Social media is a fast-paced, ever-changing platform and to keep track of what is happening you need social listening tools. It’s also one of the best ways to reach customers, build relationships, and drive sales.
But with so much going on, it can be difficult to keep track of all your brand mentions. That could mean missing out on opportunities for engagement or even damage control.
That’s where social listening comes in. A process that helps you manage your brand reputation across the web by tracking what people are saying about it online. This includes both positive and negative comments.
If you’re trying to figure out which tool is right for your business read on! We’ve rounded up everything you need to know about social listening tools from A-Z.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the process of listening to what people are saying about your brand, your competitors, and your industry.
Social listening allows you to find out how customers perceive you and can help identify opportunities for improvement. It’s also a great way to stay up-to-date on industry trends so that you’re not caught off guard by new developments.
You might be wondering: “What sorts of things should we be paying attention to?”. There are many different types of information that might prove useful in social listening:
- The number of mentions about a particular product or service over time. This could indicate demand for said product/service or lack thereof
- How frequently do specific keywords appear in conversation? These keywords often correspond with key topics related to marketing strategy (e.g., price point)
Why does it matter?
- Social listening is an essential component of any effective marketing strategy.
- It allows you to track what people are saying about your brand, which can help you understand what your customers want and how they feel about your company or industry.
- It also gives you insight into the competition, as well as information on what’s happening in the world around you.
This means that social listening can help with everything from improving customer service to creating new products and services.
Social listening will give you a better understanding of how best to communicate with customers or prospects as well as where their interests lie and what kind of content they prefer receiving from companies like yours. All essential pieces of information for making smart business decisions that keep people coming back again and again!
10 Tools for Social Listening
Social listening tools are used for a variety of purposes.
They are used to listen for brand mentions, measure sentiment and identify influencers. These tools can also be used to engage with customers, monitor competitors or track brand mentions in real-time.
1. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from one place. It also allows you to schedule posts, monitor brand mentions and competitor activity. If you have multiple marketing campaigns running at the same time, Hootsuite can help you measure your ROI across different platforms and channels.
2. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the best tools to monitor your brand, competitors and industry keywords. Simply set up alerts for specific search terms and Google will email you whenever they’re mentioned online.
For example, let’s say you want to monitor mentions of your company name or product line names in blog posts. You can set up an alert with exact terms and get notified anytime there is a mention on the web.
You can also set up alerts for your competitor brand names or products so that you know how often they are being talked about in the news or in forums like Reddit. The possibilities are endless!
3. Synthesio
Synthesio helps you keep track of real-time conversations about your brand, market trend and your competitors.
This social listening tool helps you keep up with what customers are saying, doing and thinking. It gives you data types like social-declarative data, digital-behaviour data and digital surveys.
4. Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Today, social listening and analytics are essential parts of any good marketing strategy. Social media provides an unprecedented opportunity to understand your customers’ needs and preferences, which in turn allows you to design and deliver better customer experiences across all channels. To help businesses make the most of this opportunity, Salesforce has developed Salesforce Marketing Cloud — a social listening and analytics platform that integrates with other Salesforce products such as HubSpot and Pardot to provide a complete package for marketers who want to connect with customers across channels.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a free trial so you can try it out before investing in one of its more expensive plans; however, if you need something longer-term or want access to additional features (such as chatbots), there are other options available within the Salesforce ecosystem that may suit your needs better than the free version offered by Marketing Cloud. You can also integrate this tool with other tools such as HubSpot or Oracle Eloqua through API integrations if needed but note that this will require some technical skills on your part since none come packaged with these services automatically—you’ll need someone who knows how they work well enough before trying them out!
5. Mention
- Mention is a social media monitoring tool for tracking your brand, industry and competitors. You can use it to monitor your own social media accounts or those of others.
- It offers a free version (with some limitations) or paid versions, starting at $49/month. The pricing is on par with other tools in this list.
- The paid plans give you more features: custom alerts, advanced reporting and deeper analytics based on the data collected from social networks like Facebook, Twitter etc.
6. Brand24
Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool with a free plan, but you have to upgrade to get more features. It monitors multiple social networks, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You can also track your own brand mentions on the web as well as other keywords in order to see what people are saying about your business online.
Brand24 allows you to use their app on desktop or mobile devices which makes it easy for employees in different areas of the company (like marketing and sales) who might need access at different times throughout their day. The platform includes analytics so that users can drill down into data around topics like engagement rates or keyword performance over time in order to make decisions about how they use this information going forward.
7. Awario
- Awario is a social listening tool that allows you to monitor any topic from across the web, including Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
- You can set up keyword searches for your brand or industry, then set alerts for when new content is posted about those keywords.
- Awario has a free plan that lets you monitor up to five topics (see below for more details) or you can choose one of their subscription plans: Starter ($29 per month), Pro ($79 per month) or Pro Plus ($149 per month).
8. Talkwalker
Talkwalker is another social media monitoring tool that’s better suited to larger companies. It’s more expensive, but it also gives you more features. If your company has a large customer base and brand reputation to protect (or if you want to keep an eye on your competitors), Talkwalker is a great choice.
Talkwalker offers three different plans: Starter ($65 per month), Professional ($149 per month) and Enterprise ($295). All three plans give you access to Talkwalker’s basic features—such as keyword alerts and newsfeed monitoring—as well as advanced features like sentiment analysis, which helps gauge how people feel about a particular topic by measuring their online posts based on positive or negative keywords within them.
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9. Social Searcher
Social Searcher is a social listening tool that helps you find, track and analyze conversations about your brand across social media. It also provides a unique feature called the Social Radar, which is a visual representation of your brand’s online reputation.
Social Radar allows you to see at-a-glance:
- The volume of mentions your brand receives over time
- Which types of influencers are talking about you and how much they’re sharing with their followers (in terms of retweets, likes etc.)
- Which topics generate more positive or negative feedback from consumers
10. Sprout Social
Sprout Social helps users monitor their presence on multiple channels so they can stay up-to-date no matter where they are messaging their audience from Slack or email, Sprout Social lets them do so without having any difficulty obtaining information about those conversations being had elsewhere online.
The right tool for your needs can make it easier to track brand mentions and engage with customers.
Let’s say you’re a small business owner, or maybe you’re in charge of marketing at an enterprise company. You want to find out what people are saying about your company and its products online, but the process seems too complicated and time-consuming.
How do you track all that information? Do I need a person overseeing this monitoring 24/7? What if I just want to see what people are saying about me on Facebook or Twitter?
How would I even start? These questions may cross your mind when considering social listening tools—and for good reason: there’s no one-size-fits-all solution.
But by using the right combination of these tools, it’s possible for any organization big or small to easily parse through conversations around their brand name(s).
Conclusion
You should now have a better understanding of what social listening is and why it matters. We’ve covered a variety of tools that can help you track your brand mentions on social media, but the best one depends on your needs.
For example, if all you need is Google Alerts, it won’t hurt to use them instead of buying an expensive tool like Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Mention. However, if you want something more robust with advanced features like sentiment analysis or real-time monitoring capabilities then Conversocial might be a good option for your business!
