5 Best Social Media Listening Tools

So, you are in the market for a social media listening tool.

Ideal, because in this article we have our compilation list for our top picks, and we compare the features and pricing for you. 

If you just want the best choice, we’ve added that right at the top of the article as this was what is most requested by our customers and what we see the best feedback with. So, that’ll be the “can’t go wrong” option. 

Otherwise, feel free to explore all the options we’ve reviewed on the market to find something that might fit you a little better.

Enjoy the list!

The Best Social Media Listening Tools Specifically

When you’re planning on growing your social media profile, it’s necessary to uncover hidden trends and understand the public sentiment about your posts. A social media listening tool enables you to do so by analyzing all mentions of your brand. Have a look at the products below to choose the best social media listening tool specifically:

1. ZohoSocial

ZohoSocial lets you schedule unlimited posts, monitor valuable aspects and create custom reports to analyze your social media performance. With ZohoSocial, you can visualize your content pipeline and ensure there are no dull moments for your audience. Additionally, its multiple listening columns help you stay tuned with relevant trends.

ZohoSocial Features

Here are some exclusive features of ZohoSocial:

Scheduling: ZohoSocial simplifies your content pipeline with an intuitive social media scheduler. You can customize content for individual networks and ensure optimization for every channel. Moreover, you can make content-recycling a non-task and set your evergreen content to make periodic rounds.

Live Stream and Monitoring Columns: ZohoSocial offers a real-time stream of updates from your audience across all social media channels. You can learn how often your audience is engaging and get a snapshot of their profile. Additionally, you can get in-depth tracking for hashtags, page reviews, and user profiles.

Connections: ZohoSocial offers a contact directory specifically for your brand. You can discover the sentiments of your followers and target prospects on social media. Additionally, ZohoSocial lets you view and filter social connections based on priority. With ZohoSocial, you can ensure maximum engagement with your followers.

Collaboration: ZohoSocial is a social media management platform with smart collaboration features. It lets you discuss popular posts, share custom reports, or plan a campaign together. With ZohoSocial, you can make faster decisions. It enables you to discuss content ideas with your team and get approvals on drafts.

Analyze: ZohoSocial’s social media analytics tool measures your brand’s crucial aspects. You can analyze the impact of your social media strategy and create insightful reports that help you understand your audience and track performance. With Zoho Social’s rich analytics dashboard, you can use custom KPIs to make smart decisions.

ZohoSocial Pricing

ZohoSocial offers 3 Pricing options for businesses and 2 Plans for agencies.

The “Standard” plan is priced at $9.99/month and offers multi-channel publishing and content scheduling.

The “Professional” plan is priced at $29.99/month and offers repeat posting, bulk scheduling and post insights.

The “Premium” plan is priced at $49.99/month and offers a reports dashboard, content approvals and UTM parameters.

The “Agency” plan is priced at $249.99/month and offers portal customization and 10 Brands.

The “Agency Plus” plan is priced at $349.99/month and offers 20 brands, agency-branded reports and client invitations.

2. Brandwatch

With Brandwatch, you can find the conversations that really matter through accurate monitoring. Brandwatch starts with beautifully curated queries, so you only see meaningful data. Moreover, you get a range of search operators to put conversations into context. Brandwatch gives you a flying start with robust filtering and automatic sentiment analysis.

Brandwatch Features

Here are some exclusive features of Brandwatch:

Crisis Management: Brandwatch gives you a critical headstart with real-time signals and alerts. You can detect unusual activity or emerging crises and send automatic, real-time notifications to relevant internal and external shareholders. Moreover, it empowers your team to spot negative mentions and act immediately on potential issues before they escalate.

Data Democratization: With Brandwatch, you can break down silos and build a data-driven culture. It helps you go beyond the usual metrics and reports and put the voice of the consumer at the heart of your organization. Brandwatch enables you to build a 360-degree view of your clients with an integrated data approach and reveal hidden insights by analyzing social, web, marketing and business data.

Social Media Management: Managing your organization’s social media activities across networks, regions, and teams can be a painful process. With Brandwatch, you can save time and avoid silos with a unified content calendar. It helps you maintain a responsive, aligned brand voice and automate cross-channel conversations.

Competitor Analysis: Brandwatch allows you to benchmark your marketing performance and brand awareness across your competitors. You can discover deeper consumer insights that can inform corporate competitive strategy. Moreover, Brandwatch provides real-time insight into your online presence and the purchase decisions of customers.

Trend Analysis: With Brandwatch, you get access to historical consumer conversations so you can spot trends your competitors are missing. You can see the change in consumer opinion over time and uncover new trends to better predict clients’ requirements. Brandwatch helps you spot new opportunities for product expansion and market growth.

Brandwatch Pricing

Brandwatch offers 4 Pricing options for its social media management platform.

The “Essentials” plan is priced at $108/month and offers content scheduling, customer engagement, plus impact measuring.

The “Consumer Intelligence” plan offers an on-demand pricing quote. Additionally, it allows you to segment audiences, analyze data and distribute flexible reporting.

The “Social Media Management” plan offers an on-demand pricing quote. Additionally, it provides brand monitoring, a social calendar and a centralized CRM.

The “Full Suite” plan has an on-demand pricing quote. It offers combined access to Brandwatch’s research and social media management products.

3. HootSuite

HootSuite offers an easy-to-use social media management platform that grows with you and your popularity. You can schedule content in advance and see what’s working across your clients’ social networks. HootSuite helps you find new customers by joining the conversations about your brand and automatically boosting your most popular posts.

HootSuite Features

Here are some exclusive features of HootSuite:

Publishing: HootSuite simplifies the process of planning, composing, and publishing engaging, on-brand content. Its planner includes a social media content calendar that lets you visualize your posts in a centralized dashboard. You can map out campaigns, fill content gaps or suspend scheduled posts when facing a potential crisis.

Curate High-performing Content: With HootSuite, you can easily create and preview engaging, on-brand posts using composer. It makes content development a breeze and saves your time with content libraries, image editing tools and video publishing. Additionally, you can plan your posts in advance and schedule multiple posts with a bulk composer.

Engagement: HootSuite helps you deliver efficient and personalized customer care through social media. You can monitor trends and your posts’ performance across profiles by setting up custom streams that suit your workflow. Moreover, HootSuite’s inbox is designed to help you monitor messages from different networks in a single view.

Monitoring: With HootSuite, you can stay on top of conversations and track the performance of your posts or brand mentions. Additionally, you can monitor competitor activities and efficiently respond in-stream whenever an opportunity arises. HootSuite also enables you to understand your brand’s perception in the market and analyze mentions spikes.

Advertising: HootSuite offers a multi-channel functionality from start to finish. You can save time by boosting posts, analyzing and optimizing your efforts, and creating reports across all social channels within the HootSuite dashboard. Moreover, it provides the best-in-class analytics that supercharges your social media performance.

HootSuite Pricing

HootSuite offers 4 Pricing options for its social media management and monitoring platform.

The “Professional” plan is priced: at $19/month upon annual billing. It offers 10 social accounts, post-scheduling and a publishing calendar.

The “Team” plan is priced: at $99/month upon annual billing. It offers bulk scheduling, custom-branded URL and message monitoring.

The “Business” plan is priced: at $599/month upon annual billing. It offers campaign planning, post boosting and customizable reports.

The “Enterprise” plan has an on-demand pricing quote and offers 10 Ad profiles, employee advocacy and social selling.

4. eClincher

eClincher offers a value-rich end-to-end social media management powerhouse at the nucleus of your digital marketing strategy. It helps you quantify your social ROI and increase productivity. Additionally, you can streamline posting with the visual calendar and suggested content feeds, improving your brand reach.

eClincher Features 

Here are some exclusive features eClincher:

Publishing & Advertising: eClincher offers instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs and forums. You can uncover trends and conversations of any keywords, hashtags and phrases across the web. Additionally, eClincher helps you understand your brand perception and discover how your audience really feels through sentiment analysis.

Visual calendar: eClincher offers cross-network publishing, editing and filtering. You can complete post customization per channel while curating new content. Additionally, eClincher lets you visually plan and schedule your posts with drag-and-drop functionality. It offers swift methods to edit or reuse content and workflows.

Competitor Benchmarking: With eClincher, you can analyze your competitors’ social media posts and audience sentiment. You can benchmark their performance to enhance your content and improve visibility. eClincher helps you deliver better content at a faster rate.

Advanced Analytics: eClincher offers advanced reporting tools that let you analyze your market segments and engagement rates. It ensures you only post content that’s actually received well by your audience. Moreover, with eClincher’a social listening, you can identify any potential issues in advance and delay your posts.

Engagement: Engagement is crucial to turn your fans into followers on social media. With eClincher, you can see the latest and top-rated comments on your posts and reply instantly. It ensures you stay connected with your audience and make them feel important.

eClincher Pricing

eClincher offers 3 Pricing options for its social media management platform.

The “Basic” plan is priced at $65/month and offers a publishing schedule, content suggestions and social listening.

The “Premier” plan is priced at $175/month and offers post approval workflows, inbox sentiment, and custom reports.

The “Agency” plan is priced at $425/month and offers a media library, team productivity reports and smart queues.

5. ZohoSocial

ZohoSocial lets you schedule unlimited posts, monitor valuable aspects and create custom reports to analyze your social media performance. With ZohoSocial, you can visualize your content pipeline and ensure there are no dull moments for your audience. Additionally, its multiple listening columns help you stay tuned with relevant trends.

ZohoSocial Features

Here are some exclusive features of ZohoSocial:

Scheduling: ZohoSocial simplifies your content pipeline with an intuitive social media scheduler. You can customize content for individual networks and ensure optimization for every channel. Moreover, you can make content-recycling a non-task and set your evergreen content to make periodic rounds.

Live Stream and Monitoring Columns: ZohoSocial offers a real-time stream of updates from your audience across all social media channels. You can learn how often your audience is engaging and get a snapshot of their profile. Additionally, you can get in-depth tracking for hashtags, page reviews, and user profiles.

Connections: ZohoSocial offers a contact directory specifically for your brand. You can discover the sentiments of your followers and target prospects on social media. Additionally, ZohoSocial lets you view and filter social connections based on priority. With ZohoSocial, you can ensure maximum engagement with your followers.

Collaboration: ZohoSocial is a social media management platform with smart collaboration features. It lets you discuss popular posts, share custom reports, or plan a campaign together. With ZohoSocial, you can make faster decisions. It enables you to discuss content ideas with your team and get approvals on drafts.

Analyze: ZohoSocial’s social media analytics tool measures your brand’s crucial aspects. You can analyze the impact of your social media strategy and create insightful reports that help you understand your audience and track performance. With Zoho Social’s rich analytics dashboard, you can use custom KPIs to make smart decisions.

ZohoSocial Pricing

ZohoSocial offers 3 Pricing options for businesses and 2 Plans for agencies.

The “Standard” plan is priced at $9.99/month and offers multi-channel publishing and content scheduling.

The “Professional” plan is priced at $29.99/month and offers repeat posting, bulk scheduling and post insights.

The “Premium” plan is priced at $49.99/month and offers a reports dashboard, content approvals and UTM parameters.

The “Agency” plan is priced at $249.99/month and offers portal customization and 10 Brands.

The “Agency Plus” plan is priced at $349.99/month and offers 20 brands, agency-branded reports and client invitations.

Why use Social Media Management Tools at all?

In today’s world, building an online presence on social media channels is crucial for brand loyalty and lead generation. However, managing and maintaining your social profile across different networks is a highly complicated process. You need a dedicated tool that automates your content curation and lets you schedule posts in advance.

Social media management tools rejuvenate your social profiles by drawing in crowds and offering new chances to expand. You can analyze the engagement rate on your posts to see which content works best on various channels. With social media management tools, you can keep your social profile active even when you aren’t.

Why should you use Social Media Listening Tools?

Listening is a crucial part of all good communication, and it is no different online. However, social media listening pertains to the surveillance of conversations that are going on about your brand, product or relevant industry topics that could affect the way you market your business.

These conversations are most likely already happening online. However, what you need to do is find them. People love to go online and poll their friends through social media about products. Social media listening tools gather all these conversations. So you can discover potential new customers.

If you poke around on social media, you’ll begin to see some people or brands being mentioned alongside your profile. With a social media listening tool, you can discover the top influencers who are also your customers. You can then incorporate them into your affiliate marketing strategies.

Additionally, with social media listening tools, you can analyze your competitors’ content and engagement rate. Once you connect with your target audience, the next step is to maintain relevance. Social media listening tools help you figure out what niche your audience is most interested in.

Social Media Listening Tools, A Summary

With social media listening tools, you can power up your content and engage freely with your followers. Additionally, it lets you recognize opportunities and crises earlier than they occur so you can edit or manipulate your content accordingly to avoid negative public sentiment.

Zoho Social offers an inbuilt listening tool in its social media management platform that helps you discover customer sentiment. Zoho Social is our suggested pick for a social media listening tool. Visit the website to get started.

What Social Media Management Tool would you recommend?

In short, It’s Hootsuite.com.

Hootsuite streamlines social media management, enabling efficient collaboration and goal achievement. With powerful tools and analytics, it’s the ultimate choice for effective online brand presence in today’s digital landscape.

“🚀Try Hootsuite.com For Free, It’s my favorite Social Media Management Tool to use and recommend.” -Scott Max

Hootsuite is a user-friendly social media management platform, empowering businesses with powerful tools for seamless online engagement. It simplifies complex social strategies, ensuring efficient brand communication and delivering impressive digital marketing outcomes. Hootsuite covers all your social media needs: Scheduling, Analytics, Advertising, Monitoring, Reporting, and Engagement.

For more details, read our Hootsuite Review.