The success of positioning and promoting a business in the digital environment directly depends on how well you understand your audience and their opinion of your brand and product. Access to this information provides companies with an important advantage over competitors. Monitoring, collecting, and analyzing customer opinions has become much faster and easier today through specialized services. We will talk about them in this article. You will learn what social media listening tools are and which of them are most in demand in 2025.
What are Social Listening Tools
Social media listening is the monitoring of social networks or the Internet as a whole to gather audience opinions about a particular brand or company, individual products, or services. This technique is often used by modern businesses to obtain valuable insights about their own brands or products, as well as key competitors or current industry trends.
Social listening tools are special software solutions and platforms designed to automate the monitoring and analysis of mentions of brands, products, services, or topics in the online space. They help not only collect large amounts of data from various sources but also structure it, identify audience sentiment, and determine the main topics of discussion. Based on the collected information, they create analytical reports, providing them in a user-friendly form.
There are various types of social listening tools. They are classified according to different criteria.
By data sources:
- Universal – collect information from various channels (social networks, blogs, forums, review sites, etc.).
- Specialized – work with individual popular platforms such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, etc.
By depth of analysis:
- For standard monitoring – a basic collection of mentions is performed without detailed processing.
- For deep analysis – they study the content, subject matter, and mood of the messages.
- With a combined approach – they combine elements of standard monitoring and deep analytics.
By purpose:
- To monitor brand reputation – track brand mentions and evaluate the tone of messages.
- To analyze consumer sentiment – identify themes, interests, and general perception of the brand by the target audience.
- To find influencers – find opinion leaders for cooperation and brand promotion.
- For competitive analysis – data on the activities of competitors and their positioning in the market is collected and studied.
By functionality:
- Basic solutions – provide monitoring of mentions and simple analytics.
- Advanced platforms – offer advanced features: integration with CRM systems, sentiment analytics, trend forecasting, and automated recommendations for marketing.
- Automate the work with leads from the Facebook advertising account
- Empower with integrations and instant transfer of leads
- Don't spend money on developers or integrators
- Save time by automating routine tasks
Social listening tools help solve a whole range of important business tasks:
- Deeper audience understanding. Entrepreneurs gain a better understanding of their audience and how they relate to their brands and products. This method provides businesses with more complete, detailed, and reliable information that other feedback methods may not always provide.
- Expanding opportunities for collaboration. Proactive social media monitoring allows you to establish contacts with loyal supporters of your brand and influencers interested in collaboration. This helps strengthen the company's reputation among the audience and its position in the market as a whole.
- Marketing effectiveness assessment. Such tools help to more accurately evaluate and analyze the results of marketing campaigns and strategies. With their help, entrepreneurs and marketers receive more relevant and reliable information about how their target audience perceives their campaigns, what mistakes were made in them, and what can be corrected.
- Competitor and industry trend analysis. Social listening provides valuable insights into competitors, the successes and failures of their brands, products, and campaigns, as well as current industry trends. This data can help you find opportunities to optimize your own strategies and campaigns.
The market offers many solutions with different sets of features, advantages, and limitations. Choosing the right service can be difficult. We offer you an overview of the five best social listening tools so that you can compare their capabilities and make an informed decision.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is considered one of the best social media listening tools. With this platform, businesses can track the opinions of their audience from millions of different sources – from social networks to forums. In addition, the service offers analytical tools and consulting in the field of SMM and influencer marketing.
Key features:
- The platform collects and processes data from popular social networks (Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, Tumblr, LinkedIn, YouTube), online broadcasts, blogs, forums, review sites, news resources, and more.
- Built-in AI algorithms automatically analyze text and images, turning raw data into accurate insights and recommendations. Moreover, they segment data by a number of criteria and instantly find all available information about a specific brand or topic.
- A powerful and user-friendly UI easily transforms disparate audience opinions into coherent stories, conducting sentiment analysis, highlighting key topics and trends, and using over 50 visualization formats.
- Based on the data received, Brandwatch instantly generates reports with the ability to export to Excel, PPT, PDF, or other formats via API. The system automatically sends email notifications about each of them to responsible employees and stakeholders.
- The service offers ready-made solutions for various tasks, including brand management, marketing research, crisis management, SMM, content marketing, customer service, influencer marketing, and so on.
Users of this platform can purchase a subscription to the set of tools they need: Consumer Intelligence, Social Media Marketing, or Influence Marketing. You can find out the cost and get a demo version of the product after requesting it from the sales department.
Sprout Social
The Sprout Social platform regularly appears on lists of in-demand social media listening and monitoring tools, although it offers broader functionality for comprehensive SMM management. It is a universal solution with a wide range of tools for collecting and analyzing data, managing content, and optimizing online campaigns. Additionally, the service provides teamwork capabilities and detailed analytics to improve the effectiveness of communications with the audience.
Key features:
- AI algorithms automatically process millions of data points and generate relevant insights about brands, products, competitors, and industry trends.
- Users can quickly and easily get started with social listening using a range of topic-based templates, including templates for campaign and competitor analysis, brand health assessment, industry insights, event monitoring, crisis management, influencer discovery, and more.
- The AI Assist tool automates the processing of collected data, helping to identify the most important information from it. Artificial intelligence will relieve you of the need to read long reports, turning them into short and concise summaries of up to 800 characters.
- The service supports integration with many third-party platforms of different types and purposes: social media, instant messengers, BI systems, CRM, lead generation services, helpdesk systems, and more.
Sprout Social offers 4 pricing plans:
- Standard (5 social profiles, keyword and location monitoring, unlimited AI generation alt text, review management, and more) – $199 per month per user.
- Professional (unlimited social profiles, unlimited keyword and competitor insights, AI Assist recommendations, and more) – $299 per user per month.
- Advanced (all the features of Professional, plus advanced AI Assist features, helpdesk integrations, customer service quality and team productivity reports, and more) – $399 per month per user.
- Enterprise (all the features of Advanced, plus tool customization, priority support, onboarding, implementation, and more) – the cost is calculated individually and is provided upon request.
You must pay for the selected subscription for the entire year at once, as there is no monthly payment option. Each tariff plan has a 30-day free trial period.
Brand24
Brand24 is rightfully among the top social media listening tools, thanks to its intuitive interface and powerful functionality. Its AI module provides tonality analysis, emotion detection, key topic identification, and automatic generation of insights based on mentions from social networks, forums, and news sites. The platform helps companies quickly respond to changes in reputation by adapting communication strategies.
Key features:
- Brand24 automatically tracks and collects information about brands and products in real time from over 25 million sources: social media, review sites, forums, podcasts, news, blogs, videos, and more.
- In-depth sentiment analysis allows you to segment the collected data, separating positive, negative, and neutral mentions into groups.
- This service allows you to measure a number of important marketing and business metrics: assess brand recognition and position in the market, audience engagement, and more.
- Based on the information received, the system automatically generates reports with statistics and personalized insights. They can be shared with colleagues and stakeholders and also used to optimize business strategies.
Brand24 offers 5 tariff plans:
- Individual (1 user, 3 keywords, 2,000 mentions per month, updates every 12 hours, standard AI features) – $199 per month.
- Team (unlimited users, 7 keywords, 10,000 mentions per month, hourly updates, standard AI features, and more) – $299 per month.
- Pro (unlimited users, 12 keywords, 40,000 mentions per month, real-time updates, advanced AI features, and more) – $399 per month.
- Business (unlimited users, 25 keywords, 100,000 mentions per month, real-time updates, advanced AI features, advanced reporting, and more) – $599 per month.
- Enterprise (unlimited users, keywords, mentions per month, real-time updates, advanced AI features, advanced reporting, special consulting, and more) – pricing is calculated individually and is available upon request.
If you purchase an annual subscription, you can save the equivalent of three months of subscription fees. Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial.
Keyhole
Keyhole is an all-in-one service that combines key functions for social media analysis and monitoring. It contains a set of effective social media listening tools for tracking mentions, real-time analytics, reporting, and managing SMM campaigns. With data visualization and a simple interface, the platform helps you make informed marketing decisions quickly.
Key features:
- Using Keyhole, businesses can effectively track all mentions and opinions about their brands and products on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media.
- The platform's tools for social media listening analyze current trends via Google Trends. By monitoring keywords, they identify the most discussed topics at the moment.
- Sentiment analysis can help you identify audience opinions about your brand or product and compare them with competitors. Keyhole effectively filters available information, highlighting positive, negative, and neutral feedback.
- The platform provides detailed insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns and interactions with influencers. It also helps you find new influencers to collaborate with and manage multiple influencer marketing campaigns.
- The service has a number of additional functions. The engagement level calculator, influencer tracking, hashtag analytics, social media account monitoring, automatic publication, and post scheduling are very useful.
There is no publicly available information about the cost of Keyhole products. You can get it and access demo versions by requesting the sales department.
BuzzSumo
Rounding out our top social listening tools review is the BuzzSumo platform. This is a time-tested solution for marketers, content managers, and PR specialists. The service allows you to track audience reactions, identify relevant topics, strengthen content strategies, and build productive collaboration with influencers. In addition, it offers analysis of viral content and competitive activity, helping brands confidently navigate the information flow.
Key features:
- BuzzSumo tracks all mentions of specific brands, products, topics, and competitors. Users can choose to monitor parameters (search period, language of messages, etc.) and enable notifications about new mentions.
- The Discover Topics feature generates a visualization/map of relevant topics for a given query. It also assists in discovering relevant content ideas and compelling article titles for each topic.
- Influencer marketing tools help you identify and connect with the most influential content creators across major social media channels including Facebook, X, YouTube, and TikTok.
- The service carefully monitors and analyzes all mentions of competitors' brands and products, as well as the content they post. It transforms this data into visual representations and produces customized insights tailored to your specific needs.
BuzzSumo offers 4 pricing plans:
- Content Creation (1 user, unlimited searches, 2 types of notifications, content analysis, trending feed, and more) – $199 per month.
- PR & Comms (5 users, 5 notification types, all Content Creation features, plus a media persona database, Slack integration, and more) – $299 per month.
- Suite (10 users, 10 notification types, all PR & Comms features, plus YouTube analysis, article downloads, Chrome extension, and more) – $499 per month.
- Enterprise (30 users, 50 notification types, all Suite features, plus RSS feed, location-based search, and more) – $999 per month.
The prices listed are valid for monthly payments. Opt for annual billing to enjoy a 20% discount on your subscription.
Conclusion
Advanced tools for social listening bring significant benefits to entrepreneurs and marketers, helping them stay informed about the opinions of the target audience regarding brands and products. The insights obtained with the help of such solutions allow businesses not only to promptly respond to changes in audience behavior, but also to build more accurate and personalized marketing strategies.
The services presented in our article have a wide range of functionality for social listening and cover key aspects of SMM — from social media monitoring to engagement analysis and interaction with influencers. Due to integration with millions of sources and advanced visualization tools, these platforms make analytics accessible, clear, and effective. Using such solutions allows businesses to remain competitive and maximally adapted to the changing requirements of the digital market.
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