Social Listening Tools For Business

lauryn preston

One thing that hasn’t changed as time goes on is that businesses typically live and die by their reputation. If your business’s reputation is struggling, then more than likely, your business is also struggling. The difference today is that a customer can sing your praises on social media platforms. They can also post lies about your company that will spread like wildfire on social media. So, now, many businesses are learning the importance of investing in social listening tools for social media monitoring.

Since we understand the value of sentiment analysis and social monitoring, we’ve compiled a list of the best social listening tools of 2023.

What Is Social Media Listening?

Social media listening refers to the practice of monitoring social media platforms for mentions, social conversations, and trends related to your brand. It is one of the more important elements of a social media campaign.

The goal of social media listening is to gather insights and feedback from social media users and understand their opinions. Using social listening, businesses can tailor their marketing strategy and decision-making to better improve their social media presence.

Social media listening involves the use of a variety of tools, such as keyword monitoring, sentiment analysis, and trend analysis, to track and analyze social media conversations.

Using this information, businesses can reach their target audience, identify customer needs and preferences, measure their brand reputation and awareness, track competitors, and find more opportunities for social media engagement and growth. No need to hire a social media strategist.

Social media listening is becoming an increasingly important part of social media strategies and marketing for businesses that want to stay connected to their customers and understand their needs and preferences.

What Is a Social Listening Tool?

Social listening tools help businesses monitor and analyze their social media brand mentions, trends, and online conversations related to their brand and products. These listening tools use algorithms and other technology to scan social media channels, collecting data regarding user interactions, sentiment, and engagement.

Social listening tools can track mentions of your brand or product across multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn while providing real-time notifications when new conversations or trends come up.

If you outsource social media marketing efforts, social listening is also a great way to ensure your social media marketer maintaining your brand’s reputation.

These social listening tools can also give insights into customer sentiment, preferences, and behaviors while helping businesses identify potential influencers and other brand advocates.

The most common social listening tools include keyword monitoring, sentiment analysis, trend analysis, competitive analysis, reporting, and analytics.

No matter the size of your business, you can utilize these social listening tools to improve social media strategies and improve customer engagement to get ahead of the competition.

The best social listening tools allow businesses to monitor all social media platforms in one place, which saves time in reviewing social media analysis and can allow them to focus on other tasks.

Social Media Listening Tools vs. Social Media Tracking Tools

Social media tools allow businesses to monitor and analyze conversations on social media in real-time. These social listening tools allow businesses to track customer sentiment, brand mentions, industry trends and identify potential opportunities and threats.

The best social listening tools focus on monitoring and analyzing conversations about a brand.

Social media tracking tools are different in that it’s a more narrow focus on social media campaigns and relevant keywords. These tools track the performance of a business’s social platforms while providing insight into metrics like follower growth, engagement rates, and post reach.

These social media measuring tools typically look at social media analytics and social media metrics that drive conversions via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, or Google My Business.

In layman’s terms, they measure the overall impact of social media on your business.

What are the Advantages of Using Social Listening Tools?

If you use a social listening tool to gauge sentiment analysis, social mentions, social conversations, and basic audience and social insights, you’re able to reap the benefits of social listening capabilities without having to jump back and forth from various social accounts all day.

When you have a solid social listening strategy, you’re able to:

better understand the customers that follow your social accounts
know where you stand with your audience
identify brand mentions to scope out potential brand ambassadors
create more targeted social media content
discover more opportunities and leads
improve brand management
quickly identify potential problems, like negative sentiment
track your competitors on social channels
conduct market research
improve customer satisfaction
build stronger relationships with your audience

We won’t go in-depth for all of these points, but we will touch on a few of the more important topics!

Social Listening Helps You Know Where You Stand With Your Audience

One of the first steps in social monitoring is getting information about how your target audience currently perceives your business as well as the products or services you’re offering.

When you use a social listening tool, you’re better able to get a feel of how social conversations surround your brand. This provides a more truthful audience analysis.

Social Listening Helps You Understand Your Audience

You’ll never be able to connect with your followers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or LinkedIn if you don’t truly understand what they want. Sure, social media analytics tools can help you understand your audience’s demographics and purchasing habits, as well as the overall benefit of social media on your business, but unless you’re able to monitor social data, you won’t truly understand their opinions, interests, and needs.

Using a social media dashboard can help you gather historical data so that you can further improve your social listening strategies.

Discover Opportunities with Social Listening

Once you learn how to be a content creator, if you need help with your content marketing strategy or with identifying new sales opportunities, then you should really invest in social monitoring tools, as they can drastically change the course of your business.

When you know what consumers are saying on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other social media channel, you’re able to target social media campaigns that better speak to those specific needs.

Social Listening Helps Minimize Negative Sentiment

There will always be at least one disgruntled customer that leaves negative reviews on review sites or negative comments on social media channels.

You’ll never be able to impress everyone.

Social listening tools allow you to quickly identify potential problems and respond to negative sentiments on social media.

Social Listening Helps Track Competition

While social monitoring tools are meant to help you compile data from mentions of your brand, you can also use these monitoring tools to help you track your competitors, as well.

Using competitive brand monitoring, you’re able to see the pitfalls your competitors have taken so that you can avoid those same mistakes in your business.

On the flip side, you can also see what areas your competitors are struggling with and use those pain points to come up with better social media campaigns for your business.

Social Listening Can Improve Customer Satisfaction

If your customers aren’t happy with your brand or your product, you want to know, right?

Monitoring tools help you take the necessary steps to improve your overall customer satisfaction. Furthermore, you can use the historical data pulled from your social listening strategy to help you create marketing campaigns that address those specific pain points.

Social Listening Helps You Build Relationships With Your Target Audience

Communication is key for any relationship to work. This also applies to business relationships.

When you see mentions of your brand on social media channels, you need to respond to those brand mentions. Simply replying to a customer can change them from a one-time buyer to a lifetime customer if done correctly.

Everyone likes to feel special. How hard is it for your business to make your customers feel special?

Social Listenings Helps You Create Targeted Social Media Content

Monitoring tools help you identify the trends and today’s hot topics within your specific niche or industry.

If you want to be successful, your content needs to resonate with your audience.

It’s important to frequent your typical industry news sites so that you can eventually become a thought leader for your niche.

Social Listening Helps Identify and Solve Problems

One of the biggest perks of social monitoring tools is the ability to quickly identify and mitigate potential problems with your business. By business a social listening tool for brand monitoring, you can quickly spot potential issues as they come and take immediate action to stop them, if possible.

By addressing concerns on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other social media platform, you’re able to show your customers and potential customers that you genuinely care about them.

Social Listening Helps You Identify Brand Ambassadors

Listening to your audience on social media platforms helps your business all the way around.

There are already customers out there raving about your brand. Provide them with an incentive to continue by making them a brand ambassador.

Brand ambassadors can help you promote your company on social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, or even LinkedIn. All it takes is a little social listening and brand outreach on your part.

How Can You Find Out When Your Brand Logo Appears in Pictures?

While this is a form of social listening, most social listening tools don’t provide this option.

However, you can use reverse image searches, like TinEye, to look for misusage of your brand’s logo.

Are There Affordable Social Media Listening Tools for Small Businesses?

We will dive into price points later.

Kiopi offers the most inclusive social media listening tools paired with social media management tools for $25. The social media management platform also offers a 14-day free trial so that users can test the program out before committing to anything.

Kiopi was designed by a reputable small digital marketing agency that understands the widespread pain points associated with most other social listening tools and social media marketing tools.

What are the Best Social Media Listening Tools for Social Media Management?

When looking for the best social media listening tool for your business, you’ll want to evaluate your social media strategy and what you are trying to accomplish with your social media channels.

Some of the best social listening tools are a feature of a larger social media management tool, while other apps are a stand-alone social listening tool specifically used for sentiment analysis or can be an added widget to a larger social media monitoring app.

Many social media management tools can provide your business with social media analytics and consumer insights, as well as the ability to create and plan social posts and marketing campaigns. When comparing social media monitoring tools, look for a social media management platform that has everything you need in one place.

Kiopi

Kiopi is a social media management tool that businesses and individuals can use to monitor, track, and analyze their social presence across multiple social platforms.

It offers real-time social media monitoring and in-depth analytics to help businesses gain insights into their brand’s reputation, sentiment analysis, trends, social mentions, and other social data to improve their social media marketing strategy. Kiopi also provides customizable reports with historical data and alerts for actionable insights to keep users informed about important events and mentions related to their brand or competition.

As a social media marketing tool, Kiopi is meant to meet all of your social media management needs across an array of different social media channels. You’re able to plan social media content, schedule social posts, and then use Kiopi’s social media listening tools to see how your post resonated with your target audience on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google Business profiles.

If you want to improve your social listening strategy while growing your business through social media marketing but don’t want to pay the high cost of other social listening tools, Kiopi is the social media monitoring tool for your business.

Kiopi offers a 14-day free trial, and the standard plan costs $25/month per user.

HubSpot

HubSpot is another social media marketing tool that businesses can use to grow their brand using social media.

Using this social media monitoring tool, businesses can create content, share new social media posts, and respond to comments from the app’s interface. Users can also use HubSpot to create marketing campaigns, create landing pages, set up marketing automation, and more.

What makes HubSpot different from other social media management tools is that users have the capability to grow leads and grow their social media presence. Unfortunately, this social media management platform doesn’t come cheap.

HubSpot’s social listening tool costs upwards of $890 per month.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social media listening tool feature allows businesses to monitor their brand mentions on various social media outlets, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit, and Youtube.

In addition to social listening, Sprout Social offers social media automation to help businesses manage their online presence while gaining insights that can be used to improve business.

Brands can use Sprout Social to manage their accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Sprout Social users can also use the social media management tool to plan and schedule social media posts, monitor relevant keywords and hashtags, and review competitive analysis.

To use this social listening tool, Sprout Social offers a 30-day free trial, and the standard plan costs $89/per month per user.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another social media management tool that lets businesses monitor social media trends, topics, and their social media profiles all in one place.

Users can view and respond to social media messages, comments, and brand mentions all on one dashboard.

Brands can also track influencers and leads to share with others throughout their business. Hootsuite works with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Pinterest so users can create a concise voice through multiple social media channels.

If you’re interested in these social listening features, Hootsuite has a 30-day free trial, and the professional plan costs $49 monthly.

Buffer

Buffer is a social media management tool that allows users to schedule posts and engage in online conversations with their audience using social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

With Buffer, users can publish and schedule posts on social channels and analyze their social and online data.

Buffer also provides an audience behavior feature that helps businesses create better social media campaigns.

Unfortunately, social media monitoring is not available with the basic Buffer app. In order to access their social listening tool, users will need to buy Buffer Reply at $39 per user and month. Buffer

Reply is only compatible with Twitter at this time. Buffer, without Buffer Reply, is $60 a year and offers a 14-day free trial.

How Kiopi Can Help You With Social Media Management

Kiopi is a social media management tool for businesses looking to automate social media posts, improve social media strategy and enhance online reputation. This social media monitoring tool allows users to plan, schedule, collaborate, and create content that can promote customer engagement and growth all in one place.

Using Kiopi, social media managers can gain audience insights through our social listening tool to gain valuable insights into customers’ relevant conversations so businesses can tailor their content in order to make a great social impact.

Businesses can grow just by implementing social listening into their marketing strategy. Start listening to what your customers have to say by starting a 14-day free trial with Kiopi.

Ready to try KIOPI? Start your free trial today.