Social media monitoring tools are the best way to find out what people are saying about your brand. Not only that, but they can help you track mentions of your product, your competitors, your industry, your Super Bowl ad, your customer service wait times, your new mascot… you name it.

If your audience has an opinion on something, your social media monitoring tool should be able to pick it up. That’s because social media monitoring software gathers and presents audience and competitive insights for brands that want to pay attention to their mentions.

In this post, we’ll review some of the best social media tracking tools on the market and cover social media monitoring best practices straight from the experts so you can join the conversation.

What is social media monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking social mentions about a company, individual, product, or brand. It involves tracking hashtags, keywords, and mentions relevant to your brand in order to stay informed about your audience and industry.

Social monitoring is different from social media listening, which is the next step you’ll want to take after social media monitoring. Social listening involves not just gathering and analyzing the metrics, but taking action.

Still have questions? Check out our full comparison of social listening vs. social monitoring.

What are social media monitoring tools?

Social media monitoring tools help marketers track conversations, mentions, and trends across platforms in real-time.

Katelyn Rhoades, Founder of the social media marketing agency Enfluence Marketing Studio, adds that social media monitoring tools allow marketers to make data-driven decisions.

“These tools provide valuable insights into customer sentiment, brand reputation, and competitor activity,” she says. “They also help identify emerging trends, potential crises, and influencer marketing partnerships, all of which are crucial for a successful social media strategy.”

4 benefits to social media monitoring

Social media moves fast, and you have to keep your finger on the pulse. Tools that monitor social media help you stay on top of the information that matters so you can present your brand online with your best foot forward.

Here are a few reasons why actively monitoring your social media is beneficial to your overall marketing strategy:

1. Crisis prevention

Social media monitoring is critical for crisis management and prevention.

Conversations move quickly on social, so the second you see a potential crisis arise — whether that’s a product launch with a negative reaction or a customer complaint that’s taking on a life of its own — you can step in thanks to the automation functionality of a social media monitoring tool.

“You can use social media monitoring tools to track mentions of your brand or products to really understand public sentiment and quickly respond to customer feedback or concerns,” notess Rhoades.

2. Customer service

In the same way social media monitoring is essential for crisis management, it also plays a key role in providing customer service.

Social media customer service involves providing support and answering questions in social media comments and direct messages.

“Monitoring tools help marketers monitor and respond to customer inquiries or issues in real-time, ensuring a positive customer experience,” says Rhoades.

3. Build your community

Social media monitoring tools can also help turn your social channels into a platform for nurturing long-term relationships, says Alienore Lanson, Senior Account Manager at MG Empower.

“Effective social media monitoring lets brands be responsive to their audience’s pain points, allowing them to address specific issues as they arise,” shares Lanson. “By actively engaging with their audience and providing valuable content, brands can build and sustain deeper connections, enhancing loyalty and ultimately fostering a community.”

4. Track performance

An added benefit of using tools to monitor social media is that they support the measurement and analysis you’re already doing.

Aaron White, CEO of Outbound.com, a marketing platform that uses AI to automate advertising for small businesses, uses social media monitoring tools to track social media performance, in real-time.

“This allows for on-the-fly adjustments based on audience engagement and sentiment,” he says.

15 best social media monitoring tools

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media management tool that includes features for pretty much everything a social media manager does, from content creation to scheduling, analytics, engagement, and monitoring.

Recommended by Rhoades, the management platform “ offers powerful analytics and social listening features, making it great for tracking mentions, hashtags, and keywords across multiple platforms,” she says.

Plus, Hootsuite Listening is included in every plan (and free trial!). And with these features, you can discover trending hashtags, brands, and events anywhere in the world, or dive deeper for personalized insights on your brand.

Additionally, 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 social media posts related to your search terms — you can filter by sentiment, channel, and more.

And if you want to take social listening to the next level, our upgraded listening can show you sentiment over time, top influencers in your space, audience demographics, and so much more.

Key features:

• Hootsuite Listening for easy social monitoring
• Hootsuite Analytics for competitive insights
• Industry Benchmarking for wider, industry-specific intel

Price: Plans start at $99/month for up to 10 profiles. Try Hootsuite with an unlimited 30-day free trial.

Best for: Marketers seeking both basic monitoring and advanced social listening tools across all major social media channels.

2. Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Talkwalker offers more than 50 filters to monitor conversations across 150 million data sources, including blogs, forums, videos, news sites, review sites, and social networks. As social media monitoring tools go, this is one of the most powerful.

Plus, it’s available in your Hootsuite dashboard!

You can use Talkwalker to analyze engagement, reach, comments, brand sentiment, important influencers, conversation clusters, and more.

Talkwalker is especially useful for spotting activity peaks in conversations about your brand. This can help you determine the best times for your brand to post on social media.

Key features:

• Over 50 filters for precise monitoring
• Analyzes and shares real-time alerts about engagement, reach, and sentiment
• Access to 150 million data sources

Price: Book a free demo to learn more.

Best for: Social media managers looking for comprehensive monitoring and analysis across various digital marketing platforms, including blogs, forums, and social networks.

3. Agorapulse

Agorapulse helps social media managers maintain oversight of social mentions. It also offers features that simplify monitoring and listening to relevant conversations.

The toollets you organize conversations and competitor activities, and even track negative competitor mentions. You can also manage comments on your social ads for Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Source: Agorapulse

Key features:

• Customizable monitoring feeds to filter specific phrases and platforms
• Organize and label customer conversations and competitor activity
• Synchronize and manage social ad comments

Price: Free 30-day trial, then plans start at $49 per user/month (billed annually with an additional cost per additional profile). They go up to $119 per user/month.

Best for: Brands seeking to streamline their social media monitoring and listening strategies, especially those dealing with high volumes of activity on social ads.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social media monitoring and listening tool. The tool pulls data from 100 million online sources and includes a year’s worth of historical data so you never miss a mention or a trend.

It also shares alerts to unusual trends in your data so you can stay ahead of any potential online crisis.

“Known for its robust social listening capabilities, Brandwatch lets marketers analyze conversations, spot trends, and assess brand sentiment,” says Rhoades.

Source: Brandwatch

Key features:

• Insights from 100 million sources
• Offers a year’s worth of historical data
• Includes 48 boolean operators so you can specify your searches

Price: Pricing is available on request.

Best for: Large or enterprise social teams with bigger budgets.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a professional-grade tool designed for comprehensive monitoring across all social platforms and the broader web.

A multi-lingual brand social media monitoring tool, it tracks mentions, keywords, and sentiment in multiple languages, catering to a global audience.

For social media managers who have clients across the globe and audiences speaking multiple languages, this app helps you see the big picture.

Source: Mentionlytics

Key features:

• Multi-language support
• Tracks media and social mentions, keywords, and sentiment
• Advanced sentiment analysis detects emotions in every mention
• Filtering capabilities by keyword, source, sentiment, country, language, and more
• Integrates with Hootsuite so you can assign and reply to mentions right from your dashboard

Price: 14-day free trial, then plans start at $58/month.

Best for: Professionals in need of a thorough web monitoring tool that supports multiple languages across all social platforms, web sources, and review platforms.

6. Fedica

Fedica is an AI-driven social media monitoring tool that helps you identify and engage with accounts aligned with your target demographics. For professionals, this is one of the most demographic-focused social media monitoring tools out there.

Fedica can publish content across multiple social platforms, but it doesn’t have content performance metrics or marketing campaign-specific analytics. It also lacks trend analysis, workflow management, and calendar management features. However, Fedica integrates with Hootsuite, so you can use the tools in combination.

With AI-driven analytics tools and advanced social listening features, Fedica can help you amplify your messaging and engage more effectively with various audience segments.

Source: Fedica

Key features:

• Discovery of social media accounts matching target demographics to build a relevant audience
• AI-driven social media analytics for segmented audience engagement improvement
• Advanced social listening for hashtags, keywords, and post reach with demographic-enriched analyses
• Email alerts for brand mentions, keyword notifications, and trending topics by geography

Price: Free version is available. Paid plans start at $10/month.

Best for: Good for social media managers who want to amplify their messages to specific audiences but don’t need in-depth campaign analytics.

7. Reddit by Synaptive

With 70 million daily active users, Reddit is an often-overlooked social platform where conversations skew in-depth and honest. This tool monitors conversations for specific, relevant keywords, making it a valuable resource for understanding in-depth and genuine user discussions.

Social media managers would do well to pay attention to what’s being said on Reddit. It can clue you into public sentiment and upcoming trends.

Source: Synaptive

Key features:

• Multi-keyword searches
• Favorite posts and mark posts as read or unread
• Add notes to posts of interest

Price: $6/month or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users

Best for: Marketers seeking to monitor or engage with Reddit’s unique and often in-depth conversations.

8. Synapview

Synapview lets you monitor content across multiple platforms, whether you want to track competitors’ pages, certain keywords, and hashtags or keep an eye out for trends.

Best of all, it integrates with Hootsuite, so you can unify your monitoring efforts by adding the streams to your dashboard.

Source: Synapview

Key features:

• Monitor content across Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, and blogs
• Save up to 10 streams of competitors, hashtags, or trends
• Track what you’ve already viewed

Price: $8/month or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users

Best for: Marketers looking for an easy and accessible way to monitor certain pages or hashtags from their social media management tool.

9. Disqus

Disqus is an audience engagement platform for online publishers. Blogs and media websites can use Disqus to monitor, manage, and moderate the comment section on their sites.

Plus, the app connects with Hootsuite so you can monitor conversations straight from your dashboard.

Source: Disqus

Key features:

• Works as an embeddable widget or blog plug-in
• Moderate comments directly from your dashboard
• Engage with posts from your site within the Hootsuite app

Price: $6/month or free for Hootsuite Enterprise users

Best for: Marketers who run blogs and media websites and want a user-friendly to monitor reader conversations.

10. ReviewTrackers

Social monitoring isn’t limited to social channels. It’s important to be aware of what customers are saying about you everywhere online, including in online conversations and reviews.

ReviewTrackers makes it easy to track these social media conversations. The tool monitors over 50 review websites and consolidates them into one stream within your Hootsuite dashboard. Additionally, you can categorize the reviews based on sentiment or source, so you can prioritize which ones you want to respond to or share.

Key features:

• Can filter reviews in your stream by source or category
• Reply directly to reviews from Facebook and Google
• Share reviews directly to your social channels connected to Hootsuite

Price: Free with your Hootsuite plan.

Best for: Monitoring online reviews in real-time.

11. Mention

Mention tracks more than a billion data sources across the web, including news sources, blogs, Reddit, X (Twitter), Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. You can create and save filters to make finding what you’re looking for easier.

This social media monitoring tool includes sentiment analysis and visual reporting. You can track mentions of your brand or any topic up to two years in the past and set up alerts for unusual activity.

Source: Mention

“Known for its robust social listening capabilities, Brandwatch allows marketers to analyze conversations, spot trends, and assess brand sentiment,” suggests Rhoades.

Key features:

• Gathers social media mentions and topics from one billion sources across the web and social
• Social listening capabilities such as measuring share of voice
• Real-time notifications

Price: Starting at $49/month; 14-day free trial.

Best for: Busy marketers looking for simple monitoring features for PR, comms, and social activity.

12. Sprout Social

Sprout Social helps you track conversations about your brand, understand your audience demographics, and identify important influencers in your niche. Hashtag and mention monitoring are baked into the solution, along with sentiment analysis. Though, more detailed social monitoring is available with an add-on.

Check out how Sprout Social compares to Hootsuite.

Source: Sprout Social

Key features:

• Crisis prevention with notifications that let you know when there’s been a spike in mentions
• AI-assisted replies
• AI-powered sentiment analysis

Price: Starting at $199/month; 30-day free trial.

Best for: Larger social teams with bigger budgets.

13. Digimind

Digimind expands social media monitoring to 850 million sources, including blogs, forums, offline sources, and the major social media platforms, across over 20 media types.

It works in more than 80 languages and features automatic translation. This social listening tool incorporates AI to analyze trends in mentions and sentiment analysis.

Source: Digimind

Key features:

• Unlimited social and web monitoring
• Real-time updates
• Geolocalization capabilities

Price: Pricing is available on request.

Best for: Marketing teams interested in brand monitoring to collect consumer and competitive insights.

14. Reputation

A leader in reputation management, Reputation can be used as a social media monitoring tool.

Marketers can use the platform to track competitor mentions across thousands of digital channels and then use that data for competitive analysis to compare their performance. The tool also lets you understand sentiment about trends and conversations as soon as they happen so you can identify opportunities for your brand to jump in.

Source: Reputation

Key features:

• Manage and reply to online reviews in one dashboard
• Real-time alerts for relevant mentions, keywords, or activity
• Compare mentions and share-of-voice with competitors

Price: Pricing is available on request.

Best for: Marketers and comms professionals who want to manage an entire online presence in one place.

15. Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered tool that sources mentions from across social media, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.

Not only can you track mentions, keywords, and hashtags, but the platform also measures the importance and sentiment of each mention to help you prioritize responses.

Source: Brand24

Key features:

• Gathers insights from 25 million online sources
• Advanced sentiment analysis for positive, negative, and neutral mentions
• Measure the reach and importance of mentions

Price: Plans start at $119/month; 14-day free trial.

Best for: Marketers looking for a solution for online reputation management.

4 tips for using social media monitoring tools from the experts

1. Make monitoring an ongoing activity

Reviewing your mentions should be part of your daily routine. Even if there aren’t any negative comments or major news to respond to, your mentions can also uncover opportunities you can use to inform your strategy.

“By treating monitoring as an ‘always-on’ consistent activity, you gain a deeper understanding of audience behavior over time, rather than just focusing on the immediate impact of content,” says Lanson. “This continuous monitoring helps identify patterns, trends, and shifts in audience sentiment, providing a more nuanced view of how content resonates.”

2. Customize keywords to track

Every social monitoring strategy requires setting up certain names or keywords to track. These terms typically include your own brand name, competitors’ names, and a branded hashtag. But you can get even more specific if you want to make sure you don’t miss a relevant mention.

Think about specific terms related to your brand or industry. Add these various phrases and topics to your tracking list for comprehensive coverage.

And don’t forget to set up alerts for these specific keywords, suggests White.

“My top tip is to set up alerts for key terms—like your brand name, industry-specific terms, and competitor names—so you can respond quickly when needed,” he shares.

3. Set alerts for unusual activity

If your sentiment takes a nose-dive when your new TV ad rolls out or your competitor launches a terrifyingly cool new product, the social team should be among the first to know. Social media monitoring tools are essential for brand reputation management.

A social media crisis (or just a regular PR crisis) can arise at any time. Social media monitoring can alert you if mention volume surges, or the social sentiment meters are ticking over to red all the way down the board.

The correct tool will not just warn you but make sure you have real-time insights at hand to help you make informed decisions about how to solve the problem.

4. Add a human touch

Social media monitoring tools are just that — they’re tools. They are meant to support your strategy, efforts, and activity, but they aren’t a replacement for the experience and creativity that social media marketers bring to the table.

Lanson emphasizes how analyzing the data picked up by tools with a human perspective is equally as important as the data itself.

“By incorporating our creativity into monitoring, we become more strategic and precise in analyzing results,” she says.

“One way we do this is by exploring specific keywords that might be relevant to a particular brand but aren’t always picked up by tools. This manual, intuitive approach helps us identify nuanced trends and opportunities that might otherwise go unnoticed.”

Save time managing your social media presence with Hootsuite. Publish and schedule posts, find relevant conversations, engage your audience, measure results, and more — all from one dashboard. Try it free today.

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