11 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools (2025 Comparison)

Looking for the best social media monitoring tools? You’re in the right place.

Social media monitoring tools allow you to ‘listen in’ to what people are saying about your brand, competitors, or keywords across social networks, and extract invaluable insights from those conversations.

To help you find the right solution for your needs, we’ve reviewed and compared all the leading social media monitoring tools on the market in this post.

The best social media monitoring tools – comparison

#1 – Brand24

Brand24 is the best dedicated social media monitoring tool on the market. It doesn’t just allow you to monitor all the main social media platforms, but also news sites, blogs, videos, forums, and pretty much everywhere else on the web.

To get started with Brand24, just sign up and enter the keywords you want to monitor. That could include your brand name, a competitor you want to monitor, or a topic you want to listen in on conversations about.

You’ll then get a list of all the latest and most popular mentions of those keywords on each platform, as well as a bunch of analytic reports with useful insights

AI-powered sentiment analysis tells you what percentage of your mentions are positive, negative, and neutral, so you can see what your audience really thinks about your brand (or your competitors) at a glance. Meanwhile, metrics like mention volume, reach, and presence score make it easy to quickly benchmark your brand awareness.

The ‘Discussion Leaders’ feature tells you who’s talking about your brand/keywords most on social. This comes in super useful when planning influencer marketing campaigns and helps you to find out who your biggest brand ambassadors are.

I also like the AVE (Advertising Value Equivalency) metric, which makes the usually difficult task of measuring the ROI of your social media marketing and PR activities easy. It calculates the value of your mentions based on the cost of equivalent advertising space. 

My favorite feature, though, is the Word Cloud. It provides a visual map of all the words that most commonly appear alongside your monitored words/phrases, helping you to better understand the context of discussions about your brand or industry.

My one gripe with Brand24 is that its entry-level plan only lets you monitor up to 2k mentions per month. There are higher-priced plans available that let you monitor up to 100k mentions, but they get pretty expensive. That said, 2K mentions per month should be enough for most small businesses.

The plan you sign up for also determines how often Brand24 crawls the web in search of your chosen keyword: every 12 hours, every hour, or in real-time.

Key features

• Mentions Feed. Monitor, manage, and interact with all your social media mentions from one organized feed.
• Mention Analytics. Get a better understanding of what people are saying about your monitored keywords and find out who’s talking about your brand.
• AI-powered insights. Automatically analyze the sentiment of monitored social media conversations with the power of AI.
• Storm Alerts. Get notified about sudden changes in mention volume or social media reach so you can take action quickly.
• Filtering options. Refine your keyword monitoring searches with rich filtering options and boolean search operators (AND, OR, NOT, etc.).

Pricing

Plans start at $99/month and get up to 2 months free with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Brand24 review.

#2 – Awario

Awario is another excellent dedicated social media monitoring tool. It’s the best choice for social selling thanks to its innovative ‘Leads’ feature, through which it practically pays for itself.

Like Brand24, you can use Awario to monitor all the main social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, YouTube, etc.— as well as blogs, forums, and other web sources.

All you have to do is create a project and enter your brand name, plus a few keywords to describe the product/service you sell, and any competitors you want to monitor.

Then, Awario will start crawling over 13 billion web pages every single day to discover conversations including those words/phrases.

It’ll pull in the results into your Mentions feed. From there, you can click on any mention to open it up in the channel it was posted on and jump into conversation.

You can use rich filtering options to sort through mentions and take advantage of the automated sentiment analysis to narrow it down to positive/negative/neutral conversations, depending on what you’re looking for.

You can also view reports with statistics that show you things like your mention growth over time, brand sentiment, reach, etc. Plus, view useful insights into the influencers who have mentioned your monitored keywords on social.

And we haven’t even got to the best bit yet—the Leads feed.

As Awario monitors the web, it picks out conversations in which people are complaining about your competitors or in which they mention that they’re looking for products/services like yours, and pulls those conversations into a separate Leads feed. You or your team can then reach out to the prospects in your Leads feed to capitalize on the sales opportunities.

Even if you only make a handful of sales a month from your Leads feed, that should more than cover the cost of an Awario subscription. 

Speaking of which, Awario’s monthly subscription plans are pretty great value for money too. You can monitor up to 30k mentions in the entry-level plan, which is 10x more than Brand24’s entry-level plan for half the price.

Key features

• Mention monitoring. Set up Alerts to monitor mentions of your brand and all the keywords that matter to your business.
• Competitor monitoring. Monitor conversations about your biggest rivals on social media to gather competitive insights.
• Leads & social selling. Automatically discover social selling opportunities by monitoring prospects’ conversations on social media and manage them from your Leads feed.
• Reports & analytics. Report on the results of your social monitoring to measure metrics like brand sentiment, reach, and more.

Pricing

Plans start from $49/month, save up to 40% with yearly billing. Get started with a free trial.

Read our Awario review.

#3 – Social Status

Social Status is the best solution for monitoring social media analytics. It doesn’t specifically monitor brand mentions like the other tools we’ve looked at, but it provides the best analytics and reporting tools you’ll find anywhere.

There are four things you can monitor with Social Status: Profiles, Ads, Competitors, and Influencers. And there’s a separate tool in the platform for each use case.

Get started by connecting your social media accounts: Social Status supports Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, X, and LinkedIn.

Then, open up the Profile Analytics tool to monitor and report on performance metrics like reach, impressions, engagement, link clicks, and more. Plus, find out who your fans and followers are with audience demographic insights.

If you want to monitor your competitors on social media, open up the Competitor Analytics dashboard. From here, you can track any of your rival profiles, learn from their best-performing posts, and benchmark your performance against theirs.

There’s also the Ads Analytics tool, which lets you monitor and report on your paid performance, and the Influencer Analytics tool, which makes it easy to measure the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns.

Key features

• Profile monitoring. Track, measure, and report on the performance of all your social media profiles across multiple networks.
• Ads monitoring. Analyze your social media advertising performance and manage your Facebook Ads campaigns in one place.
• Competitor monitoring. Benchmark your engagement against your rivals and learn what’s working for your competitors.
• Influencer monitoring. Connect with creators you work with across social networks, and monitor & report on the performance of your influencer campaigns.

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start at $9/month, save 3 months with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#4 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is an all-in-one platform that offers social media monitoring, as well as listening, scheduling, and replying tools. It’s primarily for Instagram and Facebook, so it’s a good choice if you’re focusing exclusively on those platforms.

My favorite thing about Iconosquare is its Mentions Feed. It monitors social media for mentions of your brand/social profile, then shows you a running list of posts that you’ve recently been tagged in or mentioned in the caption/comments. 

I particularly like how you can click on posts you’re mentioned in, then click Repost to save the media to your library ready for scheduling/publishing to your own feed. This is a great way to find and show off positive posts about your brand, and it makes it easier to fill out your posting schedule with UGC (user-generated content).

Aside from reposting, you can also manage and reply to comments you’ve been mentioned in on Facebook and Instagram from the Conversations tool.

Plus, monitor mentions of custom hashtags and competitors with the Listening tool to benchmark your performance against your industry, discover post ideas, and more.

You can combine all of that data and more into fully customizable reports, and even build your own custom analytics dashboard with your choice of 100+ metrics.

Key features

• Mention monitoring. Monitor Facebook and Instagram for mentions of your brand/social profile, hashtags, and competitors, and view them in your Mentions feed.
• Social media analytics. Analyze monitored mentions as well as the performance of all your social media profiles and pages, and combine data into customizable reports.
• Conversations. Monitor social media for comments about your brand and reply to them from the built-in Conversations inbox.
• Publishing tools. Share and schedule posts to all your connected profiles in the built-in content calendar.

Pricing

Plans start at $59/month, save up to 22% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Iconosquare review.

#5 – Vista Social

Vista Social is another all-in-one social media monitoring tool. It offers multi-channel analytics monitoring, a keyword-based social listening tool, and review monitoring.

Vista Social’s social listening feature can only be used for listening on your own social profiles. It can’t crawl the web to find mentions of your brand/competitors/target keywords like some other social media monitoring tools, but it’s still very useful.

The way it works is first, you connect and add the profiles you want to monitor, then click Add Listener. 

Next, you add the keywords/phrases you want to monitor under ‘included keywords’, and any keywords you want to avoid under ‘excluded keywords’ (this helps you to avoid accidentally pulling in irrelevant conversations).

Finally, give your listener list a name and click Save, and Vista Social will start pulling in relevant conversations from your social profiles into the feed. Click on any of these conversations and it’ll take you straight to the comment or DM on the social network.

You can create multiple listener lists for different things. For example, you might have a ‘negative feedback’ list where you track keywords that indicate the user isn’t satisfied with your brand, like ‘unhappy’, ‘bad’, ‘poor’, etc, and a ‘positive feedback’ list where you track keywords that indicate they are happy, like ‘awesome’, ‘happy’, ‘great’. You get the idea.

You can also reply to your comments and messages in VistaSocial’s unified social inbox. Plus, analyze your performance and create reports in the Analytics tool, monitor reviews across multiple sites with the Reviews tool, and schedule social media posts with the Publishing tool.

Key features

• Analytics monitoring. Analyze all your social profiles across multiple social networks.
• Social listening. Monitor brand mentions on your social profiles with the listening tool.
• Review monitoring. Track and manage reviews across websites like Facebook, Yelp, Google Business, and Yelp.

Pricing

Plans start from $15/month, save up to 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Vista Social review.

#6 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is another good monitoring tool for analyzing your social media performance. It offers robust analytics and reporting features, as well as a neat Discovery tool that you can use to curate content from across the web.

Like Social Status, ContentStudio doesn’t offer mention tracking so you can’t monitor conversations about your brand, but you can monitor how you’re performing on social with robust multi-channel analytics for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.

For each platform, you can keep track of your page/profile engagement, analyze your top-performing posts, see your follower demographics, and access lots of other useful insights.

Plus, you can also monitor your competitors to uncover insights like their publishing frequency, average engagement rate, best-performing posts, etc. You can combine all of that data into white-label reports, and then auto-schedule them to be shared with your clients and stakeholders.

I also really like ContentStudio’s Discover tool. It monitors the web to find top-performing content for any given topic, then shows you them in custom infinite content streams.

If you see an article in your content stream that you think your audience will enjoy, you can share or schedule it to any of your connected social media profiles with the built-in publishing tools.

Aside from that, you can also monitor, manage, and reply to your incoming messages and comments from ContentStudio’s unified social media inbox.

Key features

• Analytics monitoring. Monitor your performance on social media with multi-channel analytics.
• Content monitoring. Use the Discover tool to discover and curate content that your social media audience will love from across the web.
• Message monitoring. Manage and reply to all your social media comments and messages across networks from one unified inbox.
• Other tools. ContentStudio also offers other social media tools including a scheduler/publishing tool, AI writer, team collaboration features, and more.

Pricing

Plans start from $25/month, get 20% off with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#7 – Mention

Mention is more than just a social media management tool. You can use it to monitor brand and keyword mentions across the entire length and breadth of the internet. Plus, analyze, report on, and reply to your mentions from the same place.

What I like most about Mention is how flexible it is. You can get really detailed with your keyword alert settings, using Boolean search operators and advanced filtering options to make sure it only monitors conversations that you’re interested in.

If you want, you can have Mention monitor everywhere across the web, or choose the specific sources, countries, and languages you want to monitor. Supported social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit.

It pulls new mentions into your feed in real-time as soon as it finds them, but it can also fetch old mentions from up to 2 years in the past—that’s something you can’t do with a lot of other social media monitoring tools.

I also love Mention’s Spike Alerts feature. It notifies you whenever it detects an unusually high volume of mentions, so you can quickly take action to make the most of a sudden boost in sentiment or mitigate the damage caused by a PR slip.

Key features

• Mention monitoring and analytics. Monitor social media and elsewhere on the web for mentions of your target keyword, and analyze mentions to extract valuable insights.
• Advanced keyword settings. Refine your social listening efforts with Boolean search operators and complex filtering.
• Spike Alerts. Get notified if there’s a sudden spike in the volume of mentions.

Pricing

Plans start from $49/month and you can get 2 months free when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#8 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the most powerful social media monitoring tools on the market, but that’s reflected in the price. It’s very expensive, so it’s best suited to businesses and marketing agencies with a large budget.

Sprout Social’s AI-powered social listening tool is one of the best we’ve tried. It’s loaded with advanced features like pre-built templates (for monitoring brand health, competitors, campaigns, events, industries, etc.), granular sentiment analysis, custom alerts, etc.

AI and automation tools help you delve into insights you gather through social media listening. For example, Smart Categories automatically filter conversations to show you the people, places, and things being discussed.

I also love Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox. It monitors all your socials for messages, mentions, tags, etc., and brings those conversations into one unified feed, where you can reply to and manage them. 

Again, the Smart Inbox is loaded with advanced features like AI-powered sentiment analysis and ‘crisis notifications’, which let you know about priority messages that must be actioned to avoid damage to your brand reputation.

On top of that, Sprout Social also comes with lots of other tools for social media management including analytics, influencer marketing, publishing, employee advocacy, and more.

Key features

• AI-powered social media monitoring. Create keyword alerts and listen out for mentions across social media.
• Smart Inbox. Manage and reply to your incoming messages, comments, and mentions across all your social media accounts.
• Other social media tools: Publishing, analytics, influencer marketing, etc.

Pricing

Plans start from $249/month, save up to 25% with annual billing. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Sprout Social review.

#9 – Keyhole

Keyhole is an easy-to-use social media monitoring and reporting tool that you can use to track brand mentions and analyze all your social media profiles and campaigns in real-time.

Keyhole’s core monitoring feature is its social listening tool. It lets you know what people are saying about your brand on all the leading social media platforms, and automatically analyzes the sentiment behind each conversation.

You can also use it to analyze hashtags, keywords, and competitor accounts. Plus, discover influencers that you might want to partner with, uncover emerging social trends, and much more.

I like Keyhole’s UI too. It’s super beginner-friendly and couldn’t be easier to use.

Key features

• Mention monitoring. Instantly know whenever someone mentions your brand on social, and analyze the sentiment behind brand mentions.
• Campaign monitoring. Measure the impact of your social media campaigns with all the important performance and engagement metrics.
• Competitor monitoring. Spy on your competitors to benchmark your performance and reverse-engineer their strategies.
• Influencer monitoring. Discover the top influencers in any industry, compare their performance, and measure the ROI of your influencer marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Plans start from $79/month, get 2 months free when you pay yearly. Try it out with a 7-day free trial.

#10 – SocialInsider

SocialInsider is a user-friendly social media monitoring platform that can help you analyze performance metrics on major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and more. 

As well as monitoring important KPIs like engagement, reach, impressions, and follower growth, SocialInsider can also be used for more in-depth analysis and competitor benchmarking. 

One of my favorite things about SocialInsider is that you can view key insights for individual posts, which is useful when planning future content. 

You can also gain key competitor insights like average engagement and follower counts to help you keep one step ahead of the competition. 

Another useful tool is the AI-powered listening tool. Although you can only use this tool to gain Instagram insights, I find it really useful for tracking hashtags and identifying niche-relevant influencers.

Key features

• Competitor benchmarking. Measure your brand performance against key competitors in your niche to improve your social media strategy. 
• AI Instagram listening. Track your brand and campaign hashtags to gain deeper insights into your Instagram content success. 
• User-friendly analytics monitoring. Easily track and view KPIs for all major social media platforms in one easy-to-use dashboard.

Pricing

Monthly plans start from $99. 16% discount is available on annual plans. 14-day free trial available.

#11 – Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a high-level consumer intelligence program dedicated to social media monitoring and listening. 

Talkwalker is one of my favorite tools to use for social media monitoring, as it has a comprehensive feature set that goes way beyond tracking mentions. 

Using the advanced boolean catalog, you can zoom in on specific conversations about your brand, and gain deeper insights and context by using the conversation clusters tool. 

You can also use Talkwalker to monitor and analyze sentiment across 30 social networks and other outlets online. There are tons of analytics to help you identify influencers in your niche and gain insights into your audience demographics. 

One thing I particularly like about Talkwalker is its predictive alerts tool, which provides real-time updates that will help you keep a close eye on your brand mentions. 

Key features

• Advanced boolean catalog. Refine and filter your analytics to find exactly the social conversations you are looking for
• Predictive alerting tool. Stay on top of social conversations with real-time updates regarding brand mentions
• Conversation clusters. Gain a better understanding of social context by viewing conversation clusters.

Pricing

Talkwalker offers custom pricing for each customer. Contact Talkwalker for a consultation and product demo

Final thoughts

Each of the social media monitoring tools we’ve looked at so far has its pros and cons. 

The right choice for you will depend on factors like which social media platforms you want to monitor, the features you need (e.g. mention tracking, analytics and reporting, scheduling tools, etc.), and your budget. 

If you’re not sure which one to go with, remember that most platforms offer a free trial that you can use to try them out before you buy.

To learn more about the current state of social media and what it takes to be successful, check out these social media statistics, facts, and trends.

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