Social Media Listening Tools: How to Listen Right Now + 15 Top Tools

With the right social media listening tool, you can tune into conversations that matter to your brand. From customer comments to industry trends to news articles about your brand, you can efficiently analyze and glean insights.

So, how can you use social listening today, and which tools have the features and capabilities you need? In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to gather and review social media intelligence today—including 17 top tools.

Quick Answer: Best Social Media Listening Tools at a Glance

Short on time? Here’s a fast look at the top social media listening tools, including what each one is best for, starting price, and free trial availability.

Tool	Best For	Starting Price	Free Trial
Agorapulse	All-in-one social media management with built-in listening	$79/user/mo	Yes (30-day)
Brandwatch	Enterprise consumer intelligence	Custom quote	Demo only
Meltwater	PR and media/broadcast monitoring	Custom quote	No free trial
Sprinklr	Large-enterprise omnichannel CX	Custom (self-serve discontinued)	Demo only
Talkwalker	Enterprise listening and benchmarking	Custom quote	Demo only
Sprout Social	Listening as a premium add-on	$199/seat/mo	30 days
Hootsuite	Listening add-on for Enterprise plans	$99/user/mo	14 days
Brand24	Affordable SMB and agency listening	$199/mo	14 days
BrandMentions	Budget monitoring with deep historical data	$79/mo	7 days
Keyhole	Hashtag, campaign, and influencer tracking	$89/user/mo	7 days
Mentionlytics	Affordable web and social monitoring with share of voice	$69/mo	14 days
Oktopost	B2B listening paired with publishing and advocacy	Custom quote	Demo only
Pulsar	Audience intelligence and segmentation	Custom quote	Demo only
Google Alerts	Free basic web and news mention alerts	Free	N/A (free tool)

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of collecting, analyzing, and engaging with digital content that mentions specific brand names, keywords, or hashtags. Using automated searches, you can listen for terms that matter to your brand. Then you can assess the sentiment, join the conversation, and use the data to inform your social media marketing strategy.

It’s helpful for analyzing:

• Your own brand, including mentions from customers, prospects, influencers, and media outlets
• The competition, including how happy or upset customers speak about the brand
• Keywords and hashtags related to your brand so you can monitor trends and sentiment

For example, a social listening search may show you that your competitor’s brand is trending in a negative way on X (formerly Twitter). With the right tool, you can monitor popular posts and gauge the sentiment behind them.

Then you can decide on the best way for your brand to respond. Depending on the situation, you may opt to create social media content that references the issue. Or, you can use it as a way to differentiate your brand during sales calls.

While it’s a type of social media intelligence, it can go beyond social media channels alone. In fact, many social listening tools also cover review sites, news sites, and blogs to offer more complete brand or reputation management.

Marketers, communication professionals, and public relations (PR) teams often use social listening tools to track and analyze brand mentions. Yet these tools are also helpful for sales and customer success teams. When they know what users are saying about your brand, products, and services, they can craft better responses or pitches.

How can your brand benefit from social listening?

With social listening, you can discover what customers are really saying about your brand online and how they actually feel. You can also gauge how people view the competition and monitor trends related to your brand.

With social listening, you can achieve goals like:

• Managing your brand’s reputation: Engage with positive reviews and handle complaints before they become a serious problem or a full-blown crisis.
• Measuring customer sentiment: Get a read on current feelings about your brand and learn how this metric changes over time—including what affects it most.
• Sourcing testimonials and social proof: Identify positive comments, messages, and reviews to repurpose on your website and social channels.
• Keeping an eye on the competition: Monitor how people feel about other brands in your space so you can fill messaging gaps or take advantage of opportunities.

Sign up now for a free trial of Agorapulse and get listening right away.

What’s the difference between social monitoring vs social listening?

Social media monitoring and social media listening share several similarities. Both processes track mentions of brands, keywords, and hashtags online. Here’s where they differ:

• Social monitoring mainly focuses on reacting to mentions. It’s more about providing a quick response.
• Social listening focuses more on gathering insights. It’s more about analyzing data and informing strategy.

Can your strategy include both? Absolutely.

Think of social monitoring as a short-term solution for engaging with customers and prospects. Then consider social listening a long-term solution for managing your brand’s reputation and finding competitive opportunities.

How to Leverage Social Listening Today

So, how can you put social listening to work for your company or clients? Let’s look at how Agorapulse’s social listening tool can provide valuable insights.

1. Assess brand health

Want to know how customers, prospects, and influencers perceive your brand on social media? Looking to monitor how sentiment evolves over time and share findings with stakeholders?

With a single search, you can find and analyze relevant conversations across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, TikTok, Reddit, forums, blogs, and news sources. And because more sources can mean more noise, Search Screening uses AI to automatically filter out mentions that don’t match your intent, so you only see the ones that matter.

From the listening dashboard, you can spot patterns using the search volume and engagement trends charts. The dashboard also displays all the posts from the listening search, so you can identify the source of the buzz.

Agorapulse automatically analyzes the sentiment behind each post in your social listening search. It then provides an overview and displays the breakdown among positive, neutral, and negative sentiment.

2. Improve customer experiences

Want to respond to customer comments and questions more efficiently? Need to improve customer satisfaction so you can develop a happier customer base?

With Agorapulse’s social inbox, you can easily track and reply to direct messages (DMs) and comments on your social media content. But what about when people mention your brand in their own content or comments on others’ posts?

When you add Agorapulse’s social listening tool to the mix, you can monitor public mentions, too. In other words, you can find and respond to user-generated content (UGC) featuring your brand or to comments mentioning your company. You won’t have to worry about missing a mention or an opportunity to connect with customers.

Agorapulse’s listening dashboard displays a complete list of mentions that fit your search parameters, and you can click to engage with any of them directly on the source network.

You can also view the sentiment behind each eligible post in your social listening search. With these insights, you can optimize customer experiences and team workflows.

3. Gain competitive advantage

Curious how your competitors are using social media? Want to use their content for inspiration?

With Agorapulse’s social listening tool, you aren’t limited to searching for your branded hashtags only. Instead, you can also create searches to monitor competitors’ hashtags and keywords (ie, brand, product, or service names).

You can measure both search volume and engagement trends for competitor topics. You can also set up a dedicated competitor search to benchmark your share of voice, comparing your brand against competitors on volume, sentiment, and engagement, side by side. It’s an easy way to see exactly where you stand and spot opportunities to create better content for your own brand.

4. Extract industry insights

Need an easy way to stay on top of industry trends? Want to make sure your brand is responding to current events?

Agorapulse’s social listening tool can also monitor broader hashtags and keywords that apply to your industry. You can also track industry keywords across news articles, blogs, and forums, and go back through up to 24 months of historical data to understand how trends have evolved over time.

Using the volume and engagement dashboards and the content feed, you can stay on top of what’s happening in your industry across social media and beyond. Then you can let these insights guide your content strategy and keep it relevant.

15 Best Social Media Listening Tools

Which social media listening tool best meets your team’s needs? As you weigh options, consider the networks they support, the insights they provide, and the other capabilities they offer, such as social media management.

Compare Social Media Listening Tools by Capability

Here’s how the top social media listening tools stack up on channel coverage, sentiment analysis, and competitor tracking.

Tool	Channel Coverage	Sentiment Analysis	Competitor Tracking	Free Trial
Agorapulse	Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, YouTube, X, forums, blogs, news	Yes	Yes	Yes (30-day)
Sprinklr	Social channels plus customer experience data	Yes	Yes	Demo only
Brandwatch	Social and web-wide consumer intelligence	Yes	Yes	Demo only
Meltwater	Social, news, broadcast, blogs	Yes	Yes	No trial
Talkwalker	Social, news, blogs, forums	Yes (AI-powered)	Yes	Demo only
Sprout Social	Social plus Reddit and review sites	Yes	Yes	30 days
Hootsuite	Social (via Hootsuite Insights add-on)	Yes	Yes	14 days
Brand24	Social, news, blogs, forums, podcasts, videos	Yes (AI-powered)	Yes	14 days
Awario	Social, forums, blogs, news sites	Yes	Not specified	7 days
BrandMentions	Social, web, news, blogs, forums, review sites	Yes	Yes	7 days
Keyhole	Social-first (X, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube)	Yes (AI-powered)	Yes	7 days
Mentionlytics	Social, web, news, blogs, forums, review sites	Yes	Yes (share of voice)	14 days
Oktopost	Social, news, blogs, 75M+ websites	Yes (AI-powered)	Yes	Demo only
Pulsar	Social (incl. TikTok, Reddit, Twitch), blogs, forums, news, search data	Yes (plus emotion and image analysis)	Yes	Demo only
Google Alerts	Web pages and news only (no social)	No	Basic (keyword alerts only)	N/A (free tool)

1. Agorapulse

As a complete social media management solution, Agorapulse includes a powerful social media listening tool, and much more. With Agorapulse, you can listen for mentions of your brand, competitors, keywords, and hashtags on social and web pages.

With Agorapulse’s search volume and engagement trends, you can develop data-driven responses and build more impactful social media strategies. Uncover positive, negative, and neutral sentiments and include those findings in your reports. AI-powered Search Screening keeps your results clean by filtering out irrelevant noise, you get up to 24 months of historical data, dedicated competitor benchmarking with share of voice, and the ability to export everything for deeper analysis.

One of the biggest perks of Agorapulse is that it can handle every other element of social media management, too. From AI-powered content creation and social media scheduling to engagement and reporting, Agorapulse can do it all.

Need to onboard your team or collaborate with clients? Agorapulse has the approval workflows, shared calendars, and customized reports you need to manage social media marketing successfully. Even with all these features, we’ve designed Agorapulse to be affordable for growing teams.

• Best for: teams that want listening built into the same platform they already use for publishing, inbox management, and reporting, one login and one Report Studio instead of a separate listening subscription to manage.
• Choose if: you want a single tool for management and listening, at mid-market pricing, with support that consistently rates above the category average.
• Not for: teams that need enterprise-scale consumer intelligence with the deepest possible source coverage, or native on-demand translation.
• Pricing: Standard starts at $79/user/month billed annually (10 profiles), Professional at $119, Advanced at $149; Listening is sold as a separate add-on. All plans include a 30-day free trial with no credit card required.

2. Sprinklr

Designed for enterprise users, Sprinklr is a social media listening tool built into an all-in-one customer experience management platform. It handles customer support, social media management, content marketing, and social listening.

With Sprinklr’s tools, you can analyze mentions and keywords across channels to understand how your audience feels about your brand or products. The platform tracks volume, share of voice, and sentiment to give your team the insights you need.

• Best for: Fortune-500-scale brands that need listening as one piece of a full omnichannel customer experience management suite.
• Choose if: you’re already an enterprise CXM buyer evaluating Sprinklr against Salesforce, Adobe, or similar platforms.
• Not for: anyone below true enterprise scale. With self-serve gone, there’s no lightweight way to test it.
• Pricing: Custom enterprise quote only; no public pricing or free trial. As of April 30, 2026, Sprinklr discontinued its self-serve plans entirely.

3. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media listening tool built for consumer intelligence at enterprise scale. It offers social media publishing, consumer intelligence, and influencer marketing, so it can monitor brands and keywords and help you create data-driven content.

With Brandwatch, you can find what your customers are talking about at the moment and gauge how they feel about it. You can also get alerts for unusual trends so you can head off crises before they happen.

• Best for: large organizations doing brand-scale consumer research, with deep historical data, broad source coverage, and an actively expanding AI layer (Iris) for pulling insight out of huge volumes of conversation.
• Choose if: you need the deepest possible historical and cross-source data for large-scale brand or market research, and budget isn’t the main constraint.
• Not for: small or mid-market teams. There’s no self-serve option, and reported enterprise-tier costs run well beyond what a Standard listening tool charges.
• Pricing: Not publicly listed; available only through a custom quote.

4. Meltwater

Meltwater is a social media listening tool designed for enterprise users, with a suite of tools for social listening, consumer intelligence, media intelligence, sales intelligence, and influencer marketing.

With Meltwater’s listening tools, you can monitor social mentions, analyze your audience, and be the first to know before a crisis. Since Meltwater also provides historical data, it can give you a more complete picture of your brand’s health over time.

• Best for: PR and communications teams whose core job is broadcast, TV, radio, and podcast monitoring plus journalist outreach, territory that pure social listening tools don’t attempt.
• Choose if: PR and media coverage, not just social conversation, are core to what you’re tracking.
• Not for: teams evaluating it as a plain social listening tool. Expect an annual, quote-based contract with no free trial.
• Pricing: Not publicly listed; reported median around $25,000 per year, with typical contracts ranging from roughly $16,000 to $70,000 or more.

5. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a social and consumer data platform built around a robust social media listening tool set, plus media monitoring and social benchmarking. It’s designed to help you build better marketing strategies, stronger customer relationships, and connections with influencers.

With Talkwalker, you can find your brand’s biggest fans and learn how they feel about your products. You can also get AI-powered summaries of trends and gain actionable insights you can put to work in your social strategy.

• Best for: enterprise listening at scale, including image and logo recognition alongside text-based monitoring.
• Choose if: you’re already evaluating enterprise-tier listening and want a specialist that’s proven itself as the engine behind other platforms’ listening products (it now powers Hootsuite’s Lumen).
• Not for: teams that want transparent self-serve pricing. Like Brandwatch and Meltwater, Talkwalker doesn’t publish rates.
• Pricing: Not publicly listed; available through a demo or sales process.

6. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media marketing tool that offers publishing, engagement, and analytics. It provides its social media listening tool as a premium add-on to its base plans.

With Sprout Social’s listening feature, you can use templates to build comprehensive searches. Then you can use AI-powered tools to review customer feedback, analyze campaigns, spot influencers, and keep an eye on the competition.

• Best for: teams that already value Sprout’s reporting depth and want to add listening, including strong Reddit and review-site coverage, as a premium layer on top.
• Choose if: enterprise-grade reporting is your primary driver and listening is a nice-to-have you’re willing to pay extra for.
• Not for: budget-conscious teams. Sprout’s entry Standard plan starts at $199/seat/month before listening is even added.
• Pricing: Standard starts at $199/seat/month billed annually; listening is an additional paid add-on. 30-day free trial, no credit card required.

7. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool teams can use to create posts, schedule content, respond to engagement, and report on outcomes. Its social media listening tool is available as an add-on for enterprise customers.

With Hootsuite Insights, you can stay on top of industry trends, monitor competitors, and use consumer research to level up your social media strategy. This tool tracks sentiment and volume over time so you can find and respond to trends.

• Best for: teams already invested in Hootsuite’s broader Social OS suite (Perch for publishing, Nest for care, Parliament for advocacy, Lumen for listening) who want listening as one more connected module rather than a separate tool.
• Choose if: you want one connected suite covering publishing, care, and listening, and you’re comfortable with per-user pricing at the higher tiers.
• Not for: teams on a tight budget. Meaningful listening capability isn’t available at the entry price point.
• Pricing: Standard starts at $99/user/month billed annually; listening-capable tiers run notably higher. 14-day free trial.

Grab your free Agorapulse trial right now!

8. Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social media listening tool for monitoring brand reputation. It tracks mentions across social media networks as well as news sites, blogs, forums, and review sites, and it also works with podcasts and videos.

With Brand24, you can measure brand awareness, benchmark your brand against competitors, and assess the sentiment behind mentions. Premium plans include advanced AI features for deeper insights into your brand monitoring searches.

• Best for: small and mid-sized teams that want real social listening, not just a bolt-on feature, at a price well below the enterprise specialists, plus the ability to track how a brand shows up in AI-generated answers.
• Choose if: you want dedicated listening software with genuine sentiment analysis and AI insight reports, without an enterprise sales process.
• Not for: teams that also need publishing and inbox management. Brand24 is listening-only, so you’d still need a separate management tool alongside it.
• Pricing: Starts around $199/month billed annually (roughly $249 month-to-month); 14-day free trial.

9. Awario

Awario is a social media listening tool that tracks conversations across social platforms and beyond. It allows you to monitor brand mentions on social media, forums (ie, Reddit), blogs, and news sites.

With Awario, you can provide customer service, identify sales opportunities, and connect with influencers. You can also use its sentiment analysis tool to gauge positive and negative responses.

• Best for: budget-conscious teams that want straightforward keyword monitoring across social, news, blogs, and forums without a big commitment.
• Choose if: you mainly need alerting on brand and competitor keywords and don’t need deep reporting or enterprise source coverage.
• Not for: teams that need influencer discovery depth or advanced sentiment accuracy. Reviewers note it can misclassify neutral mentions.
• Pricing: Entry plans start around $39 to $49 per month; 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

10. BrandMentions

BrandMentions is a reputation management and social media monitoring tool. It can monitor mentions across social media and customer reviews on dedicated review sites to help you find and respond to customer issues efficiently.

In addition to tracking volume over time, BrandMentions also provides sentiment and trend analysis. To ensure you never miss a positive or negative trend, you can opt in to real-time alerts for your brand.

• Best for: a second budget option alongside Awario, with a notable edge in historical data depth. Some plans go back years rather than months, which suits digital PR and link-building workflows as much as brand monitoring.
• Choose if: you want long historical mention data at a low entry price, or you’re already working in a search or digital-PR context.
• Not for: teams needing real-time enterprise-scale coverage or a bundled management platform.
• Pricing: Entry plans around $79 to $99 per month; 7-day free trial, no credit card required.

11. Mentionlytics

As one of the more comprehensive monitoring tools, Mentionlytics can track mentions of your brand, products, or competitors virtually anywhere across the web. This platform supports all major social networks plus forums, blogs, and news sites.

With Mentionlytics’ reports, you can monitor brand awareness, sentiment analysis, and share of voice. Then you can use this social listening data to guide your content creation and customer engagement strategy.

• Best for: teams that want broad web and social coverage with share-of-voice reporting, at a lower price point than the enterprise players.
• Choose if: you want an affordable, comprehensive monitoring tool that covers most major networks plus forums and news, without a big commitment.
• Not for: teams needing enterprise-scale historical data or advanced AI-driven insights. Its feature depth trails the specialists above.
• Pricing: Starts at $69 per month.

12. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social intelligence tool that offers social listening, publishing and scheduling, and influencer tracking. It also offers social analytics to help you manage audience growth and review top post performance.

With Keyhole’s platform, you can monitor mentions, track virality, and use AI-powered sentiment analysis to get a read on the situation quickly. This tool also uses listening data to provide automated publishing recommendations.

• Best for: teams that want listening combined with influencer tracking and social analytics in one lighter-weight tool.
• Choose if: you care about virality tracking and AI-powered sentiment analysis alongside basic publishing and influencer discovery.
• Not for: teams that need deep enterprise listening or broad web and news source coverage. Keyhole’s focus is narrower and mostly social-first.
• Pricing: Starts at $89 per user per month.

13. Oktopost

As a social media management platform, Oktopost offers listening as well as publishing and analytics. Its AI-powered social media listening tool tracks and analyzes conversations almost anywhere online, including 75+ million websites.

With Oktopost’s listening analytics, you can understand when and why customer perception of your brand changes and how you can impact it successfully. The platform is also helpful for finding influencers, monitoring brand reputation, and analyzing competitors.

• Best for: B2B marketing teams that want listening paired with publishing and analytics, with insight tied to the broader marketing and sales funnel.
• Choose if: you’re a B2B organization that wants listening built into a broader social publishing and analytics platform.
• Not for: B2C brands or teams that need consumer-scale enterprise listening. Oktopost is purpose-built for B2B use cases.
• Pricing: Contact sales for a custom quote.

14. Pulsar

Pulsar is an audience intelligence platform designed to help you craft a customer-centric media strategy. Its audience segmentation tools allow for deeper insights into your community, and its AI-powered tools help you understand topics quickly.

With Pulsar, you can see how audiences across various social networks engage with relevant topics so you can find the best place to invest your team’s energy, and the right tactics to use for growth.

• Best for: teams that want deep audience segmentation and topic or cultural intelligence rather than straightforward brand-mention tracking.
• Choose if: your priority is understanding audience behavior and topic trends to guide strategy, not just monitoring direct brand mentions.
• Not for: teams that want simple, affordable keyword monitoring. Pulsar is positioned as a specialist audience-intelligence tool, not a budget listening pick.
• Pricing: Contact sales for a custom quote.

15. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free tool for monitoring mentions of your brand, keywords, or industry terms across the web. It’s not a full social media listening tool since it only sends email alerts for new content matching your search terms and doesn’t cover in-platform social conversations, sentiment, or engagement data. Still, it’s a reasonable starting point for teams not yet ready to invest in a dedicated social media listening tool.

• Best for: a genuinely free starting point, with email alerts whenever your brand name (or any keyword) appears in newly indexed web pages and news articles.
• Choose if: budget is zero and your monitoring needs are minimal, such as a solo founder or very early-stage brand checking for basic web mentions.
• Not for: anyone who needs social coverage, sentiment, or competitor tracking. At that point, every paid tool on this list will outperform it.
• Pricing: Free.

Wrapping Up What We Covered on Social Media Listening Tools

Social listening is essential for monitoring brand health, creating better customer experiences, keeping an eye on the competition, and much more. With the right social media listening tool, you can listen and analyze automatically, gaining critical insights to enhance your social media strategy.

Curious how Agorapulse’s social media listening tool can help your team collaborate more efficiently? Sign up for a free 30-day trial (no credit card required) and see for yourself today.