The goal of every business owner is to grow their brand. At the same time, many businesses are trying to beat their competitors and stay ahead of the game in their industry. This industry ranking reflects each brand’s product delivery and customer service. Knowing what the public says about your brand on social media gives you an insight into their position. As a business person, it is essential to use effective social listening tools to gather public opinion.
Customer reviews can either make or break a business. Many people use various social platforms to give opinions about products and services. Social media platforms are the best place to monitor discussions about your brand and address customer feedback. There are several social media listening tools to help you get accurate data. But how do you identify which one works for you? In this article, we’ll explore everything about these tools.
What Are Social Listening Tools? Definition and Functions of These Aids
Many business owners depend on several mechanisms to monitor what people say about their brand. Staying ahead of competitors is a priority in every industry. However, understanding everything about these aids may seem like a puzzle. This brings most people to ask the question, what are social listening tools?
This refers to instruments that monitor conversations on various social media platforms. It could be conversations about your niche, brand, industry, or target audience. These tools help to analyze these conversations and give results for business owners to make marketing decisions. Social listening is essential to creating marketing strategies, as it enlightens you on the reasons for every conversation.
Despite the name suggesting otherwise, these instruments are not only for social media platforms. They can penetrate the internet and collect mentions about your brand or competitors. They can also collect your hashtags and any industry-related keywords instantaneously. You can convert these mentions into leads for your growth. You can also use them to build backlinks, gain intel on competitors, run market research, and develop better products.
Social listening tools allow you to deliver better customer service. The key features of these tools help to grow your customer base. Many potential customers use online reviews on social platforms for decision-making. Whatever people say about your brand will determine their decision to become clients. Therefore, identifying the perfect tools is essential to achieving all this.
5 Best Social Listening Tools: Top Effective Options in the Game
While there are several options to help scrape the internet for mentions, only a few are outstanding. The best social listening tools are popular for creating effective market campaigns to generate leads and grow your business. However, identifying them may be challenging for people who don’t understand their operation. Let’s explore five examples of these effective social monitoring aids.
1. Awario
Awario is a top social media listening tool for effective and affordable organizational-level competence. This tool tracks every conversation involving your brand, product, or service, regardless of the niche. You only have to set the parameters to any location, language, or platform. This tool allows users to set up a Boolean search to develop complex inquiries and run accurate monitoring. The social listening features of this tool include reputation management, market analysis, research, and crisis management.
Awario social listening tool is versatile in every aspect to allow users to utilize social media for customer support. This tool allows users to access various platforms and the web for competition and audience analysis. Its social media monitoring dashboard provides reviews of a brand, trend, or market data in real-time. One additional advantage of Awario is its affordability and compatibility with various platforms.
The Starter plan monitors three topics and fetches 30,000 new mentions at $29 monthly. At $89 per month, the Pro plan allows users to monitor 15 topics and 150,000 new mentions. The Enterprise plan allows access to 50 topics and 500,000 new mentions at a monthly fee of $299. An annual plan allows you to save up to 2 months of expenses. You also get a seven days free trial for using the Starter plan. Awario supports Twitter, aka X, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, Instagram, forums, blogs, review sites, and similar websites.
2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a user-friendly social media management software with effective social listening features. This tool offers a Boolean search mode to create accurate monitoring. This feature is perfect for brands with common names. Agorapulse’s social listening tool is also effective for large teams and agencies with multiple social media accounts. You can identify trending influencers and topics and provide immediate customer care service with its features.
In addition, Agorapulse allows you to allocate roles and assign tasks. You can review, reply, schedule, designate, and publish social media posts on any platform. The dashboard displays every social mention of your brand from all your accounts. You can join conversations relating to your business and react to messages in real-time right from the tool. It also allows business managers to assign each message and client to their team members for thorough follow-up.
However, all of these features come at a price. The Medium plan allows ten social profiles and two users at $107.83 per month. Four users can access 25 social profiles with the Large plan at $216.74 monthly. The X-Large plan gives access to eight users and 40 social profiles at $325.66 monthly. At $543.49 monthly, the Enterprise plan allows 20 users and 60 social profiles. Additionally, a yearly plan helps to save up to 20%. You also get a 15-day free trial for every plan.
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is a powerful organizational-level social media listening tool that uses analytics. This tool scrapes various social media channels for mentions about your brand. Its data provides accurate marketing insights to help your business. In addition, it offers daily conversations relating to your products or services. You get to see and distribute this data to every part concerned with customer experience management.
In addition, you can use Brandwatch to discover topics and trends that interest your customers. As part of the key features of marketing strategies, you get to measure your overall social media performance. This tool also helps you to identify target influencers to help build your brand. Brandwatch supports Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Twitter, aka X, review sites, blogs, news, forums, and video sites.
Like the previous social listening tools, this one isn’t free either. However, it only offers two types of plans. The Pro plan analyzes 10,000 mentions for $800 per month. The Brandwatch custom plan is available on request.
4. Keyhole
Keyhole joins the list as one of the outstanding tools for social monitoring. It tracks and gives results for both real-time and historical data. Additionally, the tool runs advanced marketing research to help marketers measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Keyhole offers various features like marketing campaigns and brand mention monitoring, influencer tracking, and competitor analysis.
Researching about competitors allows you to measure the success of your campaigns against your competitors. Keyhole social listening tool uses AI to predict trends and expected performance engagement. You can get predictions for the next 30 days, seven days, or 24 hours. It discovers and delivers the best-trending keywords using market research powered by machine learning.
The social listening features help to conduct in-depth analysis, collect, and reply to mentions about your brand. Therefore, gaining marketing insights, generating leads, and engaging influencers can help you grow. It supports various news, forums, blogs, and social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter, aka X.
The current pricing for this social listening tool varies according to the available plans. The Professionals offers three trackers and 20,000 posts at $199 per month. At $599 monthly, Corporations offer ten trackers and 150,000 posts. Agencies and Enterprise offers custom trackers and posts for $999+ per month. You can save up to 50% when subscribing to the yearly plan. Finally, both the Professionals and Corporations offer a seven days free trial.
5. Talkwalker as a Tool for Social Listening
Talkwalker is another organizational-level tool with brilliant social listening features. Apart from social media observation, this tool features broadcast, print, and TV outlets to monitor your brand reputation. It measures your social media presence, traffic, and brand influence on your audiences and locations. Talkwalker translates your marketing efforts into key performance indicators. It also uses customizable dashboards to share your analyses and results with teammates.
This social listening tool allows you to review your global campaign performance using in-depth sentiment analysis and reputation count. This review gives you marketing insights to create targeted messages and increase engagement. As an add-on feature, Talkwalker has its virality map to track essential influencers for your niche. You learn crucial topics and engage with key social media figures to boost your marketing campaigns.
Talkwalker supports social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram. You can access the Basic plan, which offers 10,000 monthly results for $9,600 yearly. The Corporate and Enterprise plan provides 100,000 to 1 million plus monthly results on request. Unfortunately, this tool doesn’t offer free trials.
Free Social Listening Tools: The Non-Paying Options
Most of the available social listening tools require payment at some point. However, there are some free ones you can try. These options are perfect for business owners who can’t afford the exorbitant prices of paid tools. Although the services are free, they are also effective at social monitoring and analytics. TweetDeck is a free social listening tool that allows you to gain insights on Twitter, aka X.
It allows users to combine their accounts in a single timeline. They can also decide to use separate columns for each account. TweetDeck allows users to track mentions of their brand, trend, or related topics. They can also schedule tweet posts on the platform and build tweet collections. You can create a default account or use TweetDeck to manage your social media accounts in a single timeline.
This tool allows you to link, post, and follow from multiple accounts. You can divide the timeline into columns according to your interests, mentions, or tweets about a trend. In addition, you can use TweetDeck for column filters to organize content, engagements, users, locations, and alerts. This would help you track hashtags, keywords, location-tagged tweets, or tweets with high engagement. Unfortunately, this brilliant tool only supports the X, aka Twitter platform. Nonetheless, you can learn about Twitter marketing strategy.
Social Listening Tools Comparison: Comparing Parameters for Decision Making
For anyone hearing about the function of the tools mentioned above, their features will seem identical. This perception will make it challenging to choose the one that suits you best. Well, you don’t have to worry about that anymore. A detailed social listening tools comparison will help your decision-making process. Let’s compare the parameters without further delay.
Pricing
From the explanation above, Agorapulse, Brandwatch, Keyhole, and Talkwalker are more expensive. Although Talkwalker is a one-time yearly payment, its monthly calculation is equivalent to Brandwatch. However, unlike an affordable option like Avario, the most expensive options offer more features. Additionally, TweetDeck is free but offers limited features. This makes it difficult to perform advanced operations. Ultimately, they all help monitor brand reputation and grow business.
Versatility
Versatility is the key feature when choosing an effective social media listening tool. Except you assume you have few customers, a tool that tracks several platforms should be your priority. TweetDeck doesn’t offer much for any brand with customers and competitors outside Twitter, aka X platform. In addition, tools like Brandwatch, Keyhole, and Awario penetrate blogs and forums for additional accuracy. As its advanced feature, Talkwalker collects data from TV stations, prints, and broadcast outlets.
Specialization
Each tool has its area of specialization. Awario focuses on complete social listening for any business. Agorapulse is perfect for scheduling and management to engage your audience. Keyhole is brilliant for data analysis to gain in-depth insight into various parameters. Brandwatch is perfect for enterprise-level brands to make accurate market research and reputation analysis. Talkwalker works perfectly for market insights and link-up with the right social connections. Finally, TweetDeck allows business owners to manage different social accounts in one timeline.
All of these social listening tools are effective in helping users to create an outstanding brand reputation. Using popular Twitter hashtags can also help optimize your tweets to reach your target audience. However, your old posts can influence what people say about your brand. Twitter, aka X, is the most popular place for business owners to get engagements and gather insights. This is why it is essential to keep negative tweets off your timeline. If you already have tweets like this, you can immediately clear them with help.
This is why, at TweetEraser, we have designed a highly efficient web application that filters and deletes bulk tweets. This app loads, imports, and deletes tweets and archives in a few easy clicks. TweetEraser does not spread promotional content on your timeline. Start cleaning your X timeline today!
