Feeling overwhelmed by the social media buzz? Wondering what people are saying about your brand online? Then, use social monitoring tools to monitor and listen to your social media presence.

Social media monitoring tools are essential for any brand looking to thrive in today’s digital age. These powerful platforms help you get valuable customer insights, track engagement (mentions, hashtags, & comments), understand brand sentiment, identify industry trends, and effectively engage your audience.

This blog post will explore the top 13 options available in 2024. So, choose the perfect solution to listen, analyze, and engage with your audience on social media.

Let’s discover how these tools can empower you to make smarter social media decisions and achieve remarkable results.

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

Today, staying on top of social media conversations is crucial for any brand’s success. Having data that makes your campaign more specific and drives more results is a wise move.

But manually monitoring every social media platform can be daunting. That’s where social monitoring tools come in. These powerful tools offer many benefits that can transform your social media strategy and help you grow your business.

Here are some of the benefits of social media monitoring for your business and brand:

• Uncover valuable customer insights: Understand what your audience says about your brand, products, and services.
• Track sentiment analysis: Identify positive and negative feedback to address concerns and celebrate brand wins.
• Stay ahead of industry trends: Discover what’s buzzing and trending in your field and adapt your strategy accordingly.
• Boost engagement: Respond to comments and messages faster, fostering stronger customer relationships.
• Identify brand advocates: Find potential influencers who can amplify your brand message.
• Measure campaign effectiveness: Track your social media campaign performance and identify improvement areas.

By monitoring your socials activities, you comprehensively understand your social media presence. This allows you to make data-driven decisions and achieve your social media goals.

Top 13 Social Monitoring Tools to Use

Here’s a list of social media monitoring tools, both free and paid options.

1. SocialBu

SocialBu is an all-in-one social media management platform designed to streamline your social media presence across various platforms. It caters to small and medium-sized businesses and offers features like scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, and collaborating on social media content.

Here’s a breakdown of SocialBu’s key features:

Scheduling & Publishing

• Schedule posts across various platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google My Business.
• Bulk schedule content to save time and maintain consistency.
• Preview posts before publishing to ensure proper formatting and visuals.
• Schedule evergreen content for automatic reposting.

Engagement Management

• Respond to comments, messages, and mentions directly from a centralized inbox.
• Assign conversations to team members for efficient collaboration.
• Track and manage brand mentions across different platforms.

Social Listening & Monitoring

• Track keywords and hashtags relevant to your brand and industry.
• Monitor brand sentiment to understand customer perception.
• Identify brand advocates and potential influencers.
• Discover trending topics and conversations to inform your content strategy.

Analytics & Reporting

• Track key social media metrics like reach, engagement, and follower growth.
• Generate detailed reports to measure campaign performance and ROI.
• Compare performance across different platforms to identify strengths and weaknesses.
• Gain insights into audience demographics and interests.

2. HubSpot

HubSpot offers social media management features within its marketing platform. It allows you to schedule posts, monitor brand mentions and keywords across various platforms, track interactions and engagement, connect with your audience, and engage with them in one central location.

It also provides basic social listening functionalities to understand brand sentiment and track competitor activity. When combined with HubSpot’s sales CRM, you can check the top-performing content and social interactions with sales.

Key Features

• Schedule and publish social media posts across various platforms.
• Monitor brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags.
• Track social media engagement metrics (likes, comments, shares).
• Respond to comments and messages directly within HubSpot.
• Generate social media reports for performance analysis.

3. Mention

As the name implies, Mention is a social monitoring tool that tracks online conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry keywords. It scans social media platforms, news websites, and blogs to identify mentions and analyze sentiment.

Moreover, the tool can also identify spikes in the mentioned volume.

Key Features

• Monitor brand mentions, industry trends, and competitor activity.
• Gain insights into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments surrounding your brand.
• Discover potential brand advocates and influencers for future collaborations.
• Respond to comments and messages directly through Mention and generate reports to track progress over time.
• Receive real-time notifications for important mentions and integrate Mention with other marketing tools for a streamlined workflow.

4. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is another name on the social monitoring tools list. It’s a user-friendly platform that manages all your social media channels from a single dashboard.

It caters to businesses of all sizes and offers features for scheduling posts, monitoring brand mentions, collaborating with your team, and analyzing social media performance.

Key Features

• Schedule and publish content across major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
• Track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and engage in conversations through a unified social inbox.
• Collaborate with team members by assigning tasks, leaving comments, and getting approval workflows.
• Gain valuable insights through detailed social media reports, including follower growth, engagement metrics, and campaign performance.
• Build a custom listing dashboard to understand the social presence.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse goes beyond social monitoring and offers a comprehensive social media management suite with built-in listening features. Manage all your social media accounts in one place, schedule posts, and engage with followers.

The robust listening functionality allows you to track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, and discover industry trends.

With Agorapulse, you can set various parameters to filter comments and platforms.

Key Features:

• Monitor mentions across social media platforms, news sites, and blogs.
• Track sentiment analysis to understand brand perception.
• Identify brand advocates and influencers for potential partnerships.
• Measure campaign performance and ROI.
• Schedule and publish social media posts.
• Engage with followers through comments and messages.
• Generate social media reports for data-driven decision-making.

6. Awario

Awario is another social monitoring tool that simplifies social media monitoring. It helps you track mentions of your brand, competitors, and industry keywords across social media platforms, news sites, blogs, and forums.

It provides real-time data and historical analysis that allows you to understand brand sentiment and measure campaign effectiveness.

The platform also helps you identify influencers asking for recommendations and collaborations that can help your business grow.

Key Features

• Tracks brand mentions across major social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.), news, blogs, and forums.
• Real-time alerts for brand mentions and industry trends.
• Sentiment analysis to gauge audience perception.
• Influencer identification to discover brand advocates.
• Reporting and analytics to track campaign performance.

7. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a powerful social media monitoring and analytics platform. It caters to businesses of all sizes and offers a wide range of features to help you track brand mentions, analyze sentiment, track trends, understand your audience, and measure the success of your social media campaigns.

The platform integrates with all major social media handles and networks, allowing you to gather data from millions of sources. It also helps you analyze social conversations deeply and create custom dashboards to track performance.

Key Features

• Monitor mentions of your brand, specific keywords, and competitor activity across social media platforms, news sites, forums, and blogs.
• Gain insights into brand perception by analyzing online conversations’ sentiments (positive, negative, or neutral).
• Uncover your target audience’s demographics, interests, and online behavior to develop more effective social media strategies.
• Generate comprehensive reports with clear data visualizations to track progress and measure social media ROI.

8. RivalIQ

RivalIQ is a social media analytics platform designed to empower businesses with competitive intelligence and social media marketing insights.

It caters to digital marketers and social media teams and offers a comprehensive view of your brand’s social media performance compared to your competitors.

Moreover, RivallQ provides real-time alters about what has happened and changed over time.

Key Features

• Track competitor activity across major social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.
• Analyze your brand and competitors’ follower growth, demographics, and engagement metrics.
• Understand and analyze your competitors’ ad campaigns, promotions, and positioning.
• Monitor the performance of your social media posts and identify top-performing content themes.
• Understand audience sentiment towards your brand and industry trends.
• Generate comprehensive reports with social media data visualizations for informed decision-making.

9. Sendible

Sendible is a comprehensive social media management platform that offers social listening features. It also lets you schedule, post, and engage with your audience from a signed dashboard.

It allows you to track brand mentions and analytics, industry keywords, analyze sentiment, generate reports and designs, and monitor industry conversations across various social media platforms in one central location.

Key Features

• Track mentions of your brand, competitors, and relevant keywords across social media channels.
• Gain insights into the overall sentiment surrounding your brand and industry conversations.
• Respond to comments and messages directly within Sendible and generate reports to measure social media performance.
• Manage all your social media interactions from one unified inbox for improved efficiency.
• Schedule and publish social media posts across major platforms in advance.

10. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content marketing and social media monitoring tool that helps identify high-performing content. It analyzes billions of articles and social media posts to reveal what content resonates with audiences.

It also helps you discover trending content, conduct research, analyze what performs well on social media, and identify potential influencers.

Using its monitoring features, you can track mentions across your brand and popular trends and set up alerts for various keywords and topics to stay updated.

Key Features

• Find top-performing content by topic, domain, or author.
• Analyze social shares and engagement metrics for any piece of content.
• Uncover trending questions your audience is asking on forums and Q&A sites.
• Track brand mentions and monitor industry conversations.
• Generate reports to track your social media performance and content marketing success.

11. Brand24

It is a social monitoring and analytics platform that tracks online conversations across various sources. It monitors social media platforms, news websites, blogs, forums, reviews, and more and provides a comprehensive view of your brand’s online presence.

Brand24 empowers you to analyze sentiment, identify brand advocates, track industry trends, identify hashtags, and measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.

Key Features

• Tracks conversations.
• Provides instant insights into online mentions.
• Analyzes the emotional tone of conversations (positive, negative, neutral).
• Discover key influencers talking about your brand.
• Offers comprehensive reports with valuable data visualizations.
• Measures the performance of your social media campaigns.
• Integrates with various marketing tools for a streamlined workflow.

12. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a powerful social media management and analytics platform designed for brands and agencies. It provides a comprehensive view of your social media performance across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

Key Features

• Track key metrics like follower growth, engagement rate, reach, and brand mentions.
• Schedule and publish content directly to your social media profiles.
• Monitor brand mentions, respond to comments and messages, and identify brand advocates.
• Track competitor performance and benchmark your social media strategy.
• Generate comprehensive reports with valuable data visualizations to measure social media ROI.

13. Cyfe

Cyfe is a cloud-based platform that lets you create centralized custom dashboards to monitor various marketing channels and key social media metrics. It allows you to track followers, analyze top-performing posts, and post reach and engagement on popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.

It also offers a unified view of your social media performance and helps you track the latest trends and patterns across your KPIs.

Key Features

• Access social media analytics through customizable widgets for each platform, displaying key metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and top-performing posts.
• Track social media activity as it happens and identify trends with up-to-date data visualizations (colorful charts).
• Design personalized dashboards that showcase your brand’s most important social media metrics.
• Integrate Cyfe with other marketing tools to monitor SEO, email marketing, and website analytics alongside your social media data.
• Generate professional reports with your company’s branding for easy sharing with stakeholders and team members.

Wrap Up

In sum, social monitoring tools are no longer optional – they’re essential for thriving on social media. These tools empower you to gather valuable customer insights, monitor brand mentions, identify trends, and engage your audience effectively.

Above, we’ve explored the top 13 options available in 2024. Now, it’s your turn to take action and choose the perfect social monitoring tool to elevate your social media strategy and achieve remarkable results.

However, keep in mind your goals, needs, budget, ease of use, visualization, and integration before selecting the one and using it. You can even try these tools’ free trials to explore how they work or whether they meet your needs.

But in the end, don’t just rely on the tool completely–use it to inform your decisions and take action to build stronger relationships with your audience.

FAQs

What is a Social Monitoring Tool?

Social monitoring tools, also known as social listening tools, are software platforms that track online conversations about your brand, industry, or competitors across social media platforms. They help you understand what people are saying and gain valuable insights to improve your social media strategy.

What is the Social Monitoring System?

A social monitoring system is another term for a social monitoring tool. It’s a software platform that tracks and analyzes social media conversations relevant to your brand and businesses.

What are Social Listening Tools?

Social listening tools (or social monitoring tools) are platforms that help you monitor, track, and listen in on online conversations to understand audience sentiment and trends.