Top 15 Social Listening Tools for Track Brand Mentions Easily in 2025

Finding the right social listening tools can be challenging. Customers today expect quick responses on social media, and if businesses fail to meet those expectations, they risk losing potential customers for good.

One of the biggest challenges for businesses is not having access to all the platforms their customers use. It’s nearly impossible to monitor every source manually, which is why social listening tools are essential for understanding customer needs and expectations.

However, some businesses still struggle to meet their goals after adopting social listening tools, often because they select tools with limited features. This can lead to trying multiple tools, which wastes both time and money. It’s more efficient to seek guidance from experienced professionals to help choose the right tool upfront.

What is Social Listening?

Social listening involves tracking and analyzing online conversations to understand consumer perceptions of your brand, industry, and competitors. It monitors discussions across various digital platforms, offering a comprehensive view of public sentiment.

While it mainly focuses on social media, forums, review sites, and news outlets, social listening can also include any online space where your audience interacts. This approach enables businesses to capture a wide range of opinions and preferences that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Analyzing online conversations helps businesses understand how consumers perceive their products, services, and competitors. Insights from social listening are useful for assessing the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and making necessary adjustments to align with audience expectations.

In contrast to traditional research methods, social listening provides real-time feedback, offering direct insights into customer opinions and competitor activities. This approach enables companies to stay informed about emerging trends, maintain their reputation, and make data-driven decisions based on actual consumer behavior.

Social Listening vs. Social Media Tracking

Social media tracking, also referred to as social media monitoring, is a short-term tactic focused on identifying and addressing brand mentions on social platforms. This approach typically revolves around spotting individual comments or posts about a brand and responding promptly to maintain or improve customer relationships. For instance, if a customer complains about a damaged product, like a broken candle jar during shipping, offering a replacement helps preserve customer satisfaction and goodwill.

In contrast, social listening is a more comprehensive, long-term strategy. It involves analyzing a wide range of online conversations to uncover deeper insights that can shape a brand’s overall approach. Rather than simply reacting to individual comments, social listening looks at trends and patterns in consumer feedback.

For example, if numerous customers praise a product made with sustainable materials, it indicates that environmental responsibility is a priority for the audience. This aggregated data helps businesses 

• Understand broader customer sentiments;
• Identify emerging trends;
• Refine their marketing and product development strategies accordingly. 

While monitoring is reactive and immediate, listening is proactive, offering a deeper understanding of what drives consumer opinions.

What Are Social Listening Tools?

Social listening tools are advanced technology solutions, including apps and software, designed to monitor and gather conversations happening across various online platforms. These tools allow users to track discussions on any topic of interest. For marketers, this often means focusing on their brand, competitors, and overall industry trends.

These tools scan multiple social media platforms, forums, and other online sources, collecting all relevant data into a single, centralized location. This gives businesses and marketers a comprehensive view of public conversations, making it easier to analyze what people are saying without switching between platforms. By consolidating this information in one place, social listening tools provide an efficient way to assess consumer sentiment, competitor activity, and emerging trends, helping brands make informed decisions based on real-time insights.

Why Marketers Need Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools provide marketers with real-time insights into what people are saying and thinking about their brand. These tools gather and organize data, giving marketers instant access to valuable information.

Key reasons to use social listening tools include:

• Understanding your brand reputation beyond direct mentions, by tracking untagged conversations about your brand;
• Identifying opportunities for authentic engagement with your audience by responding to mentions or offering useful suggestions;
• Pinpointing customer pain points and uncovering new product opportunities based on unmet needs expressed in discussions;
• Monitoring social sentiment to react quickly to negative conversations or capitalize on positive trends before they grow;
• Finding potential influencers or creators to collaborate with by identifying key figures within your niche;
• Spotting competitor campaigns as they launch, allowing you to assess opportunities and potential threats;
• Staying ahead of emerging trends, enabling your brand to engage with what’s happening in the social sphere before it becomes mainstream.

Social listening tools offer marketers essential insights to refine their strategies and improve engagement.

You may also be interested in learning who follows who on Twitter, which can provide valuable insights for building connections and identifying key influencers in your niche.

15 Best Social Listening Tools for Comprehensive Brand Monitoring

While some social listening technologies are better at particular activities, others concentrate on particular platforms. While one tool may be better at identifying new trends, another may provide more in-depth sentiment analysis.

For maximum benefit from your social listening efforts, it’s important to choose a tool that can handle all aspects of brand monitoring.

Twilert

Twilert is an X (formerly Twitter) search and monitoring tool that helps businesses and individuals stay informed about relevant X conversations in real time. It tracks keywords, hashtags, usernames, and specific locations to ensure you capture important mentions related to your brand, industry, or other areas of interest.

The platform allows users to create custom Twitter alerts, which are sent directly to their inbox on a real-time or scheduled basis. Twilert’s search features include Boolean search operators, allowing users to narrow results by excluding specific terms or targeting certain locations or languages. This makes it useful for monitoring brand mentions, identifying opportunities, and keeping up with current events. Twilert is a practical tool for marketers, PR professionals, and businesses that need to track X activity and respond to mentions efficiently.

Key Features:

• Advanced Search Capabilities: Twilert allows you to use Boolean search operators in your X alerts to refine your results. This lets you monitor specific users, exclude unwanted keywords, and search for tweets within particular locations or languages;
• Tracking with Search History & Digest: Twilert’s search history and email digests ensure you can easily revisit important tweets from your alerts. You can also manage your own account by locating and removing retweets or likes on X;
• Scheduled Alerts: Twilert’s alert system captures every tweet related to your search and sends them to you via email, either in real time or on a set schedule. Stay informed about breaking news or new opportunities for your brand;
• User Grouping for Multiple Accounts: With Twilert, you can create multiple user groups, send alerts to predefined email lists, and manage multiple brand accounts or searches simultaneously;
• White-Labeling for Agencies: The agency package offers white-labeling options, allowing you to present Twilert’s services under your own brand to clients;
• Geo-Targeting Precision: Twilert’s geo-targeting feature enables you to focus your search on specific locations using an intuitive map interface, allowing for more targeted queries.

You may also like the guide on how to unfollow inactive Twitter accounts, which can help you clean up your follower list and improve engagement.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a platform widely used by digital marketers and community managers to simplify management tasks and enhance brand visibility. It offers features such as “Streams” for tracking keywords, brand mentions, and hashtags across various platforms. The “Insights” tool provides AI-powered competitor analysis and sentiment tracking, helping businesses gain a clearer picture of how their brand is viewed.

Beyond social listening, Hootsuite is known for its social scheduling capabilities, enabling users to manage multiple accounts from a single dashboard. Its user-friendly scheduling calendar allows content posting on major platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest, making it an effective tool for businesses of all sizes.

Key Features:

• Streamlined Brand Monitoring: Easily monitor and respond to brand mentions across platforms directly within Hootsuite;
• Boost Paid Campaigns: Optimize paid social media campaigns with the “Boost” feature;
• Multi-Platform Management: Track activity and measure success across various social media platforms;
• AI-Generated Content Ideas: Use AI to generate captions and post ideas, saving time on content creation.

Talkwalker by Hootsuite

Talkwalker’s social data library pulls from over 150 million sources, giving you extensive access to online conversations. With more than 50 advanced filters, you can segment this data to target and monitor the right audience.

This robust social listening tool helps you measure the full impact of your online interactions by analyzing engagement volume, reach, sentiment, and more. It also utilizes Blue Silk GPT for AI-driven analysis. 

Brand24

Brand24 is an AI-powered social listening tool designed to help businesses monitor and evaluate brand awareness and reach. It tracks discussions across more than 25 million online sources, including major social media platforms, blogs, and news outlets, providing valuable insights into consumer opinions. This helps companies gain a better understanding of how their brand is perceived and identify emerging trends in real time.

The platform also enables users to assess social sentiment, allowing for early detection of potential reputational risks and addressing them before they escalate. Additionally, Brand24’s influence score feature identifies key influencers and content creators in specific niches, offering valuable opportunities for collaboration and brand growth.

Key Features:

• Real-time Monitoring: Track conversations from 25 million sources, including social media, blogs, and news sites;
• Sentiment Analysis: Measure brand sentiment to understand consumer opinions and identify potential reputational risks;
• Influence Score: Identify top influencers and creators within your niche;
• Brand Awareness Tracking: Monitor trends in brand reach and awareness across various platforms;
• Custom Alerts: Set up real-time alerts for critical notifications to stay on top of important developments related to your brand.

Digimind

Digimind is a global leader in social listening and competitive intelligence, tracking data from over 850 million sources, including blogs, forums, and major social media platforms. It supports more than 200 languages and features automatic translation, making it a versatile tool for businesses worldwide. Digimind’s AI-powered platform analyzes trends in mentions and sentiment, offering businesses actionable insights for their marketing and business strategies.

The platform is designed to transform vast amounts of social and online data into useful consumer and business insights. Its brand reputation dashboard provides a detailed view to help users plan, execute, and analyze marketing strategies effectively. While the tool offers extensive data collection, it may be better suited for users with experience in analytics and data management due to its complex filtering capabilities.

Key Features:

• Extensive Source Coverage: Tracks data from 850 million sources, including blogs, forums, and social media, in over 200 languages;
• AI-Powered Analysis: Utilizes AI to identify trends, mentions, and sentiment in social conversations;
• Historical Search: Access past data for trend analysis and insights;
• User-Friendly Dashboards: Visualize social data through intuitive dashboards and charts for better decision-making;
• Trending Topics Identification: Uncover emerging trends in social conversations to inform strategic decisions;
• Tech Integration: Integrate Digimind with existing tech stacks to centralize social reports.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a comprehensive social listening tool that monitors brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across both social media and the web in multiple languages. It uses advanced sentiment analysis to identify positive, negative, or neutral mentions, providing businesses with insights into their online reputation. Mentionlytics also allows filtering results by keyword, source, country, and language, making it easy to pinpoint relevant conversations.

Mentionlytics allows users to monitor and respond to brand mentions in real time, providing detailed reporting that helps businesses make informed decisions and create proactive engagement strategies. The tool also identifies top influencers within your niche, offering valuable insights to improve your social media strategy. Mentionlytics is ideal for companies seeking to enhance their online presence with actionable data and personalized support.

Key Features:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Track brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social platforms and websites;
• Sentiment Analysis: Understand the tone of online mentions, whether positive, negative, or neutral, in over 100 languages;
• Competitive Analysis: Compare your brand’s online presence against competitors to gauge market share;
• Social Intelligent Advisor (SIA): Utilizes real-time data analysis to enhance your social media strategy;
• Customizable Dashboard: Tailor the dashboard to display key metrics and information most relevant to your needs.

Meltwater

Meltwater is a media intelligence and social listening tool that helps businesses gather insights from social media, news sites, blogs, and other online sources. It allows users to monitor brand mentions in real-time, analyze audience sentiment, and track trends by collecting historical data. Meltwater is designed for mid-market companies, offering social listening and AI-driven insights in over 190 countries, helping businesses stay ahead of potential crises and better understand their audience.

A key feature of Meltwater is its precise Boolean search capability, which allows users to filter results with high accuracy. It also provides automated sentiment analysis to help businesses gauge public opinion about their brand. The platform includes reporting options, influencer identification, and competitive analysis, making it useful for companies looking for in-depth data and customization. However, its extensive features and higher price point may be more suited for users experienced in social listening and data analysis.

Key Features:

• Influencer Identification: Discover key influencers talking about your brand or industry;
• Trend and Topic Tracking: Identify emerging trends and relevant topics to stay ahead;
• Comprehensive Monitoring: Track data from social media, news sites, blogs, forums, and more;
• Sentiment Analysis: Analyze the sentiment behind posts, articles, and online content to understand public opinion;
• Competitive Analysis: Monitor competitors’ online activities to gain insights and benchmark your performance;
• Custom Alerts: Set up real-time notifications for important events, mentions, or trends to ensure timely responses;
• Custom Reports: Generate detailed reports with key metrics and charts to evaluate the impact of your social media strategies;
• AI Assistant: Utilize AI to draft press releases and media pitches, saving time and effort.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides a robust social listening solution that helps brands track and analyze conversations across major social networks and online platforms. Its tools automatically process large volumes of data to uncover valuable insights about audience preferences, product opinions, and industry trends. With Sprout Social, brands can monitor how people feel about their products and campaigns, helping them stay on top of trends and spot new business opportunities.

Sprout Social’s social listening capabilities also allow businesses to discover key influencers and thought leaders, making it easier to engage with the right people. Custom alerts can be set to detect potential brand crises, enabling businesses to address issues before they escalate. Additionally, its built-in social media management tools allow businesses to manage all aspects of customer engagement in one place, making it a preferred choice for customer service teams. The tool offers an “intelligent inbox” that consolidates incoming messages and lets users manage, tag, and respond without switching platforms. It also provides effective monitoring of brand mentions and keywords across Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, X, and other sources, giving brands valuable insights for informed decision-making.

Key Features:

• Publishing Tool: Plan content strategy and schedule posts easily;
• Unified Inbox: Manage all engagement across social networks in one inbox;
• Trend Analysis: Identify trends in conversations and create word clouds to spot frequently mentioned terms;
• Custom Alerts: Set alerts to anticipate potential brand crises;
• Social Listening Insights: Track mentions, uncover audience insights, and inform marketing strategies.

Mention

Mention is a well-established social listening tool that offers more than just monitoring. It provides detailed analytics for different accounts and allows users to track competitor activities. Upon signing up, Mention prompts you to set alerts for keywords, hashtags, and competitors you want to monitor. Additionally, it suggests top brands in your industry for competitor analysis, helping you stay ahead in your niche.

The tool organizes data into separate tabs for your business and competitors, allowing you to monitor your performance and compare it to industry leaders. With access to over a billion data sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms, Mention ensures comprehensive tracking. You can save custom filters to easily locate relevant information, track mentions from the past two years, and receive alerts for unusual activity. The platform also includes sentiment analysis and visual reporting to provide a complete picture of your brand’s online presence.

Key Features:

• Crisis Management: Handle social media crises efficiently with the dedicated feature for managing negative situations;
• Team Collaboration: Use the Team feature to collaborate on social media efforts and share alerts among employees;
• Competitor Analysis: Monitor and compare your brand against multiple competitors to ensure content relevance and uniqueness;
• Social Listening Across Platforms: Track success on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now X), with support for additional platforms on higher plans;
• Sentiment Analysis & Reporting: Get detailed insights with sentiment analysis and visual reports to understand brand perception;
• Filter Customization: Create and save filters to focus on relevant trends and ignore irrelevant content, ensuring your insights are accurate.

HubSpot

HubSpot’s social listening tools allow you to monitor keyword mentions, set up email alerts, and create streams to track critical conversations. A key benefit of HubSpot is its integration with the CRM, enabling businesses to connect social conversations with customer data. This helps provide context when targeting specific audiences, allowing for a better understanding of customer opinions and needs.

With HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, social media managers can monitor interactions, conversations, and audiences across multiple platforms without switching between them. You can also schedule posts, manage engagement, and reply to your audience directly from the HubSpot dashboard. The ability to link keyword streams with your sales team means that they receive notifications when relevant conversations occur online, making it easier to manage the entire social media strategy from one centralized location.

Key Features:

• AI-Powered Post Generator: Save time by using AI to generate social posts;
• Cross-Platform Scheduling: Schedule social media posts in advance across platforms;
• CRM Integration: Link your social listening with your contacts database and CRM for more targeted audience insights;
• Keyword Monitoring Streams: Track keyword mentions important to your sales pipeline;
• YouTube Reporting (Enterprise Users): Get detailed insights into your video strategy with YouTube reporting;
• Unified Social Management: Manage your social profiles on Facebook, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn from a single tool.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening tool designed for consumer brands to analyze online conversations, segment audiences, and benchmark performance against competitors. It provides comprehensive monitoring capabilities, helping social media managers and market researchers track conversations across various platforms and online sources.

A key feature of Brandwatch is its audience segmentation, allowing users to break down demographic data from both social media audiences and customer lists for detailed insights. By tracking brand and competitor mentions, the tool helps businesses understand market trends and shifts in audience sentiment, making it an essential resource for staying competitive.

Key Features:

• Store visual content in a digital asset library for quick access;
• Monitor messages from all social channels in one inbox;
• Use benchmarking tools like share of voice analysis to stay competitive;
• Track brand mentions from over 100 million sources;
• Gain detailed insights into user demographics and behavior with Focus Panels.

Quid

Quid is a social listening tool powered by generative AI, designed to track customer needs and expectations from social conversations. It processes millions of data points, displaying trends and insights on a user-friendly dashboard. Unlike many tools, Quid focuses on predicting and anticipating future trends based on social data rather than simply responding to real-time conversations. This makes it valuable for businesses looking to stay ahead of market changes and consumer behavior shifts.

Key Features:

• Generative AI to predict customer needs and trends;
• Tracks millions of data points for comprehensive analysis;
• Dashboard-based insights for easy trend monitoring;
• Focuses on anticipating future trends rather than real-time reactions.

Ipsos Synthesio

Ipsos Synthesio is an AI-powered social listening tool that emphasizes trend analysis. It differentiates between two data types: social-declarative data (what users say) and digital-behavioral data (how users behave online). Synthesio’s trend detection is designed to identify statistically significant shifts in conversations, topic pairings, and trending images, making it particularly useful for spotting emerging competitors and changes in brand perception.

Key Features:

• AI-driven trend analysis;
• Differentiates between social-declarative and digital-behavioral data;
• Alerts for statistically relevant changes in conversations;
• Identifies emerging competitors and shifts in brand perception.

Audiense

Audiense takes a different approach to intelligence, focusing more on understanding who is driving conversations rather than what is being said. It uses data to help businesses gain insights into their audience, identifying the groups leading discussions. While not a traditional listening tool, Audiense applies similar concepts to segment and analyze audiences, making it useful for creating targeted marketing strategies.

Key Features:

• Focuses on audience analysis rather than direct social listening;
• Identifies key audience segments and influencers;
• Helps understand who is driving conversations and their interests;
• Provides insights for targeted marketing strategies.

Keyhole

Keyhole is an enterprise-level social listening tool that helps businesses understand their audience better by tracking keywords, mentions, and hashtags across multiple platforms. It visualizes trends over time and tracks the social share of voice. Keyhole’s volume prediction feature anticipates when posts are likely to go viral, allowing businesses to plan their responses. It also helps identify and evaluate key influencers in your niche, comparing their performance over time.

Key Features:

• Tracks keywords, mentions, and hashtags across platforms;
• Volume prediction feature to anticipate viral posts;
• Analyzes social share of voice and sentiment trends;
• Identifies and compares the performance of influencers in your niche.

The Benefits of Using Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools continuously monitor your brand’s online presence, helping maintain your reputation and keep you engaged with your audience. By tracking conversations across social platforms, forums, and review sites, these tools let you catch negative sentiment early, identify loyal fans or influencers, and spot emerging trends. They provide valuable customer feedback, safeguard your brand by addressing issues promptly, and uncover new marketing opportunities. Social listening tools also monitor brand mentions, track key metrics like share of voice, and offer insights to optimize your marketing strategies and better understand your audience’s preferences.

Final Thoughts

Using social listening tools in your strategy is important for staying competitive today. These tools help monitor brand mentions, track customer sentiment, and find engagement opportunities across social media platforms. With real-time insights, you can adjust your marketing efforts, protect your brand’s reputation, and connect more effectively with your audience. The right tools allow you to turn online conversations into actionable data that leads to better results.