There’s a conversation happening about your brand right now. It might be between two people, a group of people, or it could just be a general collective conversation that’s ongoing within the culture. But it’s happening. And you should be glad. That’s a big part of brand awareness. The more ubiquitous that conversation, the more cultural penetration your brand has.
This is a conversation you need to hear and that you need to be a part of as much as possible. That’s one of the main ways social listening enters your marketing strategy.
Whether it’s hearing that conversation, listening to your customers, understanding trends, or gaining competitive insight, social listening is one of the most powerful things you can put to use when it comes to knowing the landscape in which your brand operates.
The right tool is key to maximizing the work you put into social listening. This guide will help you get a handle on your options and make a smart decision on the best one for your needs.
1. Emplifi
Emplifi is a comprehensive, all-in-one social media management platform with a strong social listening tool. It focuses on consolidating insights from all social channels into a single user interface, making it easier for teams to see what’s happening and make quick decisions.
Notable strengths:
- Social trend spike alerts: Get notified 24/7/365 of sudden changes and anomalies in online activity directly in the platform or via email so you can respond to potential crises early.
- Historical context: Understand and analyze past trends and user behaviors from your social listening queries with up to 365 days of historical data.
- Competitive intel: Gain insights that reveal where other brands succeed or fail, so you can adjust your social content strategy with confidence.
- Cross-channel routing: Mentions identified through Listening are automatically routed into Community and Care solutions for proactive customer engagement.
- AI and natural language detection: Dynamically identify topics and their associated sentiments based on actual customer dialogue.
- New image and video recognition: enables detection of brand logos and visuals, enriching listening to include user-generated content.
- Integrated AI-powered workflows: Leverage analytics with seamless triage into marketing, commerce, and care solutions, turning insights into immediate, cross-functional action.
2. Hootsuite (powered by Talkwalker)
Hootsuite is a leading social media management tool that also delivers powerful social listening capabilities through its acquisition of Talkwalker. This pairing combines Hootsuite’s intuitive publishing and engagement features with Talkwalker’s deep analytics, broad data coverage, and AI-driven insights.
Notable strengths:
- Ease of Use: The single, centralized dashboard is intuitive and great for managing multiple social networks at once.
- Talkwalker-Powered Listening: Access advanced analytics, AI sentiment detection, and wide multi-channel monitoring without leaving Hootsuite.
- Customization: Allows for custom dashboards and streams to monitor specific keywords, mentions, and hashtags.
- AI-powered Summaries: Generates quick overviews of recurring themes and trends for faster decision-making.
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that also offers social listening capabilities, often enhanced by integrations with other platforms like Talkwalker and Brandwatch. It is known for its user-friendly interface.
Notable strengths:
- Ease of Use: The single, centralized dashboard is intuitive and great for managing multiple social networks at once.
- Integrations: Offers integrations with other powerful listening tools, giving users more robust options if they need them.
- Customization: Allows for custom dashboards and streams to monitor specific keywords, mentions, and hashtags.
- AI-powered Summaries: Features AI-generated summaries to quickly identify recurring themes and trends.
3. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a powerful, AI-driven platform designed for large enterprises. It aims to unify customer experience across multiple channels and is known for its advanced social listening capabilities and extensive integrations.
Notable strengths:
- Enterprise-Grade: Built for large companies, it can handle a massive volume of data and is highly scalable.
- Advanced AI: Uses powerful AI for crisis detection, sentiment analysis, and workflow automation.
- Workflow Automation: Helps streamline the process of monitoring and responding to conversations, reducing the need for manual work.
- Reputation Management: Provides real-time sentiment analysis to help manage brand reputation.
4. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a well-rounded social media management and listening tool that is highly regarded for its user-friendly interface and robust reporting features.
Notable strengths:
- Comprehensive Analytics: Provides in-depth analytics, including audience demographics and influencer identification.
- Unified Solution: Combines social listening with social media management, allowing for a seamless transition from insight to action.
- High-Level Overview: The tool is effective for brands that need a quick and easy overview of key social media conversations.
- AI Assist: AI-powered features can summarize long messages and analyze trends in words, phrases, and emojis
5. Meltwater
Meltwater is a popular choice, particularly for PR teams, due to its strong media measurement capabilities that extend beyond social media to include traditional media like TV and radio.
Notable strengths:
- Comprehensive Media Monitoring: Excels at monitoring traditional media, news sites, and blogs, in addition to social media.
- No Data Caps: Offers unlimited ad-hoc searches and data volume, which is great for large-scale research projects.
- Historical Data: Provides extensive historical data, with up to 10 years of online press data and 15 months of social media data.
- Customization: Features customizable alerts and dashboards to help teams focus on what matters most.
6. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is an enterprise-level platform that emphasizes understanding the “voice of the customer.” It provides a deep dive into consumer insights by integrating data from various business sources.
Notable strengths:
- Extensive Data Sources: Accesses conversations from over 100 million websites, including first-party customer data.
- Long-Term Historical Data: Can analyze historical conversations going back as far as 2010.
- Smart AI Query Building: Uses AI to build queries, saving time and improving efficiency.
- Advanced Influencer Tracking: Features a tool to identify and manage influencer campaigns.
7. Mention
Mention is an affordable and effective social listening tool aimed at small to medium-sized businesses. It provides real-time monitoring and competitive insights.
Notable strengths:
- Real-time Alerts: Provides instant notifications for brand mentions and keywords.
- Affordable: A more budget-friendly option compared to enterprise-level platforms.
- Competitive Benchmarking: Great for analyzing your share of voice and benchmarking against competitors.
- Ease of Use: The dashboard is generally easy to use and provides a straightforward way to monitor conversations.
8. Brand24
Brand24 is an all-in-one social listening tool that offers comprehensive monitoring capabilities for businesses of all sizes. It’s known for its sentiment analysis and brand protection features.
Notable strengths:
- Sentiment Analysis: Offers advanced sentiment analysis to categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral.
- All-in-One: Provides an organized feed for monitoring and managing all social media mentions from one place.
- Affordable Plans: Has budget-friendly options that are suitable for small businesses.
- AI-powered Insights: Uses AI to help make sense of data and provide actionable insights.
9. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a user-friendly social media management and listening platform that is well-regarded for its unified inbox and robust customer support.
Notable strengths:
- User-Friendly: The platform is known for its intuitive design and ease of use.
- Unified Inbox: A central inbox makes it simple to monitor and respond to all social interactions.
- Excellent Customer Support: Many users praise the quality of their customer support and training.
- Collaboration Tools: Features tools for team collaboration, such as task assignment and approval workflows.
10. YouScan
YouScan is a social listening tool that stands out for its visual insights and image recognition capabilities. It is particularly useful for brands that rely on visual content.
Notable strengths:
- Image Recognition: Its AI-powered visual insights can detect logos and images, going beyond text-based mentions.
- Market Research: Excellent for market researchers who want to understand how their brand is being represented visually.
- AI-Powered: Uses AI to analyze visual content and provide deeper insights, including the new Free AI Detector (2025) to help brands identify AI-generated content and ensure authenticity.
11. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a tool primarily known for content discovery and research, but it also includes social listening features for monitoring trending topics and brand mentions.
Notable strengths:
- Content-Focused: Excellent for finding trending content and analyzing what’s performing well in your industry.
- Influencer Discovery: Helps identify key influencers and build outreach campaigns.
- User-Friendly: The interface is generally easy to use for content marketers.
- Alerts: Provides alerts for brand mentions and competitor activity.
12. Awario
Awario is a social listening and media monitoring tool that is highly rated for its affordability and “social selling” features. It’s a great option for small to medium businesses.
Notable strengths:
- Social Selling: The “Leads” feature helps identify potential customers who are talking about your products or industry.
- Affordable: A cost-effective solution for businesses that are just starting with social listening.
- Competitor Monitoring: Excellent for gathering insights on your rivals.
- Ease of Use: The platform is known for its simplicity and ease of use.
13. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a free, simple tool that allows you to monitor mentions of specific keywords and brands across the web.
Notable strengths:
- Free: It’s a completely free service, making it an excellent starting point for any business.
- Simple to Use: Easy to set up and manage alerts for any term.
- Web-wide Coverage: Monitors news sites, blogs, and other web pages, not just social media.
14. Keyhole
Keyhole offers enterprise-grade social listening with a focus on real-time monitoring and influencer tracking. It provides insights into audience demographics and behavior.
Notable strengths:
- Real-Time Monitoring: Tracks brand mentions and hashtags in real-time.
- Influencer Identification: Helps identify relevant influencers for your brand.
- Audience Insights: Provides a deeper understanding of who your audience is and what they like.
- Predictive Analytics: Features like volume predictions can help anticipate when your posts are going viral.
7 questions to ask social media listening tool providers
There are billions of conversations happening on social media every day, and there’s no way for your brand to reasonably keep up on its own. Having a first-class listening tool is essential for so many of the use cases for brands that need to have their finger on the pulse of what’s going on around them. Choosing the right tool for your needs is challenging, though. As you examine your options, here are seven questions to help prepare you for your search:
- How easy is it to set up a query?
- How easy is it to understand the full context of social interactions?
- Is there something that can assist you in mitigating a crisis?
- How actionable is it when those crises are happening?
- Does this tool offer AI-based sentiment analysis and automated labeling?
- How easy is it to categorize and label content from all your social channels?
- How easy is it to do competitive analysis?
Conclusion: Harnessing social listening for smarter brand engagement
Listening to the ongoing conversation about your brand is a strategic signal for marketing success. When done right, social listening reveals what your audience cares about, uncovers emerging trends, and highlights opportunities to connect more meaningfully.
By choosing the right listening tool and using it consistently, you gain clarity and context, empowering you to respond faster, craft better content, and stay ahead of the competition. The goal isn’t just to monitor chatter. It’s to turn insights into action and make every voice count.
With the right platform, you don’t have to guess. You get the data, analysis, and workflows needed to understand what’s happening, where to pivot, and how to keep growing your brand’s presence.
Ready to see Emplifi in action?
Our all-in-one our social listening tool brings data from every channel into one place, so you can spot trends, manage conversations, and act fast. Book a demo today and see how Emplifi can power your brand’s listening strategy.
