The Best Social Listening Tools for Brands & Businesses

You’re already paying attention to how people talk about your brand online.

Positive, negative, or neutral, you know that online conversations can shape purchasing behavior and customer loyalty.

But now you want to operationalize things; scrolling through social media feeds and taking notes simply isn’t cutting it anymore.

That’s where social listening tools come in.

Taking an active part in social listening is a critical part of your overall strategy, but it’s difficult to do manually. 

With the right tool, you can set up triggers and continuous monitoring to translate listening insights into value-adds for your business.

Where Does Social Listening Fit Into My Social Media Strategy?

Social listening is the practice of tracking online conversations about your brand, industry, and competitors and using insights to drive strategic decision-making. 

As the name suggests, it’s most often focused on the social web: Social media platforms, review sites, and forums like Reddit.

Social listening activities include:

• Monitoring brand mentions, competitor content, and key brand messages;

• Sentiment analysis to identify how people view your brand;

• Joining relevant conversations to improve brand visibility and engagement;

• Quickly responding to customer feedback to resolve issues and build customer loyalty; and

• Monitoring industry trends to ensure your brand is aligned and up-to-date with what your clients care about.

With that definition in mind, social listening has a few valuable use cases in a broader social media strategy.

It Helps With Customer Research

Sentiment analysis and keyword or brand mention tracking can help you understand the “mood” online about your industry and your company.

This could help you grow online if you respond properly. 

Beyond social growth, you can share this data with product, sales, and marketing teams, making sure they are aware of how the customer is feeling as they build go-to-market campaigns.

It Helps Marketers Understand How People React To Campaigns

When you’re working on a campaign, you’re likely tracking a lot of data to see if it helped you reach your goals.

Social listening adds an extra layer, explaining how people feel and how they are reacting to the campaign.

It Helps Uncover (And Avert!) Issues

If conversations start bubbling about concerns — for example, let’s say someone disagreed with some of your practices — you can get ahead of any potential business impacts.

These insights have value, too. Paying attention to a customer issue could help you make a business case to improve your customers’ satisfaction. 

It could also become an opportunity for clarifying communication; maybe the customer is upset because of something they misunderstood.

In any case, social listening can help you connect with your audience and make them feel heard.

The Best Social Listening Tools for Brands & Businesses

Social listening isn't just about scrolling an endless feed of information - the best social listening tools provide actionable insights that will make a real impact on overall business performance. 

To do that, you need the right tool. Here are eight powerful options.

#1: Later Social

Later Social is the go-to platform for social listening. You’ll not only get the brand monitoring features you’d expect from any social listening software, but you’ll also get brand health metrics, tools to connect listening insights to social media strategy, and influencer recommendations based on social listening data.

Later Influence’s social listening features include:

• Customizable brand monitoring searches and tracking for key topics

• Brand health measurement that helps you track and evaluate based on online sentiment 

• Track brand mentions easily in your dashboard

• Influencer recommendations based on social listening data

Later Social’s Social Listening tool makes it easy to analyze brand sentiment, tune into key trends, and connect with creators and other top voices in your space.

Book a demo with our team today to see how it works for your brand.

#2: Meltwater

Meltwater is a social media monitoring and intelligence platform built for PR-focused marketing teams who want to understand their online impact. 

However, this complex tool can have a steep learning curve, making it harder to hit the ground running with social listening.

Features:

• Brand monitoring features to track mentions, comments, and conversations

• Research tools to help with customer understanding and segmentation

• Automated reporting where you pick the frequency

#3: Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a popular social media management tool for marketing teams who like having customizable add-ons to get the additional features they need.

For teams who want to start tracking social listening performance, it’s worth noting that Sprout Social comes at a higher price tag and can be overly complex for teams without dedicated social analysis resources.

Features:

• Analytics across multiple social media platforms

• Boolean-style feature for creating social listening queries

• Research tool to explore specific customer perspectives

TIP: If you want all of the features of Sprout Social without all of the complexity, book a call with our team to discuss Later Social's Enterprise plan.

#4: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing and reporting tool built to help large-scale businesses better understand their reach, impressions, and following.

Currently, their social listening features aren’t as robust as some of their competitors.

Features:

• Trend finder feature that highlights which hashtags or topics are gathering steam online

• Brand monitoring features that note when people are mentioning your organization on social media

#5: HubSpot

HubSpot is a marketing and CRM platform with add-on features for social media management, listening, and analytics. HubSpot’s simple social listening tools are a good place to start for users already using their CRM.

Features:

• Email marketing, forms, and live chat options included in every plan

• Keyword monitoring features that help you track what people are saying online

• Manage conversations online with DM and reply features across social media platforms

#6: Keyhole

Keyhole is a social media insights and reporting platform that helps brands understand data to generate future campaigns. 

Keyhole excels in tracking hashtags and keywords but doesn’t allow for the same comprehensive analysis tools as Later Social provides.

Features:

• Set up automatic searches for industry keywords or times your brand is mentioned online to keep track of conversations

• Sentiment analyzer so you can understand if things said are positive or negative

• Monitor multiple campaigns simultaneously so you can see how conversations are evolving

• Schedule and post features across social media platforms

#7: BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a public relations and media platform with additional content discovery, research, and monitoring features. This social listening platform is a good choice for media professionals.

Features:

• Public relations features including a database of journalists

• Content research technology that helps you track the competition

• Monitor brand mentions and other industry topics you care about

• Filtering tools for influencers based on things like how much they share

#8: Google Alerts

Google Alerts helps brands track mentions and monitor for any word or phrase for pages indexed in Google’s search engine. 

However, Google Alerts are just that: Alerts, without further insights. For brands that want to dig deeper, a more immersive tool is essential.

Features:

• Completely customized — you can create an alert for any word or phrase you’d like

• Pick your preferred time of day to receive any alerts, optimizing for your schedule

• Set unlimited alerts for any keywords or phrases you need

• Choose to receive individual alerts or a single digest email to keep your inbox tidy

Choose The Right Social Listening Tool For Your Needs

A good social listening tool doesn’t just collect information — it helps you do something about it. 

These tools supercharge all the work you can’t do manually. They can scan millions of posts across the social web and turn conversations into actual data around sentiment, key messages, and intent. 

When choosing a tool, make sure you go for a comprehensive platform that gives you all the features you need to start and scale.

Later’s comprehensive social listening tool helps you listen to what’s happening online and integrate it into your strategy.

Plus, with Later Social's Enterprise Plan, you’ll have access to content creation tools and a scheduler with automation features. This means you can easily listen to your audience, craft a new post idea, and get it into your content calendar. 

Want to learn more? Book a demo of Later’s Social Listening Tool to see it in action.