The 10 Best Social Listening Tools for 2022
Everybody appreciates a good listener. Sometimes we have to learn the hard way that being a good listener is about more than just passively hearing what’s being said. In an interpersonal scenario, active listening means you’re really trying to understand the person speaking to you.
It’s no different when we’re talking about social media marketing. Keeping an eye out for mentions and Google Alerts is just social media monitoring, and you can miss out on a lot of nuance and context.
But painstakingly scrolling miles of social feeds is not a productive use of your time. Luckily, great social listening tools exist to help you monitor your brand at scale. Here are 10 of the best social listening and social monitoring tools for your B2B brand.
The Top 10 Social Listening Tools for B2B Brands
The difference between social media monitoring and listening isn’t just in the mindset you approach it with, however. The tools you use can make a big difference in your ability to filter opportunities from the noise and focus your analytics on the messages that really matter.
If you’re ready to really listen to what your customers (and critics) have to say, here are ten social media listening tools that can help you.
1. Oktopost
Oktopost specializes in social media management for B2B companies. What this actually means is that Oktopost is capable of tracking conversions back to social media engagement. Its tools enrich lead generation data with social media engagement and profile data.
For B2B companies, which often overlook social media marketing, Oktopost can help them not only track brand mentions but also demonstrate how those mentions and social engagements impact sales opportunities.
Top features of Oktopost:
- Social listening tool tracks social posts, news, and publications of your brand
- A timeline showing the trends and popularity your brand goes through
- Sentiment analysis that interprets the overall emotions of the posts around your brand—including how those sentiments change over time
- Identify influencers, top promoters, and top critics
And much more.
Going far beyond simply scheduling and publishing social posts, Oktopost offers a full suite of social engagement tools, including sophisticated social listening. That sophistication doesn’t sacrifice ease-of-use, however, as the Oktopost platform is notoriously easy to use.
Oktopost seamlessly integrates social media data with marketing automation and CRM platforms, making it easy to expand your reach and share not just more content, but more engaging, relevant content that will actually drive conversions. In addition to that, Oktopost includes all the monitoring, tracking, and analytics features you could hope to expect from a social listening solution.
Who Oktopost is for:
Oktopost is for B2B brands who need a full social engagement suite that handles social listening, employee advocacy, social publishing, and much more.
2. Awario
Awario includes dedicated features for influencer marketing and reputation management. Users have lots of positive things to say about how it facilitates market research and customer engagement.
Top features of Awario:
- Find and participate in conversations about your brand across a wide range of platforms,
- Provides prompt discovery by crawling over 13 billion web pages every day instead of relying on third-party monitoring services.
- Metrics that track the number of posts about your brand per social channel.
- For those who are more technical, a Boolean search helps you drill down on exactly what you want to see.
Who Awario is for:
Awario is great for brands who want to take a more hands-on and technical approach to brand monitoring.
3. Brandwatch
Used by over 2,200 global brands including Microsoft, Unilever, and Walmart, Brandwatch offers a full suite of social media marketing tools.
Top features of Brandwatch:
- Help you plug into emerging trends
- Cool down public relations snafus before they can boil over into a full-blown crisis
- Maximize the ROI on your influencer marketing strategy
If you’re looking to shape specific customer experiences, Brandwatch has the features to deliver the information and insights you need.
Who Brandwatch is for:
Brandwatch is for companies that want encompassing data and analytics, but prefer to do the engagement part manually.
4. Brand 24
The developers of Brand 24 understand that the price of a good online reputation is eternal vigilance, so they’ve created a sophisticated automated platform.
Top features of Brand 24:
- Monitors social conversations for tone and content
- Analyzes customer sentiment in real-time
- Sends out instantaneous alerts when something is happening that requires your attention.
- Their tracking and reporting features can give you plenty of information to analyze for actionable information, too.
Who Brand 24 is for:
Brand 24 is for brands who need a simple social listening tool and don’t need the bells and whistles.
5. BuzzSumo
With a focus on content generation and influencer marketing, BuzzSumo’s platform consists of four primary components.
Top features of BuzzSumo:
- Discovering high-performing content to engage with and share
- Researching across billions of data points to refine and optimize your marketing tactics
- Monitoring the topics and comments that represent opportunities to expand your reach
- Identifying the influential voices that have the power to introduce you to new audiences
Who BuzzSumo is for:
BuzzSumo is for companies focused on identifying and leveraging influencers on social media.
6. Keyhole
As the top hashtag tracking and hashtag analytics platform in the world, Keyhole is a great resource for determining the effectiveness and value of your online marketing campaigns.
Top features of Keyhole:
- Engagement and reach metrics in real-time
- Fast and easy reporting services,
- A suite of tools for finding, tracking and collaborating with influencers.
- They’re used by some of the biggest internet brands around, including Google, Alibaba, and Spotify.
Who Keyhole is for:
Keyhole is for those who want to monitor and follow hashtag trends.
7. Meltwater
If your company or its marketing activities are impacted by daily news and world events, Meltwater might be the solution you need.
In addition to the expected tools for social media listening, Meltwater offers some other interesting features as well.
Top features of Meltwater:
- Conversation tracking, and engagement analytics
- Special focus on print and online news stories and the conversations that spring up around them—including the ones that are hidden behind paywalls for subscribers only
Who Meltwater is for:
Meltwater is for mid-size companies who need easy-to-use social listening.
8. Mention
By tracking topics and conversations across a wide range of social media platforms, Mention can keep you dialed into the prevailing attitudes and opinions about your brand and products.
Top features of Mention:
- Monitoring and filtering tools can help direct you to relevant conversations as they are happening, no matter where they’re hosted.
- Set up alerts that notify you of all mentions related to your brand or target keywords that are relevant to you.
- Get metrics and tracking that allow you to understand how people really feel about your company.
- With over 750,000 users, Mention knows how to deliver the data and insights businesses need to grow.
Who Mention is for:
Mention is for high-level brand monitoring that will keep you updated on each and every brand mention.
9. Google Trends
I know I mentioned that Google Trends is not enough but that doesn’t mean it should be overlooked. If you’re not familiar with Google Trends, you should look into it as soon as possible.
Top features of Google Trends:
- Tracks keyword mentions in the Google News feed and provides email notifications of those mentions.
- Email notifications when your brand gets mentioned in a publication that’s indexed by Google News. In addition, some social media platforms (Reddit for example) get indexed in Google News.
- Best of all, Google Trends is free.
Who Google Trends is for:
Google Trends is for anyone interested in what people are searching for on Google.
10. TrackMaven (Now Skyword)
Another solution that is more than “just” social listening is TrackMaven.
Top features of TrackMaven:
- Tracking marketing efforts from all channels
- Monitoring attribution spend and ROI
Who TrackMaven is for:
TrackMaven is for customer-facing brands who want to marry their content and social strategies.
Key Takeaways: Joining the Conversation
Keep in mind, listening should only be the starting point.
You should be ready to:
- Help you find and join in conversations
- Stay abreast of complaints and callouts before they snowball into a catastrophe,
- Engage your potential customers with custom-made content that speaks to their deepest interests based on your social media strategy
All of these tools have the necessary features and resources you need to monitor, track, and gather insights from social media conversations about the topics that matter to you.
They differ primarily in their specific areas of focus and the specialized features they offer to various types of businesses.
Oktopost developed around the needs and concerns of B2B companies, who often have to engage with leads and broader social media conversations in different ways than B2C.
If you’re not seeing success in getting your social media engagement where want it, it might be a question of using the wrong tools for the job. You can always book a demo with Oktopost to see how their particular expertise can help transform your B2B marketing endeavors.
