13 top social listening tools, plus tips for better insights

Social listening tools are among the most important for any social media marketer to master. Simply put, they provide a vast amount of real-time data about your brand reputation, audience, and competitors.

Back in the day, marketers had to dedicate substantial budgets to consumer and competitor research through surveys, focus groups, and market testing. Now, all you have to do is set up a social listening platform to monitor brand mentions to track the details that matter most to your brand, and the information comes directly to your finger tips.

Here, we break down 13 of the best social media listening tools so you can choose the one that best suits your current needs.

But first, let’s start by clarifying exactly what we mean when discussing social listening…

What are social listening tools?

These tools search across multiple social platforms and compile all relevant social data in one location so you can get the full picture of what people are saying in just one screen.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the practice of using social tools to monitor what people are saying about your brand online. It’s also an important form of competitor research.

Social listening works by tracking mentions of your brand (both tagged and untagged) and your competitors online, along with relevant keywords and hashtags. You can then access all of this information in one place to get actionable insights into the social media conversations around your industry and brand.

One of the greatest benefits is understanding what people are saying and thinking in real-time. Social media listening tools collect that data so you always have it handy.

Psst: Want to dive deeper into this subject? We’ve got a whole blog post on what social listening is and why it matters so much for brands.

The top social listening tools, side by side

We’ve compared the top 13 tools — from free options to enterprise platforms — so you can quickly evaluate features like sentiment analysis, real-time alerts, and historical data access.

Tool	Platforms Covered	Sentiment Analysis	Real-Time Alerts	Historical Data	Pricing
Hootsuite	All major platforms + Bluesky	Enhanced, with Quick Search		7-day Quick Search + Brandwatch integration	From $99/month
Talkwalker	30+ social + 150M sites	AI-powered, multilingual		Up to 2 years	Contact for quote
Brandwatch	100M+ sites, 1.7T conversations	NLP + visual & geo analysis		From 2010	Contact for quote
Sprout Social	Major platforms	Word clouds + AI Assist		Up to 7 days (X); varies by platform	From $199/user/month
Meltwater	Social, news, forums, TV, podcasts	Visual + emotion recognition		15-month archive	Contact for quote
Sprinklr	30+ social + 1B websites	GenAI-powered sentiment	Smart Alerts	Extensive archive	Contact for quote
Brand24	Major social + blogs/news/forums	Real-time + emotion tracking		~1-year storage	From $119/month
BuzzSumo	Media + web (limited social)	(No advanced sentiment)	(via alerts)	5-year content archive	From $159/month
Keyhole	Social + hashtags, mentions, influencers	Sentiment over time		X back to 2015 (on request); others more limited	Contact for demo/pricing
Later	Instagram only	For IG only	IG alerts	Platform-limited	Enterprise add-on only
Google Alerts	Web only		Email alerts	No historical archive	Free
Social Mention	Blogs, news, limited social	Basic sentiment			Free
AnswerThePublic	Google/TikTok/YT queries				Free (3 searches/day)

How to choose the best social listening tool

Choosing the best social listening tool depends on your goals.

If you’re looking for an affordable, easy-to-use option that also integrates with publishing and analytics, Hootsuite is a smart choice. Enterprise users needing advanced sentiment models or massive historical data may lean toward Brandwatch or Talkwalker.

1. Your business size and goals

Are you a solo marketer looking to track mentions, or a large brand managing multiple campaigns and regions?

Tools like Hootsuite are ideal for growing teams that want flexibility, while platforms like Sprinklr or Brandwatch may be better suited for global enterprise needs.

2. The platforms you need to monitor

Some tools (like Later) specialize in one channel, while others offer broad coverage across social, forums, blogs, and news.

Make sure your tool supports the networks where your audience actually engages.

3. Real-time vs. historical insights

If you’re focused on trend tracking and crisis prevention, look for real-time alerts and recent sentiment data.

For deep research or long-term reporting, tools with access to years of historical data (like Brandwatch or Talkwalker) may be a better fit.

4. Ease of use and technical skill

Some tools require Boolean logic or complex dashboard setup. Others — like Hootsuite — are built for marketers who want fast, actionable insights without a steep learning curve.

5. Your budget

Free tools can be a great way to start, but they usually come with limitations in scope, sentiment tracking, or data volume.

Platforms like Hootsuite or Brand24 offer a good balance of features and affordability, while high-end platforms provide deeper customization and data access at a higher cost.

TL;DR: If you want fast insights, easy setup, and room to grow, Hootsuite gives you a solid foundation and integrates with advanced tools like Brandwatch and Talkwalker if you need to scale later.

Best all-in-one social listening tools

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite actually offers a couple of different social listening features depending on the size of your brand and how much social data you need to analyze. That’s on top of comprehensive social media management tools, including scheduling to all major social networks, easy social media analytics, and audience engagement tools.

Listening

Every Hootsuite plan includes everything you need to get started with social listening.

Use Quick Search to discover trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.

You can track mentions of your brand, your top competitors, your products — up to two keywords tracking anything at all over the last seven days.

Plus, you can use Quick Search to analyze things like:

• Key metrics: Are more people talking about you this week? What’s the vibe of their posts? Hootsuite Listening doesn’t just track what people are saying — it uses enhanced sentiment analysis to tell you how they really feel.
• Top themes: How are people talking about you? What are the most popular positive and negative posts about? Which other conversations are you showing up in?
• Results: Ready to get into specifics? The results tab will show you a selection of popular posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.

PS: Hootsuite Listening now integrates with Bluesky! This means that you can easily analyze insights from the hottest emerging platform straight from your Hootsuite dashboard.

Pricing: Starting at $99/month.

Best for: Hootsuite is ideal for teams that want integrated social media management and listening in one intuitive dashboard. It offers user-friendly tools and upgrade paths to advanced insights tools like Talkwalker.

#1 Easy Social Listening

Brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment at your fingertips. Enhance your social strategy with the insights that matter. Start free 30-day trial

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics is primarily a tool for tracking the ROI of your social marketing strategy and the business impact of your social media posts.

However, it also contains a competitive analysis component, which earns it a spot on our list of social media listening tools.

Hootsuite Advanced Analytics lets you analyze your competitors’ audience and content strategy on Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Key social data sources include audience stats, engagement, and hashtag use.

Pricing: Advanced Analytics is available as an add-on to Hootsuite Enterprise plans. Pricing is available on request.

2. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Talkwalker’s social listening data library covers over 30 social media platforms (including emerging platforms like Bluesky) and over 150 million websites across 239 countries and regions. With more than 50 advanced filters, you can segment your social media channels and identify the right audience to monitor.

This powerful social listening tool allows you to understand the full impact of your online conversations by measuring engagement volume, reach, sentiment, and more. It incorporates Blue Silk GPT for AI analysis.

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Talkwalker is best suited for global brands that need multilingual sentiment analysis, trend tracking, and visual content recognition across massive data sets.

Popular social listening tools

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch uses a library of 1.7 trillion historical conversations from 2010 to help brands track industry trends online. More than 501 million new conversations are added every day.

Brandwatch provides access to conversations from more than 100 million sites and can integrate your own customer data. You can track key social listening metrics like brand awareness, social sentiment, and social share of voice.

For even easier tracking of your social listening queries, you can integrate Brandwatch into your Hootsuite dashboard.

Pricing: Pricing for this enterprise-level social listening tool is available upon request.

Best for: Brandwatch is a top-tier choice for enterprise teams focused on deep research and historical analysis, but with a steeper learning curve and heavier lift for setup and query building.

4. Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool that covers the major social platforms as well as blogs, news sites, and other online sources. It lets you track trends in reach and brand awareness, and set up alerts for critical notifications.

You can also gain valuable insights into social sentiment. Plus, the influence score lets you identify top influencers and creators in your niche.

Create reports you can easily share across your team and with company leaders.

Pricing: Starting at $119/month after a 14-day free trial.

Best for: Brand24 is great for small businesses seeking fast, affordable social listening, offering strong basics but limited historical depth and scalability.

5. Sprout Social

Sprout Social helps you track conversations about your brand, understand your audience demographics, and identify influencers in your niche.

Hashtag and mention monitoring, along with sentiment analysis, are baked into the solution. However, unlocking more detailed social listening is only available via an add-on.

Sprout Social’s Listening Topics automatically retrieve historical data (up to 7 days on X), with coverage varying by platform.

See how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.

Pricing: Starting at $199/user/month after a 30-day free trial.

Best for: Sprout Social is a solid fit for mid-sized teams that prioritize user experience and lightweight listening, though it may lack the depth needed for advanced use cases.

6. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a tool that helps brands monitor major media mentions. They can set up alerts for mentions of their own brand or industry trends to stay aware of upcoming trending topics and changes.

Buzzsumo has an archive of over 8 billion articles from the past five years to analyze and search for your queries. You can monitor brand mentions and track alerts about your competing brands, too.

Pricing: Starting at $159/month.

Best for: Buzzsumo is useful for monitoring media mentions and content trends, though it lacks true social listening capabilities like sentiment or influencer tracking.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole offers a social listening tool that tracks keywords, mentions, and hashtags across multiple platforms. It graphs trends over time along with social share of voice. Keyhole even tracks the sentiment in every mention and changes over time.

Additionally, the tool helps identify key influencers in your niche and compares the performance of the various influencers you identify.

Keyhole offers historical data for X dating back to 2015 (available on request), while other platforms have more limited data.

Pricing: Pricing is available after booking a demo.

Best for: Keyhole is a helpful tool for tracking campaigns, hashtags, and influencers. It’s best for short-term or channel-specific insights rather than ongoing strategy.

8. Later

Later is another social media management tool that offers a number of features — social listening included.

Later’s social listening and monitoring tools showcase data like mentions, top posts, sentiment, and more, but they’re only available for Instagram. If you rely heavily on Instagram, this could be a good tool for you, but you might want to look elsewhere if you need data from additional platforms.

Pricing: Social listening is available as an add-on to Enterprise accounts. Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Later offers a simple add-on for Instagram listening. It’s effective for single-platform use, but not a full listening solution.

9. Meltwater

Meltwater allows unlimited searches over a rolling 15-month archive so you can identify trends and yearly cycles. Beyond social and web sources, Meltwater data includes TV, radio, podcasts, and other media sources.

Within Meltwater, you can build custom dashboards, analyze sentiment, and use image recognition tools.

Pricing: Pricing is available on request.

Best for: Meltwater is well-suited for PR and comms teams managing both news and social media, though its breadth may overwhelm smaller teams or single-channel users.

10. Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a few different types of tools, from social media management to analytics and insights. Its social listening capabilities are a part of its “Insights” suite and give users access to data from more than 30 social and digital channels.

Monitor billions of customer conversations, detect reputation crises, create reports, and compare your performance to your competitors.

Pricing: Pricing is available upon request.

Best for: Sprinklr is built for enterprises that need massive scale, real-time crisis detection, and AI insights. Still, its complexity and price point may be overkill for most marketers.

Free social listening tools

If you’re not ready to invest in a paid solution, there are free social listening tools that offer basic features like brand monitoring and keyword alerts.

These tools are ideal for startups or solopreneurs getting started with brand monitoring online.

The best free social listening tools include:

• Google Alerts – monitors web mentions and sends email summaries.
• Social Mention – tracks basic sentiment and brand mentions across blogs and forums.
• AnswerThePublic – surfaces trending search queries to inform your content strategy.

11. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free and easy-to-use tool for setting email alerts for certain keywords. If Google scans a news article or social media post and sees your keyword, you’ll receive an email notification with a link.

This is a great way to keep an eye on brand and industry updates, ensuring you’re alerted immediately.

Best for: A lightweight, no-cost way to monitor mentions on the web, but far too limited for serious brand or competitor analysis.

12. Social Mention

Social Mention, a tool from Brand Mentions, is a free social media monitoring tool that allows you to keep an eye on brand and competitor mentions online. Discover conversations around your brand and your product or service so you can gauge sentiment, find customer pain points, and more.

Brand Mentions has a premium service starting at $79/month with a free trial, but Social Mention itself is a free tool.

Best for: A free tool that’s easy to try, but minimal in depth, coverage, or reliability compared to modern platforms.

13. AnswerThePublic

AnswerThePublic is a free tool from digital marketing expert Neil Patel that lets users search for different queries across platforms like Google, YouTube, TikTok, and more.

This tool is perfect for creating content ideas that perfectly answer your target audience’s questions.

While you can sign up for a premium account for more search queries starting at $11/month, users also get three search queries a day, completely free. Interested users can also pay a one-time lifetime fee of $119 to get permanent access to the tool without a subscription.

Best for: This tool is great for surfacing content and search ideas, but not a listening tool in the traditional sense.

Why social listening matters (with real results)

Social listening isn’t just about tracking mentions: it’s about turning social data into real business outcomes. Whether you’re managing brand reputation, creating content, or empowering employees, the right listening tools help you make faster, smarter decisions.

Here’s how three Hootsuite customers are putting social listening into action:

Crisis prevention and reputation management

During a major rebrand following a merger, Corewell Health used Hootsuite Listening and Advanced Analytics to monitor how people were responding across 21 hospitals and hundreds of accounts.

The team identified spikes in negative sentiment and quickly adjusted their messaging and media outreach.

Results:

• 50% reduction in negative sentiment
• 2.5x the industry average engagement rate
• 3M+ impressions through employee advocacy using Hootsuite Amplify

Audience insights

One NBA team used Hootsuite with Talkwalker to analyze fan sentiment and engagement patterns during the off-season.

They discovered that fans preferred authentic, behind-the-scenes content over promotional posts and reshaped their strategy accordingly.

Results:

• 352% increase in social video views
• 46% increase in impressions
• A new full-time content role approved to expand the strategy

Share of voice and employer brand growth

Colliers combined Hootsuite’s publishing and listening tools with Amplify to expand their reach and measure the impact of employee advocacy.

By tracking sentiment, engagement, and share of voice, they improved both brand visibility and internal engagement.

Results:

• 229% increase in social media impressions
• 9.5M people reached in Canada through organic social
• Recognized as Canada’s #1 commercial real estate website, with social traffic playing a key role

6 tips for using social listening tools

Want to know how you can make the most of these social listening tools? These six tips can help you gather great consumer insights for your brand.

1. Get in early on trends

When you monitor specific keywords in your industry, you’ll be one of the first to know about emerging trends.

For example, let’s say you run a small business selling candles and monitor keywords about “scents.” You’ll be able to quickly identify patterns among scents mentioned online, discover popular new ideas for upcoming products or figure out scents that people don’t like that you’d want to avoid.

2. Keep an eye on competitors

Tracking mentions of your competitors gives you valuable insights into their social media presence, industry trends, and customer sentiment.

And monitoring your competitors’ brand names gives you insights into information like:

• Competitor media mentions
• Competitor announcements
• Competitor online performance
• Sentiment around your competitors
• New product/service/feature launches

By keeping an eye on your competition, you can easily keep up with what they’re doing and even improve on it.

3. Find opportunities for engagement

Monitoring your brand mentions helps you find authentic opportunities for social media engagement.

Make sure you respond to everyone who mentions your brand, whether you thank them or offer a useful suggestion. You can also keep an eye on the conversation to understand the social communities where people talk about your brand.

4. Measure brand sentiment

Keeping an eye on customer feedback and sentiment helps you understand how people feel about your brand, your product/service, and your industry without speaking to them directly.

But more than just measuring sentiment, you want to do something about the insights you’re getting.

If the conversation about your brand turns towards negative sentiment, you can take action before things reach crisis level and put your crisis management plan into effect. If something is going unusually well, you can throw some budget into a dedicated marketing campaign to keep riding that wave.

5. Identify pain points

See what customers are complaining about online about your industry or product/service. Can you release a new product or feature to resolve some of those pain points?

Keeping your finger on the pulse of customer conversations can help you find even more opportunities for your business, increasing interest, sales, and a positive customer experience.

6. Get familiar with the lingo

Social listening platforms often use technical terms that aren’t always intuitive, especially when it comes to setting up queries or interpreting results.

Here’s a quick glossary to help you navigate the most common features and metrics.

The more familiar you are with these terms, the easier it’ll be to customize your social listening strategy (no steep learning curve required).

Frequently asked questions about social listening tools

Hootsuite makes it easy to monitor social media conversations and keywords, so you can focus on taking action on the insights available. Try it free today.

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