We regularly see businesses turn to social listening to boost their brand. In this blog, we dive into why, and uncover 7 of the best social media listening tools available today.
What is social listening?
Social listening helps brands monitor online conversations. Conversations that use specific keywords and phrases. Conversations about your brand, your business, your industry, your product, your competitors.
It's a powerful business practice that helps brands make sense of the crazy and overcrowded online world. Find patterns and trends to use to your advantage. To your brand's advantage. But, it can be even more than that.
It started as an early warning system for comms departments, looking to avoid potential crises. Soon, other teams quickly recognized the value of social listening. They started using social media listening tools to...
- Identify insights to improve marketing campaigns
- Find consumer feedback about products
- Improve the efficiency of customer support
Social listening plucks key insights from social media channels to boost your online marketing strategy and product development. It helps you find data to enable better decision-making. It reveals new business opportunities. It lets you know what consumers are thinking.
The tricky bit? Clicking on a hashtag or @mention, tracking notifications, and counting the number of likes. It isn’t enough.
Consumers want their voices heard, but they don’t always talk clearly. 30% of tweets about a brand, don’t include the brand’s Twitter handle. That’s 30% - of prospect, customer, and customer support queries - ignored.
You can learn more about it in our social listening guide. Just click below...
Quick Search social listening tool - quickly track competitor conversations
Why is social media listening important?
Social listening is way more than checking Twitter and Facebook every five minutes. There are many benefits...
Customer support - turning a negative into a positive
Consumers turn to social looking for a response to a question, or a solution to a problem. Social listening tools mean that you can now find these conversations and improve consumers' online experience. Increase trust. Boost brand awareness.
As consumers, we expect a fast response. Fail to hear us, and we'll find a brand that's listening.
If you have a social media listening strategy, you can track mentions of your brand, products, competitors, and industry. You'll discover exactly what your target audience likes and dislikes.
BTW... track all variations of your brand name, with and without the @ symbol. Common misspellings too. If you cover your bases, you'll never ignore an opportunity to engage.
Find the best influencers for your brand
Influencers are vital to your brand. Why?
Because 74% of consumers use social media to steer their purchasing decisions.
Consumers rate influencers’ opinions highly. We listen to them. You need these guys on side. Promoting and recommending your brand and products. Engage with them.
Track hashtags and keywords
If you're working on a new campaign, you'll need the best hashtags, keywords, and phrases. These can help you shape content to reach the right people. Social listening tools find those keywords and monitor what people say about your campaign.
Did they love it? Hate it?
Talkwalker social listening tool - track hashtags, keywords, and phrases.
Track phrases and find potential issues that consumers have.
For example, track “brand name isn’t working”. You can then jump in quickly and address the issue. This example of a quick response demonstrates that you’re looking out for consumers, you’ve got their back. You're listening, and you care.
Real-time feedback & business opps
If you use social listening tools, you’ll have access to real-time feedback from consumers. This will help you improve business processes and product development.
The Hilton Hotels chain listens to customers on Twitter. It tracks phrases such as “where should I go on my next vacation?”. The chain then responds directly with suggestions, including links to destinations.
Cool and effective idea.
Drive your business advantage
Stats from your social listening tools will help you evaluate your activities, and feed your social media marketing strategy.
Use audience segmentation and influencer analysis to find the best markets and communities to target. You'll find...
- Best time slots for engagement
- Metrics - share, sentiment, reach, impact
- Trending topics
- Product development ideas
You'll then be best-placed to evaluate brand visibility and perception before, during, and after your campaigns launch. Meaning you'll know whether they're working or not.
Competitor analysis
You don't have to restrict your listening to consumers. There's chatter from and about your competitors, that you mustn't ignore.
What do consumers think of them?
Are their marketing campaigns working?
Any ideas you hadn't thought of that you could 'borrow'?
Is a crisis about to hit them, that you can avoid?
Which brand has the largest share of voice?
There are even more reasons why social listening is important (9+ if you want the numbers. You can find them all in our blog.
Let's get onto the top social listening tools...
Top social media listening tools
What do you do? Hire a person to monitor social media day in, day out?
Pricey.
Get yourself some social listening. Get yourself some social listening tools. I’ve put together a list of the best on the market. There are freebies, low-cost, and premium.
In no particular order, let’s go...
Talkwalker Social Listening | Supercharged consumer intelligence
Talkwalker is a next-generation social listening platform. Wherever consumers mention your brand, trust Talkwalker’s Social Listening to find it.
Our social listening features coverage of 30+ social networks and 150 million websites globally, across 239 countries and regions. And covers 186 languages.
With industry-leading image recognition, you can detect brand logos in images and videos. Consumers don’t just talk about your brand, they share their experiences with it. And image recognition helps you track and understand these previously hidden mentions.
We also make it fast and easy to find valuable insights. AI Summaries to give you quick briefings about your consumer's conversations. Don’t waste time reading every mention.
While Yeti is on hand at all times, to answer any questions, and help you make the most of the platform.
It also includes Quick Search, our easy-to-use social media search engine. Use Quick Search to listen and find content ideas, detect influencers, understand your audience, and recognize trends. You can track keywords on all social media, blogs, forums, and online news sites.
- Compare up to five brands or topics for benchmarking
- Access vital KPIs - engagement, volume, demographics, SOV, and sentiment analysis @ 90% accuracy
- Unlimited search, unlimited results - going back 13 months
- Global coverage - social networks, news sites, blogs, and forums
Quick Search - listen to your audience!
"Quick Search provides such an easy and user-friendly opportunity to deep dive into your competitors' social sphere; letting you harness their strengths and weaknesses to improve and cultivate a winning marketing strategy. For a specific breakdown of the importance of this, you should definitely check out Talkwalker's latest article on the necessity and implications of competitor analysis for your business and brand."
Christina Garnett @RoanokeMaven | Marketing Media Maven
Hootsuite | Manage all your social accounts
Hootsuite is a social media management tool working with - Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube. With shared access, you and your team can stay on top of all your social media posts.
Integrated with Talkwalker, you can set up streams and monitor brand mentions of your favorite topics. Covering millions of news sites, blogs, and forums whilst sharing content in real time. If you’re using Hootsuite already, you can install the Talkwalker app for free.
Yep, doesn’t cost a thing!
"If you are looking for a tool that lets you manage all of your social media accounts and presence in a single place, and collaborate as a team on them, then Hootsuite should be at the top of your list to investigate."
"The company keeps investing in enhancements to its platform. Hootsuite just keeps getting better. And that’s not always true with products."
Anita Campbell (@smallbiztrends) | Founder and Publisher of Small Business Trends
While most use Hootsuite for its scheduling and content optimization tools, it also has a sophisticated social monitoring platform. You can monitor social networks by keyword or location. Add an @username or a simple phrase or keyword and you’ll get all the mentions in your dashboard.
IFTTT | Working with 100s of apps
If This Then That - it’s all in the name.
IFTTT works with hundreds of apps and devices, including
- Dropbox
- Evernote
- Nest
- Fitbit
- Amazon Alexa
- Gmail
An Applet is when you combine these ‘services’. Here’s an example given by IFTTT:
“Use an Applet to sync Amazon Alexa to-dos with your Google Calendar. Or, an Applet that lets you create events in your iPhone Calendar, via Google Assistant.”
You can connect to IoT devices, receive texts when it’s raining, turn on you garage lights as you arrive home.
It’s a freebie that’s also available as iOS and Android apps.
Talkwalker Alerts | Quick, easy, free
OMG!!! You don’t monitor your online reputation? How do you know when someone’s slamming your brand?
You need to find negative comments and respond to them QUICKLY. It’s all about damage limitation. Talkwalker Alerts is quick to set up, easy to use, and best of all… IT’S FREE!!!
Talkwalker Alerts eats negative comments for breakfast.
It takes seconds to set up your alerts. Then you’ll receive email alerts of the latest mentions on the web, and all the breaking news stories related to your queries. The alerts come with a short description and a link to the news source.
Big news, it’s the only alerts tool that monitors X/Twitter!!
Did I mention that it’s free?!!
Reputology | Track brand sentiment in reviews
How will you know what people think of your business if you don’t listen to what consumers are saying?
Track reviews talking about your brand, product, industry and customer services. Before consumers buy, they’ll read online reviews from happy and not-so-happy customers. If you’re not there getting involved, you could miss out on winning new customers due to a negative comment. Reputology allows you monitor your reviews in a single dashboard.
Reputology tracks review sites, app directories, Facebook, Google, and Yelp. The semantic analysis technology allows you to identify customer sentiment towards your brand. So you can address negative comments fast.
With consumers expecting to hear back from you within 24 hours of posting online, you can’t afford to ignore them.
- Monitor and measure constantly
- Identify what makes customers happy
- React to developing issues in real-time
- Spot trends ahead of time
- Custom world cloud reports
- Track your team’s responses
It’s not free, but each pricing plan offers a free trial.
Quora | Questions and answers
You ask a question. You answer a question. That’s Quora.
A free site showing what people say about your brand, product, services, competitors, and industry. Or other relevant/not so relevant topics.
Search for and answer questions or topics related to your brand and target audience. Follow people you think are relevant to your business. You’ll receive regular updates in Quora and notification by email.
To listen effectively, create feeds on the pain points your product solves. If you offer social media listening, create feeds around digital marketing, social media marketing, content marketing, etc.
Using a keyword, search for questions relevant to your brand and product. What are people asking for? What do they want?
Twitter / X Advanced Search | Fine-tune queries
With 500 million tweets posted daily, how on earth are you supposed to find what you’re looking for?
Fine-tune your queries with Twitter / X Advanced Search. Use filters to find specific content.
- Tweets from today, yesterday, last year
- Geographic location - country, city, etc.
- Tweets with a phrase, e.g., ‘Where should I go on holiday’
- Specific accounts - competitors, partners, vendors, etc.
- A specific tweet with a remembered phrase - without knowing who tweeted it
- Tweeters with a particular keyword, phrase, or hashtag in their bio - journalist, PR, writer, blogger
Dig deeper:
- Popular tweet - Top
- Recent tweet - Live
- Person - Accounts
- Media - Photos, Videos
What consumers say behind your back matters to your brand
Social media monitoring tools are great for monitoring your brand’s reputation and that of your competitors. Plus you can create alerts and listen to your entire industry, identifying what your buyer personas care about. You’ll deliver better content, better products, and more meaningful engagement.
These are some of the best social listening tools I've found on the market. If you're looking for a single social listening tool that'll give you all of the above, and more, trust Talkwalker. Learn more by clicking below.
Additional Social Listening Resources
7 inspiring social listening examples for brands
Mastering social listening: tips and techniques
How to create a social media report
What's the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
