Top 5 Social Listening Tools and Tips For Your Marketing Strategies

Social listening is important for any marketing strategy to reach its optimal goal. As a marketer, you will need effective social listening tools and tips to incorporate into your marketing strategies for them to work effectively.

In today’s fast digital world, it is really important to discover what the buzz is around your brand and content on social media. This helps in understanding audience sentiments and developing better customer relations.

For this, you need helpful social listening tools and understand the benefits of this skill that every marketer must learn. In this guide, we have covered some of the most useful social listening tools and tips that will help boost your marketing efforts and improve your online presence.

Importance of Social Listening Tools

Social listening tools help you track and hear millions of conversations that people are having across all social media platforms. You can easily navigate through these audience opinions and create meaningful marketing strategies. Here are some more benefits of social listening tools –

• Spot Trends – These tools help you find patterns in millions of conversations around a hashtag, keyword, or topic. With this, you can spot any trend that is about to get in the buzz and utilize it in your marketing strategies.
• Understanding Audience Sentiments – Knowing what your audience thinks about your brand is like having a superpower. And with social listening tools, you can have this power and use it create more likable content, smart products, and services.
• Manage Brand Image – With social listening tools, you can track every conversation regarding your brand. Therefore, you can counter any negative conversations and promote positive conversations.
• Generate Leads – The ultimate marketing goal for most brands is to receive high revenue through online channels. You can easily track conversations of users who seek a solution you can provide, giving you more leads.
• Monitor Competitors – Monitoring your competitors can give you several ideas on how they operate on different social media platforms and how they attract the audience. With social listening tools, you can track what people are talking about different brands other than yours.

Top Social Listening Tools

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a great social listening tool as it blends social media management with listening features in a single and simple interface. Here’s why you should consider this tool –

• It offers real-time keyword tracking and competitor benchmarking.
• Has AI integration for summarizing and unifying inboxes for better customer support.
• Sprout Social is also great for team collaboration.
• This tool offers cross-platform social media tracking.

Sprout Social is a great overall tool for social media management and listening. Its pricing starts from $249 per user/month.

2. Keyhole

Keyhole provides a higher level of social listening for deeper insights and understanding of your audience. With this tool, you can identify what they like and keywords or hashtags they associate with. Here are some features of this tool –

• Identify trending keywords or hashtags.
• Find and connect with famous content creators or influencers.
• Get advanced sentiment analysis to know what people are talking about your brand and who’s driving the conversations.
• Tailored dashboard with tags, filters, and sub-trackers to get a deeper analysis of a specific topic or campaign.

The platform offers a free demo for some of its features, and you can contact them for more pricing information.

3. Brandwatch

Many experts regard this tool to be one of the most advanced in social listening because of its deep insight and large historical data archive. Here are some of the benefits of Brandwatch –

• AI-enabled sentiment analysis with real-time alerts.
• Offers a custom dashboard powered with comprehensive data.
• Can track influencers. Identify and segment the audience.
• Predict long-term trend shifts and sentiment shifts.

This social listening tool offers custom pricing options for enterprises.

4. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is known for its visual learning features, which help in image and video recognition with global coverage. Brands can understand how visual content affect sentiments of their audience with this social listening tool. Here are some of the features of Talkwalker –

• Extensive coverage of all social media platforms and other web sources.
• Visual listening features to understand sentiments around visual content.
• AI-driven sentiment analysis to get insights into consumer behaviour.
• Analyze historical data to find trends.

The pricing for these social listening tools starts from $9600 annually, and it has corporate and enterprise subscriptions as well, offering deeper insights.

5. YouScan

This social listening tool also comes with AI-enabled image recognition capabilities. YouScan also helps in identifying upcoming trends so you can plan your marketing strategies accordingly. Here are some more features of this tool –

• This tool has ChatGPT integration for smart visual content analysis.
• Track brand sentiment and audience perceptions on your content and brand.
• Monitor and track the competition.
• Identify topics before they get in trend to maximize marketing effectiveness.

The price of this tool starts from $299 a month, and it also offers tailored pricing for businesses.

Tips For Better Social Listening

Even with the most powerful social media listening tools, your marketing efforts may not get the required results without impactful strategies. Here are some tips you can add to your marketing campaigns to get better results –

• Define Goals – For each marketing campaign, define a clear goal of what your brand needs, such as improved brand reputation, spotting trends, creating awareness, getting competitive insights, or better customer outreach. This helps you come up with a straightforward strategy that works on achieving your goals more effectively.
• Identify and Segment Audiences – Your audience might have a compilation of different groups of people, and you need to identify and segment them on the basis of different demographics to create appealing content.
• Analyze Sentiments – Knowing and understanding how your audience feels about your brand can help you come up with new ideas, products, and services that will appeal to them.
• Integrate Workflows – You can connect your listening tools and team to CRM systems and social dashboards to keep helpful insights flowing into the daily operations.

FAQs

What are Social Listening Tools?

In simple terms, social listening tools are software that help you track and analyze any online conversation around your brand, any topic, or keyword. These insights can help you create better marketing strategies.

Can I use social listening tools for Influence marketing?

Yes, social listening tools can be very effective in influencer marketing as they enable you to track various influencers and monitor influencer campaigns and their impact.

Who should use social listening tools?

Any brand, marketer, or content creator that values customer satisfaction can benefit from using social listening tools. These tools help you get insights into audience sentiments, which can help you create better content and services.