Top 26 Social Media Listening Tools for 2026

Since all this information is relayed in real-time, it’s easier to leverage Brandwatch’s insights for crisis management, trend forecasting, and campaign optimization. You can also use it to track the success of your social media marketing campaigns.

Key Features

Brandwatch’s listening tool lets you measure your mentions by day. You can see a snapshot of the whole week to determine which days had a higher volume of conversations about your brand.

For a deeper-level analysis, each mention is shown with certain metrics to tell you of its sentiment. The notification includes the content, sentiment, reach, date, time, and platform-based score.

Brandwatch also shows you an overall view of your brand on different platforms. There are visual charts to show brands the proportions of positive, negative, and neutral mentions on major social media platforms, blogs, and forums.

Since the data is updated regularly, brands can also see if their mentions have dropped or increased over a period of time. Brandwatch shows you the percentage of this change to make it easy to decide when it’s time to take action.

If there are any unusual trends in the data, Brandwatch’s AI smart alert automatically pings you about it so that you can take action immediately.

With 48 Boolean operators, it’s easy to specify your searches to the T. Brandwatch keeps a year of historical data for you to track important topics and trends over time. The tracked mentions are not limited to English; the tool also gathers data from other languages, making it a truly global solution.

You can connect Brandwatch’s Listen tool with its Engage feature to analyze beyond social media. The Engage feature further lets you dive into your mentions on niche forums and other community pages.

Similarly, the Consumer Research tool gathers insights from 1.4 trillion posts across 100 million online sources to inform you about your customers. Brandwatch’s AI also specializes in image analysis, letting you get insights from visual mentions.

Its customer classifiers are powered by Brightview, allowing you to train the system to form data categories based on your preferences. So, instead of positive and negative social media sentiment, you can also categorize data by campaigns, platforms, products, events, or other factors that are specific to your brand.

Success Strategy

Pierre Fabre, a dermo-cosmetic and pharmaceutical company, used Brandwatch

according to the company’s social media intelligence manager, Céline Cassagnes Febvre.

In 2020, the company created a social listening strategy that was handled by its CORE (Communication, Reputation, and Engagement) department. The department created Social Hub as a subdivision to monitor the brand’s online reputation.

Pierre Fabre got Brandwatch on board to make it possible. In 2021, when the company experienced a crisis, Brandwatch set real-time alerts for the crisis communication team to be aware of all information shared on social networks and in the press. With this data, the crisis team was able to guide its responsive communication strategy.

In another instance, the company used Brandwatch’s social media listening software to launch its Naturactive line of menstrual health products. Brandwatch’s data helped Pierre Fabre discover that most of the conversations around the female experience were happening on forums.

So, the company used forums as a primary source of information to design its SEO and content marketing campaigns. Since Brandwatch highlighted the exact keywords women were using, the company could enter the market by “establishing a relatable vocabulary that resonates with consumers.”

Brandwatch made the product launch a success, which ultimately led to long-term success for its sub-brand, Naturactive, helping it win the Product of the Year 2022 in France.

What sets Sendible apart is its integration with Google Alerts, allowing you to receive the latest blogs and news relevant to your set criteria directly on your dashboard. This feature not only keeps you informed but also aids in sharing pertinent content swiftly, enhancing your brand’s relevance and engagement. Additionally, Sendible’s multi-channel monitoring capability enables you to respond promptly to comments and messages, ensuring active and timely interaction with your audience.

Utilizing Sendible can significantly enhance your approach to social media listening. This tool is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of your social media presence. It comes with a suite of features that allows you to stay connected and respond in a constantly changing social media environment.

Plans: Creator $25/month, Traction $76/month, White Label $120/month, White Label+ $638/month. Pay yearly to save 15%. Free 14-day trail available.

The Brand24 Summary dashboard is where you get a bird’s eye view of your brand’s online presence. It shows you the total number of mentions, impressions, and reach of your brand. You can also see how many of the mentions are positive and negative.

There’s also a line graph that shows the change in brand mentions over time. Since the tool collects mentions from over 25 million sources in real-time, you’ll always be the first to know what your customers are saying about you.

Key Features

The most comprehensive feature of Brand24 is its Mentions Feed. Think of it like your social media news feed, but instead of seeing what your friends are sharing, you see all the conversations happening online about your brand.

The tool also shows a Discussions Volume Chart, which helps you identify sudden changes in brand mentions. If any of the changes peak, you can start crisis management and leverage positive publicity, whichever of the two the case may be.

For the brand mentions that get a significant reach, Brand24 gives them an Influence Score. Mentions with higher scores can be your future brand advocates or online ambassadors.

Brand24 also sends alerts that you can customize according to your preferences. For example, you can choose to get in-app or email notifications for negative or positive mentions that get more than 50k impressions.

You can export the sentiment analysis data from the tool as PDFs and infographics to share with your team or clients. If only data from a certain platform is needed, Brand24 allows that, too. Brands can filter data by number of visits, sentiment, mention source, platform, and other factors.

Brand24’s reports include a summary of mentions, mention coverage graphs, the number of mentions per category, a numerical summary, and other visualizations.

If you need detailed insights about the social media listening data you’ve collected, you can use Brand24’s AI. All it takes is a quick click to convert the visual and textual data into practical guidance.

You also get a ChatGPT-like AI-powered virtual assistant that can answer questions about your brand mentions and brand health. Brand 24’s AI also conducts topic analysis, helping you get trend-based insights for your social media campaigns.

Success Strategy

The efficiency of Brand24 lies in the fact that the tool doesn’t only show brands the positive, but also the negative, so that they can act on the feedback. For example, when Uber released its new rider app, the company saw a lot of enthusiasm around it on social media.

In just 2 days, the online discussions saw a 100% increase. However, amidst these discussions, some users were not happy with the app. Brand24 helped Uber identify them.

Uber used Brand24 to identify negative reviews so that it could discover what people did not like about the app. Social media listening, particularly on X, helped Uber identify features that people wanted to see in its app, as well as features that didn’t serve their intended purpose and needed to be modified.

Krzysiek Radoszewski, the marketing lead at Uber’s Eastern Europe arm reported that social listening helped the company satisfy its users needs, resulting in “an 11% increase in new users, and a 7% increase in average number of rides per user.”

Since Brand24 provided regular reports on the social media discussions around Uber, the company was able to act swiftly and make necessary changes to improve its app and overall customer experience. 

You can use Keyhole’s data to optimize and report on your hashtag campaigns. You can discover the total number of posts, the engagement rate, and the total reach and impressions your hashtags have generated.

Keyhole’s listening feature includes volume predictions, sentiment analysis, QuickTrends summarizing the latest industry trends, and competitor analysis.

It allows you to comb the web for any content that includes your search term. It doesn’t just give you search results, however. It also provides the amount of engagement associated with each search result. For example, if you set up a search for your organization, BuzzSumo will find its online mentions. But it doesn’t just tell you when somebody wrote a blog post criticizing your company’s service, for instance. It also tells you that people shared that article 26 times on Facebook, and tweeted about it 478 times – which would require serious damage control.

The platform also provides the total number of links each search result has received.

Buzzsumo provides a useful alerts feature. You can create alerts to track brand mentions, competitor mentions, content from a website, keyword mentions, backlinks, or an author. You can set parameters for your alerts to tailor them to your needs.

Key Features

Iconosquare allows you to benchmark your industry by tracking conversations on social media. The tool collects data from other competing brands in your industry, providing you insights about current trends so that you can determine where you stand.

You can also track relevant hashtags, whether for specific campaigns or your brand as a whole. Depending on your frequency of social listening analysis, you can schedule automated monthly reports to track your progress over time.

Iconosquare’s Conversations feature shows you all comments across your social media channels in one place. You can mark these comments as read or unread. The platform also lets you reply to comments.

With Iconosquare, you do not have to do the math yourself. The tool conducts sentiment analysis for all your brand mentions on social media and lets you export them for further analysis.

A unique feature of this tool is the Random Comment Picker. If you run contests or giveaways, you can use the Random Comment Picker to randomly select a winner from all the comments on your post.

Success Strategy

Racing 92, a European rugby team, realized it was spending too much time collecting social media data. So, the teams switched to Iconosquare to get precise statistics.

Icnonosquare helped the team refine its social media content by providing insight into how people react to it. The team was also able to benchmark its performance against 13 other rugby clubs and create targeted campaigns based on data-driven insights.

Jeanne Mallet, the spokesperson for the team’s communications department, said: 

Racing 92 also collaborates with partners to create content. When these stakeholders want to see results, Racing 92 can show them the data through Iconosquare.

The tool’s social media listening strategy is so effective because it keeps industry benchmarks and competitors in check. With this comparative data, you can see your brand’s standing in the market and decide on improvements to make.

• Monitor specific terms and topics
• Analyze mentions (up to 15 emotions for sentiment analysis)
• Share content and engage audiences
• Generate reports
• Measure ROI for owned media (paid and organic)
• Leverage search data for reputational management

Meanwhile, Digimind’s Market Intelligence tools utilize advanced extraction tools to gather information from over 800 million online sources, such as websites, RSS feeds, and forums. The data is then categorized using natural language processing (NLP) technology and semantic analysis engines.

Digimind’s tools enable you to see the conversations that matter the most for your brand, in real-time, across millions of online sources, to gain valuable insights you can use to drive and improve your marketing strategy. 

You can analyze and benchmark an unlimited number of social accounts simultaneously with Digimind Social Analytics. However, you can go beyond your social networks to see your brand based on Google search behavior. With Digimind’s Top Reputation module, you can follow what your customers want to know about you and your competitors’ brands, products, people, and more, all in real-time.

You can also conduct brand or topic monitoring manually using Boolean operators. In a Boolean search, you add “operators”—quotation marks, a slash, and words (and, or, not)—to get more accurate results.

Once you’ve set your search parameters, YouScan will build a page showing all the mentions the platform has collected matching your search criteria. You can then filter the results down in several ways to get what’s relevant to your search.

YouScan’s social listening tool casts a wide net with Visual Insights. This feature searches through images, and you can set detailed parameters to find pictures showing your specific requirements. An incredibly accurate AI engine powers image recognition. It can help you find detailed demographic and psychographic information about the people who use your brand.

You can use YouScan to find mentions of your brand by the most influential people and then determine who among these creators has the most engaged audiences. Moreover, the platform has Smart Alerts, which you can set to notify you whenever it “sees” any negative sentiment about your brand. You can even integrate complaints directly into your Helpdesk system.

The tool gives you volume, engagement, and sentiment metrics for the past seven days for the topics of your choice. Agorapulse also gives its own sentiment score to topics and indicates how it has increased in the past few days. It further breaks the sentiment down into positive, negative, and neutral, all compiled in a visual chart. 

Key Features

Agorapulse’s key feature is its brand name and mentions dashboard. The dashboard breaks down the number of engagements you get per day. It gives you an idea of the best-performing posts that have driven a lot of reactions.

With this tool’s social listening search bar, you can also search for specific keywords and hashtags. You can use this to find topics and posts that are doing well in your niche.

The tool also lets you find keywords and terms your customers use to discover products on social media. Similarly, Agorapulse shows you the sentiment around your marketing campaigns and the keywords people are using to react to them.

Since the tool also shows you which of your audience members’ social media posts drive the most engagement, you can use it to identify and collaborate with nano influencers and ambassadors who have a high reach and impact within your target market.

Success Strategy

Agorapulse works so well for social listening because it doesn’t end its offering there. It goes on to allow users to respond to comments from the same platform and even publish new content to Instagram within its dashboard.

TravelMedia.ie used all of these features in Agorapulse for efficient community management. Since the agency managed a range of brands in the travel industry, it needed a tool that would aggregate all social media interactions in one place.

Agorapulse’s dashboard proved to be the right place for the agency. Even better, the agency enjoyed the ability to generate informative reports to share with its clients.

TravelMedia also analyzed the comments and sentiment around social media ads through Agorapulse. It gave the agency an overview of how well a campaign was performing, and which keywords or phrases were doing well.

Robb Wolf, the best-selling author of The Paleo Solution, also used Agorapulse for the same purpose. Previously, the author was using multiple platforms to do each of these tasks individually.

But with Agorapulse, Wolf could read the comments on all of his social media platforms in the same dashboard. He could also respond to these comments and keep his readers engaged. The higher engagement resulted in an estimated 20% increase in sales for his books.

BrandMentions cover all the essential channels where people talk about brands. It also offers comprehensive sentiment analysis, finding out the tone of the conversations.

You can also use BrandMentions to spy on your competitors. You can use it to reveal your competitors’ marketing strategies. The social listening software enables you to quickly research and gain insights on any brand or any topic from any market.

It provides you with real-time notifications with email alerts and link notifications.

With its proprietary visual listening technology, it goes beyond the scope of just being a “social listening” tool. That’s because you can track KPIs like hashtag performance, which ties efforts back to your business objectives or customer sentiment. You will also be able to see the most popular topics concerning your brand and understand how you rank against competitors.

Want a peek into your future marketing campaign’s performance? Talkwalker’s Blue Silk GPT can provide a 90-day forecast on your KPIs and related topic volumes so you can optimize content and distribution strategies.

When you monitor a keyword or entity, this platform looks at more than just social media, examining millions of posts every day from blogs, news sites, podcasts, forums, and consumer review sites. The platform adds 1.3 billion new documents to its database and processes over 6 billion engagement activities daily. It filters out irrelevant mentions and assigns sentiment to the mentions that interest you. Thanks to its customizable automated alerts and reporting tools, you can spot negative sentiment shifts and take action before they become full-blown crises.

You can also use Meltwater to find key influencers, track your online performance, and optimize your prospecting strategy through its consumer (market research) and sales (competitor insights) intelligence features.

You can tailor its dashboards to suit your monitoring, benchmarking, and analysis requirements.

Although Quid offers only general details about the listening tool’s features, an article in its blog section says that the online solution collects from over 300 million sources in real-time, categorizing posts by emotion, behavior, and other filters. Moreover, its data warehouse reportedly archives 17 months of historical data.

Users can maximize the benefits of Quid Monitor by using it with the rest of the platform’s product suite, including Quid Discover, which generates a “smart keyword set” for research and offers customizable filtering. Furthermore, Quid Predict uses generative AI to identify events or trends that are more than just fads but could potentially impact your business’s future. 

The platform also has a benchmarking tool—Quid Compete—which generates custom reports to measure your current and past performance and how you compare against market leaders and new competitors.

You can also integrate into these dashboards paywall data from LexisNexis, logo recognition capabilities, and consumer reviews.

You can also track views, likes, favorites, replies, retweets, and shares from social channels directly on your social media listening dashboards. You can add high-level business intelligence with Media Value and Engagement Rate widgets.

Synthesio enables you to export pre-filtered data sets via API or using an in-house tool, Reveal, and merge Social Listening metrics with performance data in many SaaS business intelligence tools.

The platform underwent a rebranding in 2023 after becoming a part of Ipsos, a well-established name in market research and polling with operations dating back to 1975.

Key Features

The query builder is one of the most notable features of Sprout Social. Businesses can build listening queries to monitor keywords and hashtags related to them. There’s no prior experience or Boolean knowledge required to get started with this feature. Instead, you can use one of the tool’s pre-made templates, such as competitor analysis, industry insights, brand health, and event monitoring.

Sprout Social also uses AI technology to uncover meaningful insights from conversations happening across social media platforms. Businesses can get the full picture of the impact of their mentions without changing the queries periodically. 

Instead, they can filter the data collected by Sprout Social to only see the vertical they want to focus on, including events, products, media, and more.

The Word Cloud feature in Sprout Social allows users to visualize the most frequently used words and phrases in their mentions. Businesses can identify important data points and insights for future campaigns with this feature.

Besides audience analysis, Sprout Social also facilitates crisis management for businesses. Brands can set custom alerts to monitor evolving situations and respond promptly to any potential crisis.

Sprout Social further allows competitor analysis by offering share of voice (SOV) metrics. Businesses can compare their social media presence to that of their competitors and then close the gap if there is any.

The social listening features also assist you in finding influencers and ambassadors for your brand. Businesses can measure the impact of posts made by ambassadors and use that data to build partnerships and collaborations.

Sprout Social supports integrations with a multitude of platforms, including the most popular social media platforms. In addition, the tool offers integration with Shopify, Salesforce, Tableau, Hubspot, Zendesk, Google My Business, Trustpilot, Yelp, and more. That way, you can monitor every platform you have a presence on.

Success Strategy

96.5 (WTDY-FM) Philadelphia, a RADIO.com pop station in the Entercom brand, used Sprout Social’s listening features to find the winner for its #ArtistOfTheSummer competition. The listeners voted for their favorite artists in nine rounds of polls, bringing millions of messages and a ton of attention to the station.

The radio station used the Conversation Overview feature in Sprout Social after every poll to get the aggregates of the votes. Apart from that, the station also monitored the usage of the hashtag “#ArtistOfTheSummer” and what people were saying about it on social media.

MTV’s Hottest Summer Superstar competition, another hashtag-based voting system, was also happening at the same time. Since the radio station’s topic query was the same as MTV’s, it also got surface insights into a competing event.

Sprout Social’s listening tool allowed 96.5 radio station to go through 21.9 million messages from 637,000 unique individuals to find its winner: Louis Tomlinson. Not only that, the station also got 168,000 new X followers and saw over 17 million impressions on Instagram and X.

The station’s success is a testament to Sprout Social’s multi-level benefit to brands. Its social listening tools combine audience insights and trend analysis with competitor research to magnify the results of social campaigns.

Cyfe has dashboards available for every area of operation: start-up (data about new sign-ups, app downloads, subscriptions, and other related KPIs), social media, marketing, client, web analytics, finance, sales, project management, and IT.

Cyfe offers a wider range of features beyond social mentions. However, it does incorporate social listening capabilities. It is also much cheaper than many of the more specialist products mentioned here.

Regarding the social media dashboard, Cyfe uses real-time data and metrics to start tracking how your brand or clients are doing across Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Vimeo.

The platform gives you insights into the sentiment of each mention, its source, influence score, and reach. Mention’s Insights Center—accessible in higher plans—displays graphs representing the result of your alert results, social account reports (listening and comparative alerts), and an export feature for sharing your reports. Options are available for customizing reports and automating their send-out schedule within your team or clients.

Awario’s dashboard tracks the growth in the number of your mentions, their collective reach, and sentiment, including the geographical locations where these messages come from. The platform’s analytics can show you the most impactful conversations first by sorting mentions by audience reach. This feature can, in effect, identify top influencers by social network. At the same time, you can prioritize engagement and respond to urgent negative mentions first.

Meanwhile, Awario’s Mentions Statistics aids your reputation management efforts, measuring the public’s sentiment towards your brand—including marketing campaigns and product launches—over time.

This online solution’s competitor analysis is another feature you can use to strengthen your brand. Benchmark your company against your industry rivals by setting up alerts for keywords containing your competitor’s products and campaigns. Then see how public sentiment compares with yours. You can also track your rivals’ follower growth, posting frequency, and the channels they use to tweak your marketing strategy.

Its third and final step involves amplifying customer feedback. ReviewInc’s integrations allow you to share client reviews on social media or your website with a single click, or even automate the process entirely with free Zapier and Hootsuite apps.

It can work with Hootsuite Insights powered by Brandwatch for tracking brand sentiment, monitoring trends, and conducting consumer research. Hootsuite gathers 16 billion new posts each month. If you’re using another listening tool, you can integrate it with Hootsuite for more customer and market insights.

Knowing what your customers want and where they spend time online doesn’t only boost engagement. It also helps you determine where to spend your advertising budget, the best time to launch a new product, and identify influencers or thought leaders.

Sprinklr’s social listening function falls under Sprinklr Insights, one of the platform’s four services, which also include Sprinklr (Customer) Service, Sprinklr Social, and Social Marketing. The tool’s listening feature aggregates 500 million conversations daily across 350 million sources. It allows you to see the volume, context, and sentiment of online conversations – both historical (dating back to 2014) and real-time – and use that information to make strategic decisions that support business goals. In particular, you can filter out “non-engageable messages” and route the others to team members who can act on or respond to them promptly in the customer’s channels. Sprinklr’s AI can be set up to alert you of potential crises upon detecting risk-laden keywords or anomalies in online activities.

It includes endlessly drillable dashboards and surfaces real-time insights that connect to your unique business KPIs. You can also monitor competitive and industry activity to benchmark successes and decode competitors’ strategies.

In addition to conducting “deep listening” on sources beyond social channels like blogs and forums, you can also gather customer and influencer feedback from Emplifi Ratings and Reviews. You can later syndicate your seller ratings to boost your online image.

Furthermore, Emplifi enables you to engage with customers regardless of their location using real-time translation for over 100 languages. The platform automatically routes mentions to its community management tool—available in Standard plans and higher—where you can assign teammates to respond to urgent topics.

The analysis of conversations can reveal top trends, including the latest online activities of top players in your field. But more importantly, you can get to the heart of your customer’s pain points so you can improve their customer journey. You can rework campaigns to align with fresh insights by tapping into Mentionlytics’ AI-driven Social Intelligence Advisor (SIA). 

SIA goes beyond campaign performance analysis—it suggests solutions such as how to improve the content of your social posts, including more attention-drawing hashtags, the optimal publication dates, and the identification of content you can repost. SIA can also spot a crisis or viral event so you can take appropriate action. The AI tool also identifies influencers and the most popular sites in your industry (including those where your rivals get published) and recommends ways to work with those creators or publishers for greater brand awareness.

Zoho Social is another powerful social media management platform for monitoring your brand’s audience interactions. Its Live Stream tool offers real-time access and flexibility in responding to comments and collaborating on responses to followers. You can study the social post author’s profile, check how frequently they post, and discuss with your team before responding directly to the message from Zoho Social. The platform also has a Monitoring Columns option that arranges conversations by channel, making content-viewing less overwhelming.

Meanwhile, Zoho’s Message Inbox lets you receive and read direct messages sent to your brand’s social channels like regular emails. You can organize your contact list and forward messages to the department that is best equipped to address the sender’s concerns through Zoho’s mail or CRM integrations. A separate contact directory is available where you can create a social connections “priority list” in one place, even if these contacts are from different channels.

The platform offers “social mentions analytics” over time for share of voice, audience values, and mentions volume on specific networks. Meanwhile, its sentiment analysis feature helps your brand improve its understanding of each social post’s context. Discover your strengths with positive mentions, which you can repost to polish your image. At the same time, you can work on any deficiencies surfaced by negative mentions and take steps early to prevent risks to your brand reputation. Receive notifications for brand mentions and other keywords, which you can set up by specific media type or market via real-time alerts.

You can customize templates and graphs to generate density maps and word clouds. Present comprehensive reports by comparing your campaign’s performance from a year ago. You can also conduct a competitor analysis using Critical Mention’s archival search.