportunities, and trendy comment boxes that it can be hard to navigate through all the hubbub, even as an experienced digital marketer. That’s probably why it’s so important to sort through the noise and make the right decision on how to promote your business online.
But how can we listen carefully to the social media buzz and find that needle in the haystack that can drive our marketing efforts forward? The answer is social listening. A thriving business expected to be worth over $1 billion, social listening is already a top priority for countless freelance marketers, advertisement agencies, and billion-dollar corporations.
Considering that over $930 billion has been spent on social media ads since 2017, it’s clear that social listening can be the differentiator between maximizing your ad investment and simply throwing away money on useless campaigns. Below, you can find the 11 best social listening tools of the year so you can listen… And know how and when to act.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the act of monitoring one or more social media networks for keywords that are relevant to one’s business. The purpose of social listening is to filter through endless social media pages to locate only the ones that have promotional value for a brand. By locating these pages, businesses can engage in highly targeted campaigns that hit the right spot without getting lost in the noise.
Thus, social listening is a data-driven marketing process concerning the identification of viable promotional channels. For identifying these gold nuggets, marketers can rely on social listening tools such as KeyMentions. There are many quality options out there, but choosing the best social listening tool for your business depends primarily on what your needs and target audience are.
In our list of the 11 best social listening tools of the year, you can find the highest-quality options for all kinds of social media marketing, including Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and more.
Top 11 Social Listening Tools of 2024
- KeyMentions: Best for Reddit
- Brandwatch: Best for influencer marketing
- Brand24: Best for blogs and Quora
- BuzzSumo: Best for backlinks
- Talkwalker: Best for AI reports
- Awario: Best for market research
- Fedica: Best for X/Twitter
- Pentos: Best for TikTok
- Tailwind: Best for Pinterest
- HubSpot: Best for sales
- Google Alerts: Best 100% free tool
1. KeyMentions: Best For Reddit
There’s a bad habit of undervaluing Reddit, all the way from its share price to its marketing potential. But while many well-intentioned people will tell you marketing on Reddit isn’t worth it, it would be just crazy to ignore one of the busiest, most well-trusted, and most influential websites in the world.
The traditional problem with Reddit marketing is that people insist on using Google Search to identify threads and posts that are relevant to their brands. This is a nuisance because most Reddit posts that show on Google Search have already been crawled and indexed at least a few months or years ago.
KeyMentions is a revolutionary social listening tool for Reddit because it places marketers where it matters most: relevant discussions that aren’t months old, but rather taking place right now. By identifying these threads/posts, marketers can promote their businesses on Reddit while discussions are still active.
How does it really work? All you have to do is enter your target keywords in KeyMentions and set email alerts based on the keywords, the number of days or hours a post was submitted, and the number of upvotes and comments in the post. This way, every time your keywords are mentioned in threads that are both active and popular, you get a chance to get in on the action while the thread is still hot.
2. Brandwatch: Best For Influencer Marketing
Brandwatch is a classic and reputable social listening tool with solutions for all types of platforms. As the name implies, the main focus of Brandwatch is to allow marketers to automatically monitor social-media mentions regarding their brands. Features include, among others, tools for improving engagement (writing assistants, schedules, etc.) and conducting in-depth analysis based on consumer data.
There’s no doubt that Brandwatch is a great resource for anyone trying to tap into a specific target audience, but what can it do better than any other social listening tool? Well, that would be influencer marketing. As the fastest-growing sector in the creator economy, worldwide influencer marketing is valued at more than $20 billion… And it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
Brandwatch provides marketers with the necessary resources for discovering the right influencers, contacting them in a convenient and timely manner, and even generating entire networks of influencers that can be simultaneously activated to conduct ambitious social media campaigns.
Brandwatch also provides tools for vetting influencers, meaning it’s not just about quantity, but also about quality. Following a campaign, you can access tons of data to measure success, learn from mistakes, and identify both winning and losing marketing patterns.
3. Brand24: Best For Blogs & Quora
Brand24 is a social listening tool based on AI that lets you know anytime your brand or business gets a critical mention online. Brand24 is one of the most reputable social listening tools out there, and its sheer scope is impressive, covering pretty much every social website you can think of. More precisely, Brand24 is one of the few professional social listening tools around tackling blogs and Quora pages.
While data on Quora is relatively scarce, the social network gets millions of hits annually and is a bonafide gold mine waiting to be discovered. Blogs, on the other hand, represent too large a piece of the Internet to even put into numbers, and some people (bloggers, admittedly) believe old-fashioned Blogspot-type blogs are pushing for a comeback.
Whether you believe that blogs and Quora will soon rule the world or not, it doesn’t matter: Brand24 will always be the best social listening tool to leverage its untapped marketing potential. They represent huge promotion opportunities, especially for businesses running products and services that cannot be explained in social media’s ideal 40-80 character post length.
Apart from its peculiar focus on blogs and Quora, Brand24 sets itself apart by being an AI-driven, data-based social listening tool for all kinds of professionals, covering not only solutions for agencies but also individual marketers in fields such as SEO and Public Relations.
4. BuzzSumo: Best For Backlinks
BuzzSumo is a popular social listening tool that can serve all your marketing purposes quite effectively. Believed by many to be the best of its kind, BuzzSumo misses out on some key features like Reddit marketing (KeyMentions is the way to go on Reddit) but makes it up by offering what’s arguably the most powerful backlink monitoring tool on the web.
If backlinks are your business, then BuzzSumo is the perfect social listening tool for you. You can set alters on backlinks based not only on keywords, but also on competitor domains, authors, and even other backlinks.
In SEO, backlinks are responsible for driving traffic to a website, but also for increasing its Google authority and, consequently, ranking higher on Google Search. Even though recent Google updates have deemed backlinks non-important for the first time, they are still a huge part of what makes or breaks a great SEO strategy.
5. Talkwalker: Best For AI Reports
A whopping 35% of all companies have already incorporated AI into their processes. The technology is relatively new, but it had quite an impact in virtually all online-based industries, including the social listening sector.
Just like Brand24, Talkwalker also leverages the power of AI to analyze vast amounts of data and put only the data that matters in front of you. They do so via Instant AI Summaries, one of the key features of their social listening package.
In addition to convenient AI reports that summarize all relevant data in one single cell, Talkwalker also deserves to be praised for being a complete marketing platform, including everything from influencer finding and image analysis to conversation clusters.
6. Awario: Best For Market Research
Social listening tools and market research go hand-in-hand, and Awario is hardly the only available tool for conducting data-based market research. However, its sentimental approach to data is what makes it unique.
Sure, Awario also lets you monitor keywords, engage directly with customers via social media, and even do some influencer marketing. Its main strength, though, is the tool for setting alerts based on competitors, as well as the way it organizes competitor data in simple, straightforward graphs and schemes.
According to Fuel Cycle’s Chief Strategy Officer Rick Kelly, market research should be seen as a strategic element of a brand’s long-term progress. If the same logic applies to digital marketing, then Awario is the kind of social listening tool you’ll want to have at your side.
7. Fedica: Best For X/Twitter
Elon Musk hasn’t exactly helped raise X/Twitter’s popularity, and the social network’s user base has been relatively stagnant in recent years. That, of course, is no excuse to snub Twitter marketing, especially if you run a business operating in X-friendly niches. Fedica steps in as the ultimate social listening solution for this platform even though it covers pretty much every social network out there.
Why use Fedica for X/Twitter? The biggest perk is the Post Scheduler feature, which allows you to time your Twitter interventions to perfection. That’s nothing new by itself, but it takes on a whole another level due to Fedica’s powerful proprietary algorithm, which calculates the time when your audience is most active on a case-per-case basis.
As the importance of timing in digital marketing cannot be overstated, so does not the crucial role Fedica can play in your X/Twitter strategy. Assuming their algorithm works as well as advertised, Fedica is the one social listening tool you need to get ahead of the competition on Twitter.
8. Pentos: Best For TikTok
Recent headlines focusing on TikTok’s so-called collapse have hardly demoted its one-billion-plus members from continuing to use the platform. Whether you love or hate TikTok’s addictive video feeds and viral challenges, one thing’s for sure: your brand will be missing out if you miss out on TikTok.
If you’re looking for a social listening tool that’s exclusively designed to collect data from TikTok and present it in a way that even 12-year-old content creators would understand, we recommend signing up for Pentos.
One of the biggest advantages of using Pentos instead of a more generalistic social listening tool for TikTok is the section dedicated to music trends. By identifying TikTok hits as they’re still getting hot, you can associate your brand and products with future number-one hits and get the kind of post engagement you’d only dream of before. Billboard even started publishing a TikTok Top 50 in 2023.
9. Tailwind: Best For Pinterest
Pinterest is an often overlooked social network, and—quite frankly—it has been struggling to stay alive for well over 10 years now. Not as hip as Instagram, not as viral as TikTok, and hardly as popular as most social media platforms we have discussed today, Pinterest is nevertheless huge in certain niches.
While it’s probably not a good idea to sell your banking services on Pinterest, you’d be a fool to keep your gardening, interior design, sewing, or [add any other cute DIY activity] business out of it. As for the right social listening tool for Pinterest, our top suggestion is Tailwind.
Tailwind’s unique value proposition is that they take care of copywriting for you, but they also seem to focus on Pinterest more than any other social listening tool out there. Run mostly by women and driven by an Insta-worthy take on digital marketing, Tailwind is actually an official business partner of Pinterest.
10. HubSpot: Best For Sales
Social listening is an art in a way, but it’s most importantly a means to an end. The means is social media and any other online channel that lets you promote a business or brand; the end is… Making money!
HubSpot is a nice social listening tool featuring marketing automation software and tools for generating and editing promotional content. The crown jewel, however, is their Sales Hub for small and medium companies, which helps you list all ad expenses in one single place and optimize subsequent deals with accelerated revenue growth software.
The bottom line? If you find it hard to tackle expenses, reach out to new customers, or find intelligent new ways of scaling your marketing efforts, HubSpot can be of assistance.
11. Google Alerts: Best 100% Free
The Occam’s Razor is a philosophical principle stating that “plurality should not be posited without necessity.” In layman’s terms, that means simply that the simplest solution must be viewed as the best solution. That’s when Google Alerts comes in knocking.
To say that Google Alerts is the best social listening tool for Google would be a mistake, but its Occam-like approach to setting alerts based on keywords is nonetheless interesting, especially for marketers who are just getting started with digital marketing.
Without advanced features and none other than a search bar to set alerts based on keywords, Google Alerts is social listening in its simplest and purest form. Oh, and the best part? It’s 100% free—all you need is a valid Google email.
Verdict
There’s no perfect social listening tool, and each one has its own strengths. So, how can you choose the best? The key is to listen to the specific needs of your brand or business and have a clear understanding of your priorities.
If Reddit is your playing field, then KeyMentions is the way to go. If you’re more into SEO, then why not try BuzzSumo’s exquisite backlink features? And if Sales is your middle name, HubSpot sounds like the obvious choice.
In conclusion, choosing the best social listening tool depends more on the unique needs of your marketing efforts than on the tool itself. Either way, each of the 11 social listening platforms presented above has qualities that can help you take your business or brand to the next level.
Best Social Listening Tools in 2024 (FAQ)
Social listening is the activity of monitoring mentions (brands, keywords, competitors, etc.) on the Internet to make better business and marketing decisions.
KeyMentions is the best one for Reddit, whereas Fedica is the best for X/Twitter, Pentos is the best for TikTok, and Tailwind is the best for Pinterest. Several social listening tools cover more tha one social media platform.
Brandwatch is the best social listening tool for influencer marketing because it has features not only to identify and reach out to influencers but also to create entire influencer networks based on vetted content creators that relate to your brand.
Professional social listening tools are normally paid services that can be tested for free. However, Google Alerts is a 100% free, simple alternative to professional social listening tools.
Ideally, you should use various social listening tools to make the most of their particular pros, but this can be costly and time-consuming. Luckily, all-around social listening tools like Brand24 and BuzzSumo can cover most of your marketing needs in one single platform.
