Top 20 Social Media Listening Tools for 2021 [Brand Monitoring Tools]

Nowadays firms can live or die by the quality of their reputation. With social media, customers can instantly spread your praises or make you appear like an incompetent demon. It certainly helps to know what others are saying about you on social media so you can react appropriately, taking damage control if need be.

A while back, we profiled 15 Tools to Monitor Brand Mentions. We take another look at the industry here, looking at 20 social media listening tools for 2021. We have deliberately picked products that we (mainly) did not look at in our last article.

Many of these tools target large businesses and enterprises and do not advertise prices for their services. However, you should find a suitable tool to help you discover your social media mentions, no matter what your size or level of competition.

Top 20 Social Media Listening Tools for 2021:

Plans: Plus $49/month, Premium $99/month, Max $199/month. 14-day free trial.

Brand24 provides you with social insights into what people say online about your brand. Unlike some of its competitors, Brand24 targets businesses of all sizes, with a $49/month package for small or new businesses.

It shows you a mentions feed, where you can discover what people say about your brand and take action in real time. You can join in and engage in discussions directly from Brand24.

It shows you a Discussion Volume Chart, graphically depicting your brand’s mentions, so you can easily see any surges in brand mentions, and discover if there is a problem. Indeed, it provides full mention analytics, giving you a better understanding of who is talking about your brand online.

Brand24 has developed their own Influencer Score, to help pinpoint your industry influencers, so you can begin making contact with the people that matter in your niche.

It also includes sentiment analysis – not only can you see mentions of your brand, but it gives an indication of whether these mentions were positive, negative, or neutral in tone.

Plans: Medium $99/mo, Large $199/mo, X-Large $299/mo, Enterprise $499/mo

Agora Pulse is another highly professional social media management app that includes social listening features.

It features an extremely clean and straightforward interface. 

You can easily set up relevant brand-listening parameters, that allow you to listen to relevant conversations about your brand. You can further refine your YouTube, and Twitter searches by providing words NOT to include in your saved searches. Boolean operators allow you to hone in on only what you want to listen to. Add location and/or language parameters to your Twitter searches if you want to be even more specific.

Perhaps even more critical is that Agora Pulse helps you take action on what you hear. You can click on a monitoring item and like, retweet, reply, or reply in DM/PM. You can also label, bookmark, and assign any monitoring item to a teammate or client so that they can act accordingly.

Plans: New Business $49/month, Growing Business $79/month, Company $299/month. 14-day free trial.

BrandMentions searches virtually every section of the internet to find all relevant mentions about any of their clients (or any other term that interests them).

Brands can use it to monitor everything that is being said about their company or product on all the channels that matter, be it web or social media.

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. Indeed, you can 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.

Plans: Pro $79/mo, Plus $139/mo, Large $239/mo, Enterprise $499/mo

Buzzsumo is primarily a content analysis tool but also acts as a social media listening tool. 

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, Buzzsume 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.

BuzzSumo provides engagement figures for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. It also provides a 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.

Plans: Standard $99/user/mo, Professional $149/user/mo, Advanced $249/user/mo

Sprout Social is a high-end professional social media management app. Although most of its features relate to social media management and optimization, it also includes social CRM tools and social media listening capability. It includes many collaboration tools, making it easy to work with a team.

Every time you enter Sprout Social, it presents you with a Dashboard, that offers you suggestions of what you should do next.

One of the most user-friendly features of Sprout Social is its unified Smart Inbox. You can reply to your messages, retweet/repost or repin content, like items, etc., all from within Sprout Social. You can group all of your messages in any way you desire. You can filter your inbox multiple ways including by keywords and hashtags.

Sprout Social’s social listening feature works in much the same way as the Smart Inbox, and you can track mentions of your brand, your competitors, or selected keywords. You can quickly build complex queries, using Boolean phrases in the Query Builder, making your query visual and obvious. You can refine your searches to ensure that most of the mentions shown are genuinely about your firm.

Plans: Hootsuite Insights Custom Pricing

Hootsuite is one of the best known social media management platforms. Social listening is not part of their well-known Hootsuite Platform, but a separate product called  Hootsuite Insights.

Hootsuite Insights allows you to gauge the social sentiment around your brand. You can easily filter results by location, language, and gender—for a multi-dimensional view of your market segments. You could spot a trend in a specific segment, for example, if women on Twitter or Spanish-speaking men began commenting negatively about your brand.

You aren’t limited to your brand’s social channels. Hootsuite Insights allows you to tap into the conversations happening on news sites, blogs, forums, and other public places. Indeed, Hootsuite Insights accesses real-time data from over 100 million sources in more than 50 languages across 25+ social networks and other platforms.

It provides you with real-time data in your dashboard. You can set alerts that notify you instantly of any unusual spikes in volume, sentiment, or other measures.

7. Brandwatch

Plans: Not shown on website. Contact Brandwatch for information.

Brandwatch helps you discover vital insights within the billions of conversations happening online every day. It helps you know your customers. You can use it to reveal key consumer insights, drive product innovation, and stay ahead of the competition.

Brandwatch consist of three products:

• Analytics – to analyze conversations
• Vizia – to share insights
• Audience – to understand people

There is also a version of the product developed for agencies, Brandwatch for Agencies, which combines their social intelligence technologies with agency-specific training, support, and resources to help agencies win new business and retain clients.

Brandwatch Analytics is the product’s social listening platform. You use it in four steps:

1. Search the web for reviews, articles, comments, and conversations
2. Segment data into categories relevant to your business
3. Analyze data to discover something you didn’t know
4. Action, by reacting in real-time with instant email alerts

Brandwatch currently crawls 95,635,729 websites for mentions of your company name or other terms relevant to you.

Plans: Standard $500 per 5 topics per month, Pro $750 per 5 topics per month, Insight $1500 per 5 topics per month, Ultra $5000 per 5 topics per month 

Unlike most social listening tools which offer more searches on the higher plans, YouScan keeps a consistent five searches in all its plans. But each search (Topic) can be detailed, with ways to include and exclude a variety of factors (like keywords and hashtags) and apply rules to them.  

You need to enter your search queries using Boolean operators. There are only a handful of operators to learn, and they all make perfect sense, but many marketers will first have to upskill their Boolean logic before they begin.

Once you’ve set the parameters of your search, 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 specific search.

A particular strength of YouScan is Visual Insights. This searches through images, and you can set detailed parameters, to find pictures showing your specific requirements. An incredibly accurate AI engine powers the 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 see which of these has the most engaged audiences. It has Smart Alerts which you can set to notify you whenever it “sees” negative sentiment about your brand. You can even integrate their complaints directly into your Helpdesk system.

9. Meltwater

Plans: Not shown on website. Contact Meltwater for information.

Meltwater provides AI-driven insights, covering many aspects of an enterprise’s activities. A significant aspect of this is its social media monitoring and engagement software, emphasizing analytics and focused engagement.

It looks at more than just social media, examining millions of posts each day from social media platforms, blogs, and news sites. It filters out irrelevant mentions and assigns sentiment to the mentions that interest you.

You can use Meltwater to set up searches, find key influencers, and track your online performance.

Meltwater incudes multiple dashboards, including some that monitor, benchmark, and analyze your online activity. You can also design customized dashboards to meet your needs better.

Meltwater allows you three keyword per search, and you can add numerous filters to refine the results. It carries out sentiment analysis on the results, determining whether each mention is positive, negative, or neutral.