31 Essential Social Media Monitoring Tools for 2023!

Social media monitoring tools are an essential element of your social media marketing strategy.

Adopting a social media strategy allows your brand to meet its audience in its comfort zone. It also means customers, brand advocates, and audiences can follow and engage with your brand as they deem fit.

These exchanges occur in real-time across different platforms. So, it’s essential to set up a social media monitoring tool that ensures you stay on top of these conversations.

In this piece, we share 31 essential social media monitoring tools to think of as you plan for 2022.

But before that, let’s get some basics down.

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the process of following, engaging with, and planning conversations around important brand awareness keywords on different platforms.

Social media makes it easy for brands to monitor conversations around keywords relevant to their product or business. These tools take this functionality further by allowing users to track those conversations on one convenient social media monitoring platform.

While finding the best social media monitoring tools, the key things to look out for are flexible features. These features allow your social media team to set and follow keyword activity, track brand sentiment and overall social content performance.

Many free social media monitoring tools exist. But most have limited features to encourage pro-buy-ins.

Social Media Monitoring Tools

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management tool for planning, scheduling, and monitoring social media performance and task management.

Key features:

• Create and schedule social media posts
• Track and respond to incoming messages
• “Streams” for following conversations
• Social media analytics
• Create and assign tasks
• Allows integrations with 3rd party apps

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Pinterest.

Price:

• Free plan
• Professional: $19/month
• Team: $99/month
• Business: $599/month
• Enterprise: custom pricing

2. Buffer

Buffer is a complete suite social media marketing tool that initially started as a tweet scheduling platform. The platform segments its features into three core functions: publishing, analytics, and user engagement.

Key features:

• Plan, queue, and schedule multi-platform social posts
• Customize posts for each platform
• Platform performance analytics
• Monitor social conversations on Instagram
• Browser extension
• Analytics and content performance for different platforms

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest.

Price:

• Free
• Essentials: $5/month/social media channel billed annually

3. Zoho Social

Zoho is a social media monitoring and scheduling tool focusing on content management functions. Zoho also allows marketing teams to track revenue and justify ROI.

Key features:

• Drag and drop publishing calendar
• SmartQ publishing time
• Content curation
• Brand review, mentions, and keyword monitoring
• Post engagement live-stream
• Workflows and task management
• Analytics and custom reports
• Zoho CRM and 3rd party integrations via Zapier

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+

Price:

For businesses:

• Free
• Standard: $10/month billed annually
• Professional: $25/month billed annually
• Premium: $37.5/month billed annually

For agencies:

• Agency: $200/month billed annually
• Agency Plus: $300/month billed annually

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a cloud-based consumer intelligence and influencer marketing platform. Brands can use the tool to monitor mentions on social media, print, and radio.

Key features:

• Social listening and keyword monitoring
• Follower analysis
• Influencer tracking
• Supports 198 languages
• Social analytics and audience activity
• Customized reports

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, Mixcloud, Flickr, Foursquare, and Soundcloud

Price:

• Basic: $9,600/year
• Enterprise: (on request)
• Corporate: (on request)

5. Iconosquare

Iconosquare focuses on content and social channel management. It enables brands to follow conversations around identified keywords in real-time. This social media tool is great for agencies and businesses with multiple platforms.

Key features:

• Content scheduling and library
• Keyword tracking and trends
• Competitor tracking and industry metrics
• Follower analysis
• Post optimization and engagement
• Analytics and reporting

Supported platforms:

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok.

Price:

• Pro: $49/month billed annually
• Advanced: $79/month billed annually
• Enterprise: custom pricing for big businesses

6. Audiense

Audiense is a cloud-based “audience Intelligence” platform for brands to monitor their consumers and interact with them based on data.

Audiense has two products:

• Audiense Insights for audience intelligence and segmentation
• Audiense Connect (formerly Socialbro for Twitter marketing)

Key features:

• Competitor monitoring
• Keyword tracking
• Influencer discovery and tracking
• Media planning
• Trend analysis
• Analytics and reporting

Supported platforms:

Twitter and web sources

Price:

• Limited free version
• $49 per month for Twitter marketing
• $1499 per month for Audience insights

7. Digimind

Digimind is a dynamic social listening and competitive analysis platform. Its best used by brands and agencies that need actionable insights for managing digital marketing strategy. This tool is also great for justifying social ROI.

Key features:

• Competitive analysis
• Social media conversation tracking
• Data collection and insights
• Influencer marketing
• Analytics and reporting
• 3rd party integrations

Supported platforms:

LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram

Price:

• Free plan (a Digimind account is required)
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

8. Sprout Social

Sprout Social‘s suite includes brand social media mentions, messages, and branded keyword monitoring. The Sprout platform’s UX is so intuitive. This is one reason it’s a firm favorite of lots of social media marketers.

Key features:

• Smart inbox
• Competitor and follower analysis
• Campaign optimization
• Audience measurement
• Influencer tracking
• Hashtag performance
• Marketing analytics and reporting

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Instagram, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest

Price:

• Standard: $89/user per month (billed annually)
• Professional: $149/user per month (billed annually)
• Advanced: $249/user per month (billed annually)

9. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics is a social intelligence monitoring tool for web and social media. It’s a great marketing tool for startups and agencies.

Key features:

• Social influencer monitoring
• Influencer mentions
• Competitor monitoring
• Brand reputation and sentiment tracking
• Campaign management
• Lead monitoring and research
• 3rd party integrations

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Reddit, and all web sources

Price:

• Essential: $99 per month
• Advanced: $199 per month
• Pro: $299 per month
• Agency: $450+ per month

10. Keyhole

Keyhole‘s features focus on social media listening and influencer marketing. You also get the added advantage of market research and competitor analysis.

Key features:

• Hashtag and keyword tracker
• Influencer tracking
• Competitor analysis and tracking
• Trend analysis
• Account tracker
• Automated reports
• Demographic analysis

Supported platforms:

Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube

Price:

• Custom pricing offered upon request

11. HubSpot

Hubspot is a popular social media marketing tool. It has a broad suite of social media marketing, business development, and customer relationship management functions.

Key features:

• Build social media campaigns and schedule across platforms
• Keyword “streams” monitoring across social media
• Lead monitoring
• Brand mentions and social inbox
• Content suggestions by following what prospects are interested in
• Competitor analysis

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and Twitter.

Price:

• Starter CRM Suite: starts at $45 per month
• Professional: starts at $800 per month
• Enterprise: $3,200

12. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a free keyword monitoring tool that sends email notifications for saved keywords from web pages, newspaper articles, blogs, etc.

Key features:

• Set alerts for keywords and automate when to receive emails
• Track keywords on any site Google tracks
• Online reputation monitoring
• Competitor research
• Monitor content plagiarism

Supported platforms:

All web sources and RSS feed

Price:

• Free

13. AgoraPulse

AgoraPulse is your go-to social media management tool for post scheduling, post engagements, analytics, and social listening. It allows its users to search for relevant keywords and URLs on Twitter while monitoring comments on Ads.

Key features:

• Social media monitoring and listening
• Automated inbox assistant
• 24/7 customer support through chat and email
• Content queuing
• UTM code generator

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube

Price:

• Free plan
• Pro: $79 per month
• Premium: $159 per month
• Enterprise: Custom

14. Listen powered by Brandwatch (formerly Union Metrics)

Listen powered by Brandwatch is an AI-powered tool that can help improve social media strategy. It can help track, analyze and monitor trends, allowing them to get better insights about content they publish.

Key features:

• Content insights
• Trend monitoring
• Content engagement
• Social media listening
• Hashtag suggestions

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr

Price:

• It starts at $49 per month

15. Mention

Mention is a brand listening tool that monitors social media and the web for brand keywords. You can also get it to send automated daily summary alerts.

Key features:

• Automated keyword alerts
• Assign alerts to key team members for action
• Filter mentions according to relevant social site
• Competitor tracking
• View mentions on their native sites/apps
• Influencer scores

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, and blogs.

Price:

• Free
• Solo: $29
• Pro: $99
• ProPlus: $199
• Company: on request

16. Reputology

Reputology is a review management platform that allows you to manage reviews from one place. Its users can monitor, analyze, and respond to online reviews from the social platform.

Key Features:

• Review monitoring
• Customer sentiment analysis
• Analytics and reporting
• Text analytics
• User-friendly interface

Supported Platforms:

Google, Facebook

Price:

• Solo: $110 per seat per month – 1 seat included
• Professional: $60 per seat, per month – 3 seats included
• Agency: $40 per seat, per month – 10 seats included
• Partner: $25 per seat, per month – 100 seats included

17. Sprinklr

Sprinklr, like other similar tools, helps you benchmark social media performance. In addition, its Modern Research feature allows its users to follow trends and get real-time views on relevant topics.

Key features:

• Performance benchmarking
• Crisis tracking
• Social listening
• Comment/message moderation
• Campaign management

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn

Price:

• Custom price offered upon request

18. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social listening tool that acts as a ‘WatchGuard’ for your brand. It helps find relevant data from the web and social media platforms on what people say about your brand. You also get an overview of your social mention volume compared to your competitors.

Key features:

• Data visualization
• Brand sentiment monitoring
• Benchmarking
• Report Customizability
• Influencer Identification
• Follower analysis

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit

Price:

• Free trial
• Pro: £800 per month
• Enterprise: £3000 per month

19. Falcon.io

With Falcon.io‘s monitoring and engaging features, brands can offer more personalized experiences to their audience. This social media monitoring tool has an intuitive and collaborative UI that provides consultancy and detailed support services.

Key features:

• Manages adverts
• Tracks audience behavior
• Automated scheduling and publishing
• Collaboration management
• Keyword tracking and filtering
• Community management
• Negative feedback management
• Third-party integrations

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn

Price:

• Essentials: $108 per month
• Full Suite: Custom pricing

20. NUVI

Nuvi manages brands’ customer experiences. Its multi-language feature makes it an excellent choice for multinational brands. With industry-leading accuracy, Nuvi enables brands to plan, publish, listen, analyze, engage and review their customer experiences.

Key features:

• Competitive analysis
• Audience targeting
• Multi-account management
• Impact measurement
• Brand reputation management
• Trend analysis

Supported platforms:

Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter

Price:

• Custom pricing offered upon request

21. TweetDeck

Tweetdeck is a free browser extension for managing and posting to Twitter. The tool has undergone several evolutions. It presently exists as a web desktop app as Twitter discontinued the mobile app version in 2016.

Key features:

• Schedule and manage tweets for multiple social accounts
• Unlimited columns to monitor several activity streams for different keywords on the same Twitter account
• Follow multiple tweet interactions and updates
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Chrome browser extension

Supported platforms:

Twitter and Web

Price:

• Free

22. SocialMention

SocialMention is a free, simple search tool under BrandMentions. With SocialMention, you can view and monitor all your social activity across any supported social network. Brands can monitor their social mentions and other important keywords.

Key features:

• Keyword monitoring
• Brand mentions and sentiment analysis
• Customer insights
• Online reputation management
• Influencer monitoring

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Price:

• Free

23. Brand24

Brand24 describes its primary service as “media monitoring.” But that’s one phrase for a full suite of social media monitoring features.

Key features:

• Brand mentions feed and analytics (media monitoring)
• Discussion volume and brand sentiment analysis
• Brand influencers
• Brand discussion alerts
• Hashtag performance
• Marketing segmentation
• Slack integration

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, and Twitch

Price:

• Plus: $49 per month
• Premium: $99 per month
• Business: $149 per month
• Max: $249 per month

24. ZoomSphere

ZoomSphere is a suite of different apps/features with social listening as its primary function. Other functionalities such as project management and social media content management are perfect for agencies.

Key features:

• Content scheduling
• Community management
• Meeting notes and task management
• Team and client chats
• Content approval workflows
• Facebook leads manager
• Competitor comparison and analytics

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or YouTube.

Price:

ZoomSphere has different prices for particular features, while customized quotes are available for customers who want to purchase the full suite of features.

• Notes: Free
• Social Media Scheduler: £149 per month
• Social Media Community Management: £149 per month
• Social Media Analytics: £89
• Social Media Benchmarking: £89
• Social Media & Web Monitoring: £149 per month
• Workflow Manager: £29 per month
• Leads Manager: £29/month

25. Tailwind

In addition to Tailwind‘s analytics and scheduling features, it has monitoring features that come in handy on Pinterest and Instagram. Users can monitor their content and competitors and get information about emerging trends.

Key features:

• Monitors social media channels for brand mentions
• Streamlined workflow
• Hashtag optimization
• Competitor analysis
• Keyword tracking

Supported platforms:

Instagram and Pinterest

Price:

• Free plan
• Pro: $9.99 per month
• Advanced: $19.99 per month
• Max: $39.99 per month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

26. TweetReach

A part of Union Metrics, TweetReach is a Twitter analytics and monitoring tool. Brands can see their tweets’ reach, measure the impact of each tweet, and even learn about their influential followers.

Key features:

• Snapshot report of relevant keywords/hashtags
• Brand mention monitoring
• Multiple output file options
• Content performance monitoring
• Competitive analysis

Supported platforms:

Twitter and web

Price:

• Social manager: $49 per month
• Social marketer: $99 per month
• Marketing team: $199 per month

27. Awario

Awario is a web monitoring tool that crawls web pages to get keyword mentions in real-time. In addition to gaining essential data about your audience, they offer a prompt customer support service.

Key features:

• Multilingual keyword tracking
• Alert system for conversations with high traction
• Daily/Weekly summary of new mentions
• Sentiment analysis
• Lead generation
• Social selling

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, the web

Price:

• Starter: $24 per month
• Pro: $74 per month
• Enterprise: $249 per month

28. Sendible

Sendible is a social media management tool that caters to agencies that manage multiple clients. In addition to its management features, users can improve their social media marketing strategy with its brand monitoring features.

Key features:

• Multi-user collaboration
• Customer engagement
• Brand tracking
• Engagement monitoring
• Lead attribution

Supported platforms:

Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and YouTube

Price:

• Creator: $29 per month
• Traction: $89 per month
• Scale: $199 per month
• Expansion: $399 per month

29. Meltwater

Meltwater enables brands to listen to relevant social media conversations and mine audience insights. It also has social media management features that allow users to schedule posts and engage with their audience.

Key features:

• Audience insights
• Social listening
• Social influencer marketing
• Press distribution
• Custom reports

Supported platforms:

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn

Price:

• Custom price offered upon request

30. Buzzlogix

Buzzlogix is an excellent tool for interacting with your community and tracking relevant content. The tool enables its users to ‘catch the buzz’ about their products in real-time by monitoring preferred keywords and multiple social media accounts.

Key features:

• Hashtag suggestions
• Keyword monitoring
• Online influencer identification
• Automated social media publishing
• Sentiment analysis

Supported platforms:

Google+, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and news sites

Price:

• Custom price offered upon request

31. Followerwonk

FollowerWonk is an excellent tool for social listening for Twitter audiences. It allows users to analyze theirs and the competition’s presence on the social media platform.

Key Features:

• Updated twitter bio search
• Twitter performance benchmarking
• Social authority rank tracking
• Tweet time optimization
• Tweet engagement monitoring
• Followers tracking and sorting

Supported platforms:

Twitter

Price:

• Free plan
• Target: $29 per month
• Multitask: $79 per month

Choose The Best Tool For Your Business And Get Ready for 2022!

As social media evolves and new platforms emerge, so too will social monitoring tools. While there are many social media monitoring tools, this article summarizes 31 of the best to look out for in 2022.

You will likely find yourself using a combination of tools to suit your unique needs – different tools will excel in different areas.

So, whichever social media monitoring tools you choose to use, be sure to find the ones that work best for your business.