Did you ever want to know what your customers think and feel about your products and brand? Here is help. Social listening tools come to the rescue and assist you in discovering that.
Such tools monitor and decipher the conversations held across various social media channels to offer businesses, not-so-obvious insights to support decision-making processes.
In a word, they deliver customer intelligence to empower your business development strategies.
Read on to discover how!
What Are Social Listening Tools?
Social listening tools, also known as social media listening tools or social media monitoring tools are specialised solutions that actively monitor and analyse the discussions and conversations on social channels related to a brand.
How do social listening tools work and what are their main features?
They incorporate advanced technology, sophisticated algorithms and AI to gather, process and interpret huge amounts of data generated in the social media environment.
And discover valuable insights concerning the customers’ sentiments, preferences, opinions, and trends.
In our speed century, customer preferences and expectations change faster than ever. Being aware of and understanding these changes in due time is critical for businesses looking to keep their competitiveness and relevancy.
Consequently, social listening tools act as a compass towards the heart of customers’ preferences.
Usually, social listening tools have powerful features like:
Social media monitoring in real-time. They keep an eye on multiple channels and receive instant updates on discussions, mentions, complaints, and comments. Plus, reveal news related to your niche, industry, and competitors.
Sentiment analysis. They help detect the main emotions associated with your brand and products, and the tone of your customer comments (positive, neutral, negative).
Competitive analysis. Check your competitors’ activity on social media, their performance, and what’s your social media performance against relevant benchmarks. Identify competitor insights that help you gain an edge and new opportunities.
Influencers discovery. Identify individuals that have an influence on your audience and brand ambassadors who can help increase your reach.
These features empower businesses to monitor, analyse, and respond to customer feedback and market trends with precision and speed. And build a stronger, more resilient brand presence in the digital landscape.
Benefits of Social Listening Tools
Offer a deeper understanding of audience needs and preferences
- Obtain insights into customers’ pain points, preferences and antipathies.
- Early identification of changes in customer requirements.
Improve offer
- Refine and improve current products/services based on received feedback.
Come up with new product features and ideas.
Boost engagement and improve customer experience
- Tailor interaction with clients based on insights discovered.
- Answer promptly to customer inquiries, concerns and feedback.
- You can create content targeted to their preferences and pains.
Consolidate brand loyalty and reputation
- Address complaints and solve issues as soon as possible to build trust.
- Continuously monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to cultivate a positive reputation.
- Establish a good relationship with influencers and brand advocates to disseminate a good vibe.
Gain an edge over the competition
- Profit on competitive intelligence to spot new opportunities in the market.
- Follow closely industry changes and trends.
- Update strategies to obtain a competitive edge and become a leader in the market.
To understand better why certain social media posts perform better than others, businesses should look into the “why” of their audience behaviour. What is driving the interest and motivations of your audience to like, share or comment on your activity?
Psychology helps us find the reasoning behind consumer behaviour, what subconsciously drives consumers to purchase a product or a service. Meaning marketing activities are more likely to be consumer-centric when they integrate psychological insights into it.
At Symanto we consider technology needs to have a more human way to interact with our society. That´s why we have developed Psychology AI Models that understand human personalities, drivers and barriers in social media.
Furthermore, here are some reasons why you need a social listening tool that includes Psychology and AI to offer you more actionable insights:
- To clearly identify what messaging is relevant to your audience
Sometimes is difficult to get meaningful insights out of a bunch of charts or dozens of filters. With so much unstructured data, it could be challenging to identify your segments and what they expect from you.
Psychology AI helps on clustering your audience into more comprehensive segments based on their distinctive psychological traits and delivers clear guidance on what the optimal communication strategy for each of them should look like.
- To use personality traits to engage better
Personality is what drives consumers’ behaviour. Knowing your customers helps you not only build a bond with them but also to predict the success of different marketing initiatives and in general your marketing strategy and product development.
- To discover unbiased opinions
While the majority of social listening tools use a pre-defined glossary or only detect topics in a high-level and generic way, our text analysis software detects all relevant topics in actual conversations and finds the “hidden gems” in the long-tail conversations.
- To make decisions with more accurate results
Social conversation can be extremely noisy, so accuracy is the key to real insights. Our proprietary NLP (Natural Language Processing) technology surfaces audience opinion and sentiment towards the exact topic discussed – and not just on the post level.
- Real multi-language
Several social analytics tools translate languages into one that can be handled first. Yet each language has its nuances which will easily get lost in translation. That’s why we are dedicated to developing models for each language and analysing it in its native form.
Best Social Listening Tools for 2023
Symanto
Symanto is, among others, a social listening tool that combines next-gen AI technology with psychology to craft insights with a uniquely human touch.
We offer state-of-the-art text analytics for deep and solid customer insights that go beyond ratings and sentiment. It’s our mission to discover critical details, including the “why” behind the customers’ sentiments and actions.
Plus, we deliver truly actionable insights. And highly accurate, granular and refined results.
Symanto’s solution has several components:
- Symanto Platform
- Symanto Brain
- Custom Solution
- Consumer Personality Traits API
- Big Five Personality Traits API
- Text Sentiment Analysis API
- Aspect-Based Sentiment API
- Emotion Text Analysis API
- Natural Language API
The major benefits of Symanto technology are:
- Access millions of social media posts and reviews and depict advanced employee and consumer insights.
- Profit on psychology AI to reveal singular customer insights.
- Count on very accurate sentiment analysis made at the text level and topical level.
- Based on existing text obtain critical metrics almost instantly to improve your decisions.
- Obtain advanced opinion analysis personalised for your customers and/ or employees.
- Tailor your data analysis model to match your industry.
In a nutshell with Symanto, you receive:
- Granular sentiment
- Deep insights
- Critical metrics for your company
It works as follows:
Data collection and gathering
- Amass reviews and data from more than 75 distinct online data points in a single place on the server.
- Upload your company’s own text databases on the server, be it in a form of a CSV file or Excel.
- Gather all the data you need from various social media networks with Symanto’s add-on service.
Data analysis
- Topic sentiment analysis considering particular aspects present in your texts.
- Obtain highly accurate output delivered by models specific to your industry.
- All your global text data will be translated into English, Spanish or German.
- Adjust and refine the final results to cater to your business needs.
Exploration options
- Net sentiment heatmap to support you in comparing customer sentiment and employee sentiment across products and brands.
- Comparison capabilities – compare elements and topics to identify weaknesses and strengths of certain products.
- Check the evolution in time of a topic, net sentiment, or activity and spot trends change for an interval of time.
- Sidebar that displays categories, number of texts, topics and sentiment in a visual setup.
Powerful insights to enhance your business strategies
Psychographic insights provided by a complete overview and segmentation of customers and/or employees based on Carl Jung’s Personality Traits Theory. The purpose is to clearly identify what influences customer preferences and actions.
Brand equity. Evaluate the value generated by a renowned product in comparison with a generic one.
Brand recommendation. Social media posts are classified into categories in order to assess their perceived influence on other users.
User segmentation. Extract valuable insights from various psychographic-based segments characterised by sentiment tonality and personality. (critics, at-risk, loyalists, ambassadors)
Symanto’s technology delivers great results for clients in industries like management consulting, pharma, consumer electronics, e-Commerce, e-sports, tourism and hospitality.
And is trusted by thousands of clients across the globe among which Paramount, Microsoft, Adidas, UBL, FC Bayern Munchen, etc.
Brandwatch
Considered one of the leading social listening tools across the globe in 2020 by Forrester Wave, Brandwatch is actually a customer intelligence platform with social media management and influencer marketing components.
This is a complex tool, that offers an array of features for:
- Brand management. Monitor the mentions regarding your brand and spot modalities to grow your brand.
- Market research. Clearly understand the customer needs and how these change.
- Crisis management. Protect your brand from negative aspects and react in due time to a potential crisis.
- Social media management. Expand reach and impact on social media.
- Content marketing. Create content that delights your audience and maximises return on investment for content-related activities.
- Customer care. Answer promptly and adequately to your customers’ concerns and gain their loyalty.
- Influencer marketing. Reach new audiences with the help of influencers and ambassadors.
- Stakeholder management. Establish a good relationship with all relevant stakeholders.
Consumer Research is at the core of Brandwatch’s technology and has some add-on apps for improved performance.
- Consumer Research. Market and brand intelligence tool to acquire a deep understanding of your market and clients.
- Vizia. Visual marketing reporting app for enterprises that delivers live data reports.
- Reviews. Product intelligence app to understand customer preferences, upgrade products and increase sales.
This solution caters to the following industries pharma and healthcare, entertainment and media, financial services, marketing agencies, education, technology, retail and CPG.
Keyhole
Keyhole is a complete social media analytics tool allowing businesses to analyse multiple profiles on all major social media venues, campaigns, mentions and influencers in a matter of minutes. And automate social media monitoring.
It’s a platform capable of answering all your needs to make social media decisions backed by data.
Keyhole solution includes the following products:
- Social listening and campaigns to monitor brand mentions and social media organic and paid campaigns in real-time and find out what your audience thinks about your products/services.
- Unlimited smart publishing for efficient posting on multiple social networks at once.
- Profiles analytics to evaluate the accounts’ evolution, the number of followers and their engagement, keep an eye on the competition and improve your social media strategy.
- Quick trends to spot and analyse social media trends, conduct market research and check on the competition.
- Influencer tracking to measure the performance of influencer marketing campaigns, identify influencers, and compare their performance and corresponding ROI.
Such configuration is appreciated by agencies, nonprofits, B2C brands, and companies in media and entertainment.
Meltwater
Meltwater declares its mission is to empower global brands by analysing billions of data points and squeezing reliable and useful insights that generate results. They propose a collection of solutions that include consumer, sales and social intelligence.
Having over 27,000 global customers and offices spread over six continents, Meltwater is the partner of choice for brands like Asana, Western Union, Pernod Ricard, Haleon, Bic, AstraZeneca etc.
These are the smart solutions needed by dynamic companies that evolve in a complicated environment.
A suite of AI-powered tools that provide the necessary agility to make an impact. It integrates ChatGPT API and similar advanced technologies.
Meltwater’s suite includes the following products:
- Media Intelligence for brand monitoring.
- Media Relations – to identify and reach relevant journalists.
- Social Listening and Analytics – to identify social trends and social insights.
- Social Media Management – to drive engagement and generate leads.
- Consumer Intelligence – to know better your target audience.
- Influencer Marketing – expand your brand’s reach with influencer campaigns.
- Sales Intelligence – get useful data to increase revenues.
- API and Data Integration – gather and connect your relevant databases.
It caters to industries like technology, education, the public sector, financial services, consumer goods and retail.
Awario
This is a brand management and social listening tool looking to show all the mentions you have online as soon as they are published. It tracks discussions related to your company on all social media channels, reviews, blogs, news, forums, etc.
Awario declares their solution will inform you instantly when important talks about your brand pop up. They check more than 13 billion pages each day to gauge your brand’s popularity via built-in analytics.
As social media software, Awario features the following capabilities:
- Market research and social media monitoring. Understand better your audience, track brand mentions and engage with your customers on social channels. Be present always when they need their questions answered.
- Hashtag tracking. Identify the right hashtags for your brand, track events, analyse sentiment and campaigns.
- Social selling. Spot potential sales opportunities via social networks and convert potential leads into customers.
- Social customer care. Provide prompt answers and personalised feedback to any of your customers’ queries based on the alerts received. And create a positive sentiment towards your brand.
- Influencer marketing. Identify industry influencers, reach out to them and build meaningful business collaborations. Run and track influencer marketing campaigns.
YouScan
An AI-backed social listening tool with high-level image recognition capacities. That helps with brand reputation management, customer opinion analysis and delivers insights.
YouScan covers more than 500k media sources and analyses daily over 500 million data points. And is capable of classifying with high accuracy more than 95% of texts and images.
A multi-awarded social media listening software it provides for its customers brand management, market research, competitor and trend analysis, crisis management and influencer marketing solutions.
YouScan suite is composed of the following products:
- Social Listening Platform. Gather brand mentions, classify and segment data and obtain real-time customer insights. Clearly understand what your brand’s strengths and weaknesses are.
- Visual Insights. An AI-powered tool that is able to extract demographic information from images, and detect logos and activities. And offers your business visual capabilities to gauge brand visibility, realise competitor analysis, identify influencers and more.
- Audience Insights. Discover your audience’s preferences, interests and demographics.
- Mention Wall. Craft your personalised social media wall that displays posts about an event or your brand on a large screen.
- Insights Copilot. A social listening assistant that integrates ChatGPT and empowers your business to obtain insights from countless social media conversations.
- Image Recognition API.
- Social Intelligence API.
Among the valued clients of YouScan, we find Nestle, Unicef, Smapsung, Danone, Vodafone, L’Oreal, Coca-Cola, M&C Saatchi, etc.
Digimind
Awarded by Forrester and Gartner, Digimind is a market intelligence software and social listening tool powered by AI. It is dedicated to agencies and brands looking to accelerate their digital transformation.
Their technology uses online and social data to obtain actionable insights that support business and marketing strategy decisions.
Digimind platform incorporates several solutions:
- Brand Reputation. Manage your reputation, anticipate crisis early and investigate brand perception to update in consequence your business strategy. Count on real-time alerts, AI sentiment analysis, and detect weak signals.
- Competitive Intelligence. Outperform your competition by using the power of data and insights in your favour. Know your direct competitors and newcomers, identify risks and spot new positioning alternatives.
- Consumer Insights. Deliver world-class customer experiences by knowing in depth your consumers’ behaviours and preferences. Get reliable insights to be able to innovate and differentiate your products.
- Trend Tracking and Innovation. Spot developing trends early, keep up with innovations and upgrade your products to reflect clients’ expectations.
- Influencers Identification. It’s quite challenging to find the right influencers for your business. Gauge the “why” behind each type of influencer, benchmark and analyse them to identify the most relevant collaborators to help expand your brand awareness.
- Campaign Analysis. Evaluate campaigns and spot ways to maximise ROI via highly accurate insights and metrics. Update strategies and enhance campaigns.
Digimind serves over 800 customers across the globe among which we can count Lexus, Sony, LinkedIn, McCann, Audi, Danone, Accenture, L’Oreal, HP, Sodexo, McDonald’s, Deloitte, etc.
Mentionlytics
Launched back in 2015, Mentionlytics aims to support a large array of companies in streamlining their marketing strategy and reinforcing their brand awareness.
Its features help your business track automatically and in real-time mentions about the company, products, services, and competition, from social media users, bloggers and just about everyone online.
Plus, their Social Intelligence Advisor(SIA) is designed to provide smart insights and advice to elevate your online presence.
Mentionlytics platform features the following:
- Media Monitoring. Keep a close eye on what media talks about your brand, products and services, and about your competition.
- Social Listening. Go beyond the surface noise and use boolean search and high-level filters to uncover what really matters for your audience and what makes her take action.
- Review Monitoring. Get a 360 degrees overview of your online presence by tracking your reviews on all major review venues, responding promptly to your clients’ requests and thus gaining their trust.
- Social Intelligence. SIA gathers mentions, extracts insights, and offers advice on how to refine your social media game in an automatic manner. Plus, it delivers industry and competition insights and detects crises and viral events in early stages.
- Social Media Report Builder. Creates for you personalised and data-powered reports that include valuable insights. Some types of reports are top mentions reports, influencers report and share of voice.
- Publishing. Schedule posts and publish them on multiple social channels from one dashboard.
This suite is usually a good alternative for companies active in the hospitality industry, Web3 and Crypto, for financial institutions, nonprofits and agencies.
Among Mentionlytics customers we encounter major international brands such as Knorr, Hoolio, Lidl, Tribal Worldwide, National Bank of Greece, Banco Internacional, Project Management Institute, Electra, etc.
Brand24
Brand24 is a multi-awarded social media listening tool, that offers your business the possibility to track all online conversations and mentions relevant to them. Check and analyse your brand mentions, product mentions and all those related to your competition.
This is an AI-backed tool that crawls and gathers large amounts of data from social networks, blogs, reviews, news, and forums and analyses them to pull out actionable insights.
It has as main features:
- Mentions feed and analytics. Discover who talks about your brand and what are users saying in real time. Obtain insights from different angles by analysing these mentions from a quantitative and qualitative point of view.
- Influence score. Filter and contact just influencers that can generate a real impact on your brand awareness.
Sentiment analysis. Discern and classify the mentions’ sentiment and grasp your customers’ attitudes and preferences, identify areas of improvement to accomplish their expectations.
- Alerts. Set customised alerts and be the first to find out when something meaningful appears on talks related to your brand.
- Discussion volume chart. Protect your brand’s reputation by identifying quickly modifications in the discussions’ volume.
- Data exporting and filtering.
Brand24 serves thousands of companies from around the world, among which Ikea, Carlsberg, Intel, H&M, GlaxoSmithKline, Samsung, Standford University, etc.
BrandMentions
It is a web and social listening tool aiming to deliver daily, accurate, and complete notifications regarding businesses and their competitors.
In a nutshell, BrandMentions supports interested companies in managing their reputation, building engaged relationships, and attracting and retaining customers.
Monitor social media and the web to know what people say about your brand instantly. And be the first to know when something relevant happens in your industry and market. Receive all this updated info daily in your inbox.
BrandMentions most important use cases and features are:
- Brand monitoring. Find out rapidly when something noteworthy related to your brand, your product/service or niche appears.
- Business intelligence. Having access to meaningful data helps your business make informed and data-backed decisions. And enables it to take advantage faster of opportunities that show up.
- Reputation management. Your brand’s reputation has a significant impact on your business evolution and you have to do your best to build and maintain a solid one. Keep an eye on, comprehend and protect your reputation in a highly competitive landscape.
- Media monitoring. Overlook social media and the web to know when your brand pops up in the conversation, and track topics of major interest for your business.
- Competitor spying. Get insights into your competitors’ strategies from multiple angles and make the necessary decisions to keep pace and move ahead.
More than ten thousand fast-growing businesses are using BrandMentions services, among them we find TechHub, Etoro, McCann, Aureon, iProspect, PMBC, etc.
There you have it, a list of the best social listening tools to help your business monitor relevant social media channels, gauge competition strategies and get advanced and actionable insights to make better strategic decisions. Just pick the one that suits your business!
