As more brands turn
to social media for customer insights, social listening tools are
gaining momentum. Here are our top 6 picks for 2020.
Social listening gives you access to what people are saying about
your brand, industry, or competitors across social media and the web –
often without them being aware of you listening. If you know how to word
your queries and filter the results, you’ll end up with the most
authentic, unbiased insights you can get as a business.
In this
post, we’ll take a look at some of the best social media and web
monitoring tools to help you gain and act on those insights in the
coming year. Let’s roll.
1. Awario
Affordable social listening and analytics with Enterprise-level capabilities.
Awario is
a relatively new tool that (finally!) makes social media and web
monitoring affordable for businesses of any size: with plans starting at
$29/mo, Awario offers a lot of capabilities that you’ll find in
Enterprise-level tools.
You can use the tool to monitor mentions
of your brand, competitors, industry, or even set up complex Boolean
queries for the less obvious use cases. For instance, Awario lets you
detect plagiarized copies of your content, find linkless brand mentions
that you can turn into links, and monitor new backlinks to your site.
The platform also offers a
social selling tool,
called Leads, as a free add-on to all users. The tool uses predictive insights to find people who’re asking for recommendations about a
product like yours or looking for an alternative to your competitors.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, news and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- A Boolean search mode to set up flexible queries and improve the accuracy of the results.
- An Influencers report outlining the most influential people talking about your brand, competitors, or industry.
- A free Leads add-on for sales prospecting on social media.
- Enterprise-level
analytics such as sentiment analysis, location and language breakdown,
and unlimited historical data available in all plans.
Pricing: Awario offers a free trial that lets you fully test the app out. Pricing starts at $29/mo for the
Starter plan, with 3 monitoring alerts that let subscribers find 30,000 new mentions per month. Awario’s most popular
Pro plan costs $89/mo with 10 alerts and 100,000 monthly mentions.
Enterprise is $299/mo and includes 50 alerts and 500,000 mentions. If you choose to go with an annual plan, you’ll get 2 months for free.
2. Agorapulse
Social media management and monitoring for a growing business.
If you aren’t quite ready to invest into a standalone social listening or reputation management platform,
Agorapulse
is an excellent 2-in-1 option: it offers both the scheduling and
monitoring bits. The tool will find @mentions of accounts you connect as
well as comments on your social media posts, plus allow you to search
for keywords of your choice across Twitter. The tool also lets you
identify influencers within your social media audience and assign
conversations to your team in a mouse click.
While Agorapulse doesn’t offer web monitoring, it’s a great choice if you’re mainly interested in social mentions.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube.
Benefits:
- The ability to tag important mentions.
- Being able to assign conversations to team members.
- Audience insights that let you identify influencers and brand ambassadors.
- A built-in CRM that lets you create lists of prospects and influencers.
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Pricing: Agorapulse has a free trial if you’d like to test the app out first. The pricing starts at $49/mo for the
Small plan, which comes with 3 social media profiles and a single user.
Large is their most popular option at $199/mo, with 25 profiles to manage and 6 users. Agorapulse’s
Enterprise solution is $299/mo with 40 profiles and 12 users.
3. TweetDeck
A handy tool for managing several Twitter accounts and monitoring mentions.
TweetDeck is
Twitter’s official social media dashboard that lets you manage your
Twitter presence as a business, particularly if you have multiple
accounts that you regularly post to. The tool’s column layout lets you
add in several
“streams”: feeds from people you follow, trending posts, direct messages, and mentions of any keywords of your choice.
For
the latter, TweetDeck gives you access to Twitter’s search
functionality, with the ability to narrow searches down using language
and location filters, negative keywords, and date ranges. You can then
engage with mentions on behalf of any of the Twitter accounts you
connect to the app.
Supported networks: Twitter.
Benefits:
- Built-in Twitter search filters, such as location, language, and negative keywords.
- Twitter scheduling capabilities for multiple accounts.
- A neat column layout that lets you keep your feeds organized.
Pricing: Free.
4. Keyhole
Real-time hashtag and keyword tracker for Twitter, Instagram, and the news.
Keyhole is
another 2-in-1 social media tool: it lets you both automate your posts
and track keywords or hashtags across Twitter and Instagram. On top of
that, you can monitor brand mentions across blogs and news sites. The
tool comes equipped with analytics, too, including sentiment analysis,
keyword clouds, and mention maps that display which countries your
social mentions come from.
Keyhole’s higher-tier plans also
include premium features like tracking industry influencers, unlocking
historical mentions, and getting API access to Keyhole’s data.
Supported networks: Twitter, Instagram, news and blogs.
Benefits:
- Social media management capabilities.
- Powerful analytics, such as sentiment analysis, keyword clouds, and mention maps.
- API access available in higher-tier plans.
Pricing: Keyhole’s
Basic
plan costs $49/mo and comes with one keyword search and 5,000 monthly
social media posts. The tool has 4 other plans, with the $599
Corporate option being the most popular with 10 searches and 250,000 posts. The highest-tier
Enterprise plan can include a custom number of searches and posts, with pricing starting at $1,000/mo.
5. Mention
Real-time social media monitoring with data-rich, customizable reports.
Mention is
another social media and web monitoring tool. Its focus is on real-time
search – setting up an alert will give you results from the last 24
hours. Historical data is available upon request under the
Custom plans.
Apart
from social listening, Mention lets you discover Twitter and Instagram
influencers by running quick keyword searches. The tool then lets you
add influencers of your choice to lists, save your lists in CSV, and
import them into your CRM tool.
Mention comes with data-rich
reports available out of the box, but the real power is in the Insights
Center where you can build your own custom reports and automate
delivery.
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Reddit, news and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- Tags that let you organize your mentions.
- Influencer discovery and management.
- An ability to build your own custom reports and 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 plan includes 2 alerts and 3,000 mentions.
Starter is offered at $99/mo and comes with 5 alerts and 5,000 mentions. There’s also a
Custom plan available on request.
6. Brandwatch
Social media measurement and in-depth analytics for the Enterprise.
Brandwatch is
one of the most powerful social listening tools in terms of analytics –
but it’s also one of the more expensive ones. On top of the monitoring
aspect, Brandwatch offers image recognition, demographic data about your
audience, trending topics in your niche, API access, and dashboards
that can be exported into customizable PowerPoint presentations.
Brandwatch
also has its own data visualization platform called Vizia. The tool
lets you visualize your Brandwatch data, plus combine it with insights
from a number of integrations (including Google Analytics, Buzzsumo, and
Hootsuite).
Supported networks: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, Sina Weibo, VK, QQ, news and blogs, the web.
Benefits:
- Demographic data including gender, interests, occupation and location of your audience.
- Image analysis that lets you find images containing your brand’s logo.
- An ability to add preferred sites to collect mentions from.
- A possibility to identify trending topics in your industry.
Pricing: Brandwatch is an Enterprise-level tool. Their most affordable
Pro plan costs $800/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 are turning to social media for market research,
customer insights, competitor analysis, and even sales, social listening
tools are getting increasingly powerful and affordable.
Whichever
social media listening tool you settle on, don’t forget that the
monitoring itself isn’t worth it if you’re not going to act on the data.
Engage with the people mentioning you on social and make use of your
social listening tool’s analytics to spot trends and adapt your
marketing, customer service and product strategies – before your
competitors do.
