12 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools (2023 Comparison)

Are you looking for a social media monitoring tool to help keep track of what your customers are saying about your business?

Social listening is a great way to gauge brand sentiment, and it’s a useful practice for businesses of all sizes. However, in order to keep track of social mentions properly, you’ll need a social media monitoring tool.

In this article, we’ll be taking an in-depth look at the best social media monitoring tools available to help you decide which is the right one for your business.

Ready? Let’s get started.

The best social media monitoring tools – summary

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#1 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one social media tool that has some pretty powerful social media monitoring features.

Not only does Agorapulse help you to monitor mentions of your brand, but you can also monitor what people are saying about your competitors.

With the keyword search tool, you can monitor mentions of other brands, or even specific words relating to your own campaign, not just your brand name.

Another benefit of Agorapulse is that it’s quick and easy to respond to social media mentions and direct messages thanks to the social inbox feature.

In just a few seconds you can join in with customer conversations, respond to comments, and more. This means you can be the first to respond to your customers, whether their comments are positive, or negative.

In addition to its social media monitoring features, Agorapulse also comes complete with other essential tools such as social media publishing and reporting.

It’s the perfect tool for brands, agencies, or social media managers. Also, Agorapulse has its own app, so you can stay on top of your social media monitoring no matter where you are.

Key features:

• Brand monitoring
• Competitor monitoring
• Keyword monitoring
• Social inbox
• Social media publishing/scheduling tools
• Custom reports
• Collaboration features
• Mobile app
• Labels
• Boolean searches
• Unlimited saved searches

Pros:

• Advanced features
• Flexible search parameters
• All-in-one social media toolkit
• Unlimited keyword and hashtag tracking (Twitter & YouTube) on all plans

Cons:

• Higher-priced plans are expensive
• Not a dedicated listening tool

Platforms supported: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube

Pricing: Agorapulse has a free individual plan available. Paid plans start at €59/month/user. Yearly discounts available.

Read our Agorapulse review.

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#2 – Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful social media monitoring tool perfect for brands that are looking to monitor mentions from all across the web & popular social networks.

Keeping tracking of Facebook comments and Instagram mentions is one thing, but Brand24 will allow you to do so much more than that. With Brand24 you can track mentions from all corners of the web, including news outlets, blogs, forums, podcasts, and reviews.

Brand24 uses advanced sentiment detection to automatically gauge the overall brand sentiment. The tool will also instantly notify you of negative company mentions so that you can quickly and effectively respond to negative conversations before they snowball into larger issues.

Brand24 is also a great tool for building strong relationships with your customers via social media. You can use the tool to engage with your customers, quickly respond to reviews and make comments on social media posts and message boards.

Most importantly, the tool can help you to ensure that no positive mention of your brand goes unnoticed, and it makes it much easier to express your thanks and appreciation for positive comments.

Overall, Brand24 is the perfect monitoring tool for large brands and agencies. Not only will it allow you to track and analyze your brand’s social presence, but you can also use it to create extensive reports, and supercharge your marketing and PR campaigns.

Key features:

• Mentions feed and analytics 
• Influencer score tool 
• Discussions volume tool 
• Sentiment analysis 
• Alerts and filtering 
• Data exports

Pros:

• Dedicated social listening tool
• Monitor mentions and brand sentiment across platforms 
• Influencer score feature for selecting influencers for campaigns 
• Discussions volume helps you monitor how much your brand is being talked about online 

Cons:

• Plans have limits on keyword tracking 
• No free plan available

Platforms supported: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Twitch, blogs and news outlets, newsletters, podcasts, and the web.

Pricing: Plans start from $49/month

Read our Brand24 review.

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#3 – Awario

Awario is a useful social media monitoring tool that can help you to not only track your social media mentions but capitalize on them.

Awario provides real-time monitoring of social media platforms, blogs, and more to give you the most up-to-date picture of your customer’s brand sentiment.

It also comes complete with a powerful analytics dashboard that you can use to visualize and track all of your brand mentions on various social networks and platforms.

However, arguably the best feature of Awario is its social selling function. Awario can help you to collect posts from around the web that ask for recommendations of products and services like yours.

This opens up ample sales opportunities and allows you to quickly and easily recommend your brand to qualified leads.

Not only that, but you can also use Awario to quickly identify negative conversations about your competitors.

With the help of this feature, you can siphon leads from your competition by offering an alternative, and better product or service to customers that already have gripes with your competitor’s products or services.

In addition to all this, Awario can also be used to create white-label reports for clients.

Key features:

• Real-time mentions monitoring 
• Mentions inbox 
• Awario Leads for social selling 
• Boolean search for targeted mentions monitoring 
• Awario reach tools 
• Analytics and white-label reporting 

Pros:

• Advanced monitoring technology that can help you gain tons of valuable insights
• White-label reporting is great for agencies 
• Social selling tools help you turn mentions into sales

Cons:

• Cheaper plans have low limits on topic monitoring 
• No free plan available

Platforms supported: Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, news, blogs, forums and the web.

Pricing: Plans start from $24/month

Read our Awario review.

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#4 – BuzzSumo

If you need a little help engaging with your customers on social media, then BuzzSumo may just be the tool for you.

In terms of social media monitoring, BuzzSumo provides a powerful monitoring tool that can help your track mentions, and stay ahead of key trends in your industry. You can track everything from brand mentions to specific topics and product mentions.

You can also set up tracking for key influencers and thought leaders in your niche so that you can be the first to engage with influential people in your industry.

Other features of BuzzSumo include its content discovery and influencer search tools. If you’re struggling to produce relevant content that will keep your followers engaged and keep your brand sentiment positive, then the content discovery tool is just what you need.

It can help you discover the most relevant topics for your audience and the current trends on different social platforms. In addition to this, the Find Influencers tool can help you pinpoint the most influential people in your niche, which is perfect if you’re planning influencer marketing campaigns.

Key features:

• Brand mention monitoring 
• Topic monitoring 
• Competitor analysis 
• Product mention monitoring 
• Tracking tools for blogs, influencers, and journalists
• Backlink monitoring 

Pros:

• All-in-one content marketing tool with social media monitoring built in
• Great for competitor analysis 
• Advanced monitoring for different metrics, not just mentions

Cons:

• Doesn’t include monitoring for Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok
• No authority metrics included with backlink tool

Platforms supported: YouTube, Reddit, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, and the web.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $119/month, or you can pay annually and save 20%. Try BuzzSumo with a 30-day free trial.

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#5 – Sendible

Sendible is an all-in-one solution designed to put you in the driving seat when it comes to social media marketing. One of the stand out features of this tool stack is the listening tool.

The tool allows you to track mentions relating to a range of keywords, including your brand name, industry terms, and competitor brand names.

You can view all of your brand mentions in one place, and manage your social media interactions, messages, and comments from one easy-to-use dashboard.

Sendible integrates with Slack to make it easier for you to include merge social media monitoring tasks with your team’s existing workflows.

The social listening tool also has a Twitter lead generation that you can use to highlight pain points for consumers within your niche and get involved in relevant conversations.

As social media tools go, Sendible is quite an affordable option and would be a great choice for smaller brands and agencies.

Not only does it provide in-depth social media monitoring features, but it also makes it easy to manage other tasks such as scheduling, publishing, and content collaboration from one centralized dashboard.

Key features:

• Keyword tracking
• Brand monitoring
• Competitive analysis
• Slack integration
• Collaboration tools
• Scheduling & publishing
• Unified social inbox

Pros:

• Advanced automations, workflows, and collaboration features make it great for agencies and teams
• Capable of tracking any keyword across most of the major platforms
• Excellent design tools (Canva integration, image editor, media importing, etc.)
• Replaces multiple social media tools with its broad feature set

Cons:

• Might be overkill if you just want a social media monitoring tool (it’s more of an all-in-one solution for social media)
• Some social media networks are not supported (TikTok, etc.)

Platforms supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, GoogleMyBusiness, Pinterest, YouTube

Pricing: Prices start from $29/month

Read our Sendible review.

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#6 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a powerful social media analytics tool that includes Instagram monitoring features. If you like to keep track of your social media performance but feel that Instagrams built-in insights tools fall short of the mark then this is the tool for you.

With Iconosquare, you can organize and track all of your brand mentions from Instagram in one easy-to-read feed.

Designed with all the features of Instagram in mind, the Iconosquare brand monitoring tool helps you to break down your mentions to analyze them and make powerful insights about your Instagram strategy.

You can break down your mentions based on the type of mention, such as caption, comment, etc. You can also easily view posts and stories that you’ve been tagged in by going to my tags feed.

Iconosquare can also be used to spy on competitor Instagram profiles and benchmark your brand’s progress. You can also easily schedule regular competitor performance reports.

In addition to social media monitoring, Iconosquare comes complete with a publishing tool, and a range of analytics tools.

Key features:

• Social media listening
• Deep insights (analyze tags and mentions by type)
• Tags feed
• Competitive analysis
• Publishing tools
• Collaboration tools
• Conversations management
• Analytics
• Instagram performance benchmarking

Pros:

• Great for tracking hashtags and competitors
• Keep track of your mentions with automated monthly reports
• Very easy to use
• Eye-catching reports and UI

Cons:

• Heavily focused on Instagram (most of the listening features don’t work on any other platforms)
• Can’t track hashtags with over 50k posts per day
• Limited to 10 hashtags and 10 competitors
• No keyword monitoring

Platforms supported: Instagram only for social media monitoring. Other tools can be used to track Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Pricing: Prices start from $49/month

Read our Iconosquare review.

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#7 – Semrush

Semrush is an all in one marketing platform that includes a range of tools to assist in your social media campaigns.

Semrush comes complete with a brand monitoring tool and a social media tracker that can allow you to gain insights about brand mentions on social media and across the web.

Semrush’s brand mentioning tool focuses more heavily on analytics and gaining customer insights. The tool still includes important monitoring metrics like brand sentiment and individual mentions as well as other key metrics like backlinks, traffic estimations, and more.

What if you want to track the performance of your social media posts? You can use the social tracking feature to track top-level metrics for posts + profiles.

In tandem, the two features create the ultimate social media monitoring tool that can be used to gain powerful insights about your brand, and how well you are performing in comparison to competitors.

If social media monitoring is just one of the many marketing tasks you’re looking to get started with, them Semrush could be for you.

In addition to the features we’ve mentioned, Semrush also provides powerful tools like Keyword research tools, SEO tools, and many more. This makes it the perfect choice for someone looking for an all-in-one marketing solution, as opposed to a dedicated monitoring tool.

Key features:

• Social media tracker
• Mentions monitoring 
• Competitor analysis 
• Social media poster 
• Social media ad management 

Pros:

• Monitor your own mentions and your competitors
• Monitor posting times, performance, and more
• Social media posting tool built-in 

Cons:

• Other tools are better for tracking mentions and online sentiment 
• Paid plans are expensive, although a free trial is available

Platforms supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, GoogleMyBusiness, Pinterest, YouTube, and the web.

Pricing: Prices start from $129.95/month

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#8 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an enterprise-level social media management tool with powerful listening features including. The tool can be used to track mentions from across the web, from the big three platforms (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) to smaller more niche platforms like Reddit.

Sprout Social’s social media listening tool can not only help you to monitor mentions relating to your own brand, but it can also help you to gain powerful insights about your industry from social media.

You can use it to gauge audience sentiment and brand health, as well as using it to learn more about influencers and thought leaders in your industry.

This is the perfect tool for businesses that are looking to up their social media marketing game, and companies that plan on engaging in influencer marketing.

Like many of the other tools on this list, you can also use it to keep a close eye on the competition and gain key insights relating to their social media strategy.

Key features:

• Social media monitoring
• Web monitoring
• Competitor analysis
• Audience analysis
• Customer feedback & research
• Sentiment research
• Campaign analysis
• Trend identification
• Identify influencers
• Share of voice tracking
• Brand health monitoring
• Publishing & scheduling tools
• Unified social inbox

Pros:

• Monitor mentions across a wide range of channels
• Advanced analytics like share of voice and brand health
• Great for benchmarking and competitive analysis
• Ideal for agencies and teams

Cons:

• Very expensive
• Geared more towards enterprises & agencies than SMBs

Platforms supported: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr, and the web.

Pricing: Prices start from $249/user/month

Read our Sprout Social review.

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#9 – Socialinsider

Socialinsider is a social media analytics and competitor research tool designed with agencies in mind. When it comes to monitoring, Socialinsider allows you to keep track of your own Twitter mentions and keep a keen eye on your competitor’s mentions too.

You can view all your Twitter mentions in one simple-to-use dashboard, and include key mentions and insights in analytics or competitor reports.

Socialinsider also offers premium social media analytics tools such as a unified social media dashboard and hashtag performance measuring. You can use the dashboard to create reports relating to all of your social media accounts including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok.

You can even use it to track Facebook and Instagram ad analytics. Thanks to its powerful campaign reporting feature, Socialinsider is the perfect social media analytics tool for agencies.

Key features:

• Twitter mentions monitoring 
• Competitor analysis and monitoring 
• In-depth social media analytics 
• Reporting tool
• Unified social media dashboard

Pros:

• Great for tracking Twitter mentions 
• High-quality social media analytics and insights
• Reporting tool is great for agencies 

Cons:

• No mentions monitoring for other social media platforms (only Twitter)
• No free plan available 

Platforms supported: Twitter only for social media monitoring. Other tools can be used to track  Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok

Pricing: Prices start from $83/month

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#10 – Mention

Mention is one of the best social listening tools but it lacks some of the advanced features of Brand24 and others on this list. The tool includes some powerful listening and monitoring features that can help you to track mentions about your own brand, and your competitors.

With Monitor, you can track mentions from over 1 billion sources a day, and neatly compile them in an easy-to-view dashboard. In addition to social media platforms like Instagram and Twitter, Monitor can also help you track mentions on high-level news and blog sites.

If you’re the kind of person that hates receiving tons of notifications and alerts, Mention is the perfect tool for you. You can set up advanced alerts so that you’re only notified about the social mentions that really matter.

The tool can also be used to create concise and in-depth reports. The listen feature can help you to gain more insights relating to your audience based on social media mentions.

In addition to all this, Mention has a social media publishing feature, that makes managing posts for different platforms a breeze.

Key features:

• Web monitoring
• Social media listening
• Social media publishing & scheduling
• Alerts
• Advanced query builder
• Boolean operators
• Analytics
• Saved filters
• Mention previews
• Collaboration tools

Pros:

• Higher-tier plans have very advanced features
• Able to find mentions that other tools miss
• The preview tool is a great time-saver

Cons:

•  Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest listening are not included in entry-level Solo plan
• Refining searches can be difficult for beginners

Platforms supported: All plans support Instagram, Twitter, news websites, blogs, review sites, forum sites, and the web. The company plan also supports Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok.

Pricing: Mention has a free plan available. Paid plans start from € 29

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#11 – TweetDeck

TweetDeck is Twitter’s own social monitoring tool, and what’s great about it is that it’s completely free for Twitter users. TweetDeck is a simple to use tool that can help you to gain some insight into brand sentiment on the platform.

By searching for your brand name or a relevant topic, followed by a sad face or a happy face, you can easily view negative and positive comments related to the chosen keyword.

TweetDeck also allows you to schedule posts and manage multiple accounts from one easy-to-use dashboard. This simplified tool is a great alternative to an expensive social media management tool and is perfect is Twitter is the channel you use the most.

Key features:

• Brand name search
• View mentions by sentiment
• Customizable UI
• Tweet scheduling & publishing
• Monitor hashtags and stories
• Account linking
• Engagement tracking
• Messages
• Collections
• Activity

Pros:

• The column-based dashboard is completely customizable
• It’s free to use
• Manage and track multiple brands from one place

Cons:

• No other social networks supported

Platforms supported: Twitter

Pricing: TweetDeck is a free to use tool

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#12 – Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence tool that can be used to track social media conversations and mentions. The tool gives your real-time insight into conversations happening on major social media platforms and across the web.

Talkwalker provides a range of free social monitoring tools like mention alerts and a social search tool which track mentions from across the web and Twitter. However, it’s Talkwalker’s paid tools that really stand out from the crowd.

Talkwalker’s Social Intelligence tool doesn’t just track text and comments, it can also be used to track logos, social images, and videos.

This tool is perfect for anyone planning a video marketing or YouTube campaign as you can use the tool to track what people are already saying about your brand on video platforms. Talkwalker also uses AI-powered sentiment analysis to provide you with key insights about your social media performance.

This advanced-level monitoring tool integrates seamlessly with popular social media marketing software like Hootsuite, Facelift, and more. All in all, it’s the perfect tool for those looking to take social media monitoring to the next level.

Key features:

• Social listening
• 5 years of historical data
• AI-powered sentiment analysis
• Image, video, and speech recognition technology
• Track mentions in videos
• Automated smart alerts
• Reports
• Customized dashboards

Pros:

• Very advanced consumer intelligence platform
• The AI-powered sentiment analysis is excellent
• One of the only tools that can track media mentions like videos, images, and logos
• Free monitoring tools such as TalkWalker Alerts are available

Cons:

• Expensive
• No upfront pricing information for paid platform (you have to request a quote)

Platforms supported: social media platforms, blogs, forums, and news sites

Pricing: Talkwalker has some free social media monitoring tools available. To access the Social Intelligence tool, contact Talkwalker and request a demo

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What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of monitoring what people say about your business on different social channels.

You can use the information you gather to keep your finger on the pulse when it comes to customer relationships and inform your marketing campaigns. To monitor mentions of your brand, you’ll need one of the social media monitoring tools listed above.

How often should you monitor your brand?

Social media monitoring is an ongoing task, and it’s best when you take stock of what’s being said about your businesses at least once a day.

By monitoring your brand mentions regularly, you can stay up-to-date on the latest discussions regarding your business and be the first to know about any issues or negative sentiment. The sooner you know about these kinds of things, the sooner you can take steps to resolve them.

What should you look for when monitoring brand mentions?

You can use one of these social media monitoring tools (e.g. Brand24 or Awario) to keep track of individual comments or conversations that are happening online, as well as for monitoring overall brand sentiment. On a daily basis, you should check whether or not your brand sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

If you notice that your sentiment is overwhelmingly negative or positive, you can then take a closer look and evaluate what is causing the change.

This can help you to identify customer issues and complaints, as well as give you an idea of how your customers are responding to new products, marketing efforts, and more.

Choosing the right brand monitoring tool for your businesses

For many consumers, social media is the first place they will go to share their opinions about a business, so it’s really good practice to monitor your social mentions of your brand regularly.

But, how do you choose from all of these social media monitoring tools?

The tool you choose will depend on the size of your business, your budget, and what other social media features your business needs. You will also need to consider the social media channels your business is focused on most.

If you’re struggling to choose an option, you can’t go wrong with any of our top three picks:

• Agorapulse – For all-in-one social media management software that includes social listening.
• Brand24 – For monitoring mentions from all corners of the internet.
• Awario – For businesses looking for a tool that includes social media monitoring and lead generation and sales features.

If you’re keen to learn more about using social media for business, or social media marketing check out some of our other posts including 28 Latest Social Media Statistics: What Is The State Of Social Media? and 16 Best Social Media Analytics Tools: Reporting Made Easy.

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