The 12 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools to Try in 2022

Social media monitoring tools have been around for years. I think they are still underutilized, even though there are so many of them to choose from. The main reason is probably the fact that many business owners believe online media monitoring is for large brands only. That is not true. Everyone can benefit from them. All you need to do is choose the right tool and set up the project correctly.

Sure, there are businesses that are hardly ever talked about online, but a vast majority could take their marketing to the next level with social media monitoring.

We have lots of tools available on the market to do that. Even though they might look similar, they somehow vary a lot from each other.

There are tools that are totally free and those that you need to pay big bucks for.

Then, some of them are dedicated, standalone social media monitoring tools, whereas many of them are all-in-one solutions that combine monitoring, scheduling, publishing, content creation, etc.

I decided to make it a little bit easier for you folks and picked the 12 best tools for small and medium businesses that offer a great bang for your buck!

1. Brand24
2. Keyhole
3. Hootsuite
4. Sprout Social
5. Tweetdeck
6. Buffer
7. Agorapulse
8. Social Mention
9. Talkwalker
10. Falcon.io
11. Zoho Social
12. Mention

If you want to know more about social media monitoring, take a look at the rest of our blog post:

• How to set up a social media monitoring project?
• Why do you need media monitoring tools?
• Which social monitoring tool should you choose?

The 12 best social media monitoring tools

Of course, you can do social media monitoring manually. This approach has many drawbacks, though.

Firstly, you have to put time aside to browse through all social media platforms and look for brand mentions. That requires a massive amount of time, and you’ll never be sure if you’ve missed a mention.

Secondly, you will have to set up a reporting panel for your research. Some of the metrics, for example, the volume of mentions, you can measure by yourself. Others, for instance, brand awareness or social media share of voice, are hard to track manually.

Thirdly, thanks to professional tools with robust analytics sections, you can use the power of social listening. Social listening will provide you with actionable insights that are based on the data you gathered from social networks.

All of the tools listed below offer a free trial period. You can test them and choose the software that suits your needs best.

Without further ado, here are the top social media monitoring tools!

1. Brand24

Whether you want to collect mentions of your brand, keep an eye out on your competitors, or evaluate the results of your marketing campaign, it’s all there for you in a single dashboard.

Start your free trial!

The platforms covered by Brand24 include:

• Public posts from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit
• TikTok mentions
• Twitch mentions
• Web monitoring
• Review sites
• Blog posts
• Newsletters and podcasts

Brand24 will collect every social mention that will occur on these social media platforms in real-time and analyzes them thoroughly.

Moreover, Brand24 analyses social media conversations and provides you with analytics. Inside the dashboard, you can find metrics such as:

• Sentiment analysis
• The volume of mentions
• Estimated social media reach
• Social media engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares
• Top public profiles talking about your brand, product, or service
• Identify trending topics by monitoring trending hashtags

Another useful feature is custom reports. Whenever you need to present the results of your work to your supervisors or share the customer insights you collected, you can do it by preparing a custom report.

You can choose the metrics that will appear in the report and add your company branding colors and logo.

Brand24 offers other social listening features that will help you stay one step ahead of your competitors. For example, by monitoring social and non-social media reach over time, you can measure the results of social media marketing campaigns.

One of my personal favorite features that saves a lot of time is the Slack integration that helps me keep track of all the most important mentions in a Slack channel while collaborating with my teammates at the same time.

All you have to do to start the online media monitoring process is your email address!

Price: Brand24 starts at $49 per month and offers a 14-day free trial.

2. Keyhole

Keyhole helps marketers in many different areas, from brand monitoring, market research, event monitoring, influencer marketing, social media insights, to collecting historical data from Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Historical data are delivered within 1 business day and, as far as I know, is only included in the enterprise plan. However, it’s optional for plans below that and can be purchased on a per-project basis.

Keyhole is a robust social listening tool with social media management capabilities. The tool offers sentiment analysis and other useful features, for example, tracking engagement and reach of posts and social media reporting.

Apart from the core product, you can also make use of free hashtags and account trackers that will help you monitor conversations containing your hashtags, keywords, and post by your competitors and yourself.

Price: Keyhole Suite — Social Listening and Account Analytics starts at $59 per month. The tool offers a 14-day free trial.

3. Hootsuite

When I first got into digital marketing, I thought Hootsuite was just a social media management software, but there’s so, so much more to it than that! It provides features we can find in social media listening tools.

Hootsuite is a social media management software that not only monitors different social platforms for mentions of your brand in real-time, it also offers robust social media analytics and scheduling section.

Hootsuite allows you to track your online presence, analyze your performance on social, create and manage advertising campaigns, create and publish posts, and manage incoming messages.

Hootsuite is the tool of choice if you need to manage multiple social media profiles. Hootsuite will help you manage your profiles on the most important networks, for example, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram.

Price: You can either start a 30-day free trial or schedule a demo before you choose from 4 different plans depending on your needs and budget (Professional, Team, Business, Enterprise). The basic plan starts at $19 per month.

4. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media tools among marketers and PR professionals.

Sprout Social categorizes its services by three different segments – business type, need, and network.

Monitoring social media with Sprout Social is a piece of cake. Sprout Social works on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The tool covers four major aspects of profiles management:

• Engagement
• Publishing and scheduling
• Analytics
• Social listening

This platform will let you uncover audience insights from online conversations and improve your overall social media strategy. You will be able to improve customer experience by identifying content that sparks your customer interests.

You will be able to understand your customers better, prepare campaigns that will reach the right audience, and measure the results of those campaigns.

Moreover, you can track your competitors and improve your overall brand positioning on the market.

Sprout is a robust social listening tool that will help you manage various social media accounts in one dashboard.

Price: Sprout offers three different pricing plans – Premium, Corporate and Enterprise that cost $99, $149, and $249 per month.

5. Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a free tool that helps you set up streams of brand mentions that appear on one social media platform — Twitter.

It’s fully customizable, so you can set up a column that will help you track your Twitter presence and manage messages. You can see all the conversations about your brand on a single Twitter page.

On top of that, you can also monitor the activity of the people you follow or add a list column.

Tweetdeck is a great tool if you want to take a closer look at your Twitter presence. You will be able to spot trending topics and prepare content that will boost your brand awareness.

This platform has a few drawbacks. Firstly, it does not offer any Twitter analytics. You still need an additional tool to measure reach or track your keywords in real-time.

Also, it’s impossible to measure customer sentiment or conduct social monitoring of any other platform.

Price: Tweetdeck is a free tool.

6. Buffer

Buffer is yet another robust social media tracking tool with a range of features at your disposal.

Famous for its transparency and company culture, it offers 5 different plans, one of which is free.

Social media monitoring is not available within the core product, but you’ll have access to it with the Business plan offered by the Buffer Reply product. The monitoring feature only works for Twitter now.

If you want to gather your mentions only from Twitter, take a closer look at Buffer.

7. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is one of the most comprehensive social media management tools available on the market.

The tool works across various social channels, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Youtube. Agorapulse helps you publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate on your digital marketing projects.

Agorapulse is one of the multipurpose social media monitoring tools. It lets you schedule posts, listen to your customers’ online conversations, and measure the impact of your content.

The listening feature I found the most useful is customer sentiment, as it lets you identify the best social media content and grow your online presence. You can easily track your competitors and thus prepare a more informed social media strategy.

Moreover, you can monitor the results of your activities and report them to your colleagues and supervisors.

It caters to small businesses as well as agencies and large teams. Moreover, Agorapulse is famous for its exquisite customer support.

Price: Once you’ve done with the 14-day free trial, you can pick one of the plans ranging from €49 to €249 per month.

8. Social Mention

Social Mention is a free search engine that aggregates social media content from across the web.

Following the information from their website, the tool monitors 100+ social media properties.

Compared to other social listening tools, Social Mentions is a very basic one. It doesn’t cover major networks, but blogs, forums, news sites, Flickr, and Reddit. The tool offers a limited analytics section.

If you want to analyze your online presence mention by mention and you don’t focus on major social channels, Social Mention is a provider worth considering.

You don’t need to set up an account to start monitoring a topic or your brand, which is pretty cool, but you also won’t save your results for the future.

Still, considering it’s a free tool, it provides valuable information for those just starting with social media monitoring.

9. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a bit of both worlds – you can go for its pricier version or settle for one of the free products – Talkwalker Alerts or Talkwalker’s Free Social Search. When it comes to social listening tools, Talkwalker is definitely worth looking at.

While Alerts seem to be a Google Alerts alternative, the social search mode is all about tracking your brand, company, hashtags, or any other conversations across the web.

Besides real-time social monitoring, Talkwalker offers customers insights and consumer segmentation. The tool gathers data from social networks and other online sources and combines them with market data. This will help not only your customer service but will help you make smarter and more informed decisions regarding your products, brand, or services.

The main product consists of social listening and analytics suite, influencer marketing platform, and AI engine. Thanks to KPIs and machine learning algorithms, you will be able to produce and distribute content your audience wants to interact with.

This social media monitoring software covers multiple social networks to give you the most comprehensive data possible, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. The KPIs you can find inside the tool include:

• Readership or how far your owned and earned media traveled
• global coverage or where in the world are customers talking about you
• Message pull-through or is your message getting through to the right audience
• Consumer sentiment or how consumers feel about your products
• Website traffic or how much traffic your campaigns are driving
• Share of voice or how many people are talking about you compared to your competitors
• Word clouds to help you get a quick overview of all that is being talked about when it comes to your company

Price: As far as the plans are concerned, the Basic one aimed at smaller brands or owned media-focused companies costs $9,600 yearly. The prices of the two remaining plans, Corporate and Enterprise are discussed on request.

10. Falcon.io

Falcon is another product that took the all-in-one approach.

It helps you manage your content in one calendar, monitor the social web for insights, use one inbox for all your interactions, track your performance across channels, create automated ad campaigns, and see all your audience data in one place and schedule social media posts.

This social listening tool covers all major social media platforms, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, news sites, blogs, forums.

The tool helps you set benchmarks for your business, identify trending topics, analyze the sentiment around your brand, examine audience demographics, and find influencers. Of course, the tool collects mentions in real-time.

Moreover, it is a neat management platform. You can schedule all your content within one calendar across all social media channels.

Price: It has a pretty standard division of their plans, so we’ve got Starter, Pro, and Premium. There’s no free trial, and all pricing details are available upon the requested demo.

11. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is yet another powerful social media management tool that helps you in several different areas, from creating, scheduling, and publishing content to monitoring brand mentions and keeping all your social conversations in one place. In other words, Zoho Social makes social media management a piece of cake.

You can work with major social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

You can engage people mentioning your brand directly from the dashboard, but what makes it stand out from the rest is the Facebook Lead Ads integration that helps you capture and monitor leads in real-time.

Zoho Social helps you better understand your audience, create the most engaging content, and prepare pre-built reports to share the results of your work.

The platform examines every social mention to provide you with the most accurate set of data possible.

Test the tool for 15 days for free before choosing one of the available plans.

Standard and Professional are available for Individuals & Businesses that are available for both monthly and yearly subscriptions, whereas Agency and Agency plus aimed at Agencies are available only on annual subscriptions.

12. Mention

Mention is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools. Based in Paris, France, Mention has recently been acquired by Mynewsdesk, an online newsroom and PR platform provider.

However, both tools continue to provide separate services. Mention focuses on three key areas:

• Monitoring
• Listening
• Publishing

An interesting feature are Advanced Alerts that help sift through the Internet noise and get to the information you need to make better decisions.

Moreover, Mentions allows you to precisely track the impact of your work and compare trends by filtering key online conversations.

Analyzing online content will help you manage your customer service and stay one step ahead of your competitors.

You can take it for a spin with a free trial and then choose one of the three available plans, $29 a month is the most affordable.

There’s also a Mention for Enterprise and Agencies that you need to request demos to get all the details.

See also: The best Instagram tools.

How to set up a social media monitoring project?

We’ve already discussed this topic at the beginning of the blog post. You can monitor keywords related directly to your brand, for example:

• The name of your company or product
• Your branded hashtag
• Your campaign hashtag
• Your slogan
• The name of your CEO or other employees active online

Moreover, you can track the keywords related to your competitors or industry in general.

But media monitoring tools will give you much more than just your brand mentions, provided you type the right set of keywords.

Social monitoring tools will provide you with information about your potential customers and in-depth audience insights. People are looking for solutions to their problems.

Social media monitoring will help you spot all the conversations on different platforms and increase the awareness of your brand.

Combine words such as “recommend” or “suggest” with keywords related to your business or industry.

In the panel, you will see results linked directly to your product. Just like in the mentions below, where a Twitter user is looking for a take our restaurant recommendation:

Why do you need social media monitoring tools?

The benefits of using a social media monitoring tool for your business are hard to miss. It can boost your marketing strategy.

First of all, you can measure the results of your social media activities and campaigns across various platforms.

Social media monitoring tools will help you measure key social media metrics, for example, your hashtag campaign performance or the reach of your posts.

You will be able to closely track your social media marketing campaign, the results of cooperation with influencers, and everyday activities.

Active social media monitoring will help you prevent PR crises and maintain brand health. Once you spot a sudden spike in the number of negative mentions, you can take action and prevent the crisis from escalating.

Media monitoring tools not only collect mentions but also analyze the results. In the Analysis tab, you will find a lot of actionable insights on how to boost your online presence.

For example, you can closely examine the question your customers pose on social networks and answer them extensively or include the answers in your promotional materials. That way, you can reach your target audience with a precise message.

Here’s an example of how you can build strong relationships with partners. Some time ago, SEO & Marketing Educator Michal from Ahrefs mentioned Brand24 on Twitter. Our CEO was able to react to his post. That’s a great way to build relationships with other companies.

Which social media monitoring tool should you use?

That’s a question only you can answer.

You’re the one who knows your needs and budget the best.

Remember to test the tools to find the perfect match. There are several areas you should take into account while choosing the right social media monitoring tool:

• How much does the tool cost? can you get a discount if you pay for a year in advance?
• Can you test the tool during a free trial period? Can you schedule a demo?
• Do you need a standalone tool or are do you want media monitoring to be a part of social media management tool?
• What social media platforms are covered?
• What features does the tool have?

Social media management software or social media monitoring tool?

These tools look similar but they serve different purposes. It’s good to know what the difference is, to make the best decisions for your brand.

You can use a media monitoring tool to check what people are saying about you online. The tool will collect online conversations from social media platforms, blogs, review sites, and other sources. Then will let you know what is the landscape around your brand.

Social media management platform has different goal. These types of tools let you reply to conversations, schedule posts but not necessarily monitor what is said about your brand online.

A carefully-chosen media monitoring tool that fits your needs will help you bring your social media game to another level.

Use social media monitoring to boost your online presence. Give it a spin and start media monitoring now!