Best Social Media Monitoring Tools Compared

Tracking the progress of your social media campaigns and analyzing their results is one of the most important things you can do to understand what’s working and adjust your strategy to solve what isn’t. We’ve analyzed dozens of options across the internet to find the very best social media monitoring tools. Hootsuite is the best social media monitoring tool for most businesses because it’s affordable, easy to use, and provides a comprehensive suite of features that can scale up or down with your business.

The Best Social Media Monitoring Tool for Most

If you want a robust social media monitoring solution that checks all the boxes, Hootsuite has all the features you need. With post scheduling, account management across multiple profiles and campaigns, in-depth analytics, and a way to respond to incoming messages within the app, Hootsuite provides everything you need to manage your social media presence effectively.

It’s also great for managing customer service inquiries in one place, so you can quickly view and address issues. Plus, Hootsuite integrates with a wide range of other business tools, so you can easily track your social media progress alongside the rest of your marketing efforts, painting a more complete picture of how your strategy is working.

The Best Social Media Monitoring Options to Consider

1. Hootsuite – Best social media monitoring tool for most
2. Nextiva – Best for monitoring and managing reviews on social media
3. Semrush – Best combination of SEO and social media analytics
4. Sprout Social – Best enterprise-grade social media monitoring
5. Awario – Best for monitoring brand mentions
6. Sendible – Most affordable for smaller brands and agencies

When it Makes Sense to Invest In a Social Media Monitoring Tool

From Twitter to Facebook and Instagram to TikTok, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to break through the noise and reach customers, leads, or just as many eyes as possible.

On one hand, social media can be used to reach a wider audience than ever before because of its massive user base. However, it can also be a time-consuming and expensive endeavor, especially if you make some costly mistakes that take you back to square one. 

Getting your social media strategy right as early as possible is key to not wasting your time and money. And a social media monitoring tool is a nearly indispensable key to honing that strategy.

Whether you’re launching a new product and monitoring for mentions of it or trying to build brand awareness in general, this tool will help you understand how customers feel about your product or brand and make necessary adjustments.

Whether or not to invest in social media monitoring depends on your specific goals. But if you’re looking to get the most out of social media, it’s certainly worth considering.

#1 – Hootsuite – Best for Most

Hootsuite is a great tool for keeping track of your brand’s presence across numerous social networking sites. Manage numerous social media platforms from a single platform. You won’t need to remember difficult passwords or visit each site separately.

It allows you to look at several streams at once and monitor what your consumers are saying in a single social media management system. The possibilities are nearly endless. Post messages, read replies, set up notices, view statistics, and so on. 

International businesses, including Coca-Cola and Sony Music, use Hootsuite to manage their brand presence, but it has subscription packages also geared toward SMBs and local businesses. Its individual plan is priced competitively and has many features for a single-user membership.

Hootsuite’s analytics give you a detailed view of how effectively your campaign is functioning. The tool collects clicks and views on all of your social platforms and delivers them in an easy-to-read sequence of charts. 

Hootsuite also provides extensive monitoring capabilities and additional reporting, allowing you to create professional-looking, printable reports on your company’s social media performance.

Hootlet is a fantastic bookmark plug-in that lets you easily share material across the internet with your followers. This unique Hootsuite add-on sits on your browser toolbar for instant access.

Simply click the Hootlet button when you discover anything online that you wish to share with your followers. The application truncates the URL and inserts a little piece of prominent text from the website into your social media post, using Ow.ly as an intermediary service.

Hootsuite also allows you to track client inquiries in one spot without checking numerous social media sites. Keep drafts of common customer service replies prepared and ready to post when a client has a need or issue, such as store hours or a return request.

Pricing for Hootsuite scales up to accommodate more users and social accounts, plus some features.

• Professional: $49/month for one user and 10 social accounts
• Team: $129/month for three users and 20 social accounts
• Business: $739/month for five users and 35 social accounts
• Enterprise: Custom priced for five users and 50 social accounts

You can request a demo of the two higher-tier plans or try a 30-day free trial of Hootsuite Professional or Team today.

#2 – Nextiva – Best for Monitoring and Managing Reviews on Social Media

Nextiva recently added a powerful social media management element to its suite of modern communication offerings. This platform is packed with features, benefits, and potential use cases. 

At its core, it’s a straightforward tool for monitoring what’s being said about your brand across all social media sites. But, as you start peeling back the layers, you’ll see that it’s also an advanced tool for improving social media performance and customers’ experiences. 

One of the top features is an AI-powered tool for managing your online reputation that tracks reviews across a wide array of social channels and third-party review sites. 

This works really well for businesses in industries where customers tend to leave lots of feedback via user reviews, social media posts, comments on others’ posts, and direct channels. 

Beyond review monitoring, you can also use Nextiva to track brand mentions, hashtags, related brand keywords, and more. Set up custom tags and alerts so you’re notified about new mentions instantly or certain types of mentions you’re trying to react more quickly to. 

Many of you know social media monitoring and listening is only half of the battle. You’ll still need to take additional, proactive steps to ensure your brand has a positive reputation on your social channels. When customers are happy with all their interactions with you, you can rest assured that digital sentiment about your brand remains glowing. 

To do that, tap into the many advanced features that surpass basic monitoring, such as:

• All-in-one social media inbox
• Private and bulk messaging
• Ticketing and helpdesk features
• Suggested and automated responses
• Competitor analytics
• Custom response surveys
• Detailed reports and analytics
• AI routing

Nextiva delivers one of the most powerful social media management tools on the market today, and it just so happens to come with crucial social monitoring and review management features. 

Plans start at $149 per user per month, plus $99 for each additional user. Get a demo today to see Nextiva in action and find a plan with the features you need to succeed.

#3 – Semrush – Best Combination of SEO and Social Analytics

Semrush is one of the best-known and most popular SEO tools on the market. It’s also an excellent social media monitoring tool.

The platform provides users with a comprehensive suite of social media management features, including detailed analytics reports, real-time alerts, and influencer marketing tools.

Semrush’s Social Media Toolkit has a variety of tools to post to, track, and manage your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google My Business profiles.

The Social Media Poster tool itself lets you generate social media content effortlessly. It enables you to schedule a post across several platforms, change graphics and other elements, create UTM codes, and shorten links.

The Social Media Tracker tool not only measures how active you are on social media but also other social metrics like reactions, mentions, comments, and user impressions. The program then generates reports in a comprehensive dashboard for easy and quick analysis. It’s also possible to use it to watch your rivals’ social media profiles and see what they’re posting and when.

On top of that, Semrush’s reporting system is second-to-none. The platform provides users with a wealth of information, including detailed insights into their brand, competition, and industry.

You can use Semrush starting at $129.95 per month to track up to 500 keywords. While this is by no means the cheapest product, it offers a ton of features for competitive insights, generating marketing ideas, building a content strategy, and more.

However, they do offer a free trial to try the platform on for size. Give Semrush a two-week test drive to see how it can help your efforts.

#4 – Sprout Social – Best Enterprise-Grade Social Media Monitoring

For companies that need it all, Sprout Social offers an extensive arsenal of advanced features that may be just what you’re looking for.

Sprout’s cloud-hosted listening technology has a wide range of use cases and benefits. Social listening insights can help support cross-functional departments like sales and HR, or inform your next product launch.

Sprout Social’s dashboard is well-structured and easy to navigate. Divided up into Messages, Tasks, Feeds, Publishing, Discovery, and Reports, these core sections of the platform are arranged in a line across the top of the screen for quick access and navigation.

Sprout Social’s Reports section is useful for monitoring engagement and seeing how your posts and accounts are landing with social media users. You can also connect Google Analytics to get a deeper understanding of how your social media posts are driving visitors to your site or web store.

The Find Content tool can be quite useful when you’re out of ideas and finding it difficult to come up with new material. Choose a category and relevant articles and media will appear that can be immediately shared to your accounts.

Sprout Queue makes it easy to plan social media postings well in advance. Schedule out a month-long campaign in a couple of hours and each post will stay in the queue until the time you scheduled it to publish. 

That’s not even close to all this platform offers. Sprout Social also enables you to use AI chatbots, link tracking, automation tools, and Twitter surveying mechanisms that generate NPS and CSAT scores. 

The pricing for Sprout Social comes in three tiers, with each adding more features:

• Standard: $249 per user per month for five social profiles
• Professional: $399 per user per month for unlimited social profiles
• Advanced: $499 per user per month for unlimited social profiles

They offer a very generous 30-day free trial of any of those plans, which is a great thing to take advantage of if you think Sprout Social can work for your organization. 

Start your free trial of Sprout Social to see what it can do for you.

#5 – Awario – Best for Monitoring Brand Mentions

If you take reputation management seriously, Awario is your social media monitoring tool. It’s an innovative search engine that enables users to track their brand and products or services across the internet. Awario’s Boolean search lets you create precise and intricate social media monitoring queries by combining sets of keywords.

Awario has several intuitive methods for generating social listening alerts. You can create search queries in just one click by entering your keyword(s) and clicking Go, or switch to advanced search and filter your mentions by date, location, language, and more. You can also monitor your competition and see what people are saying about them online.

The platform includes a variety of features, such as detailed weekly reports, real-time email alerts, and an influencer marketing module.

Awario’s reporting system is excellent. It provides users with detailed information about their brand, including where it’s being mentioned, how often, and by whom. The platform also includes a keyword cloud that allows you to see which words are being used most frequently in conjunction with your brand.

You can also blacklist retweets and add multiple negative keywords. Or narrow down searches and reports through filtering by reach, sentiment, date, and other options.

After you enter your search query and click Apply, the results will populate in real time on the main dashboard. The platform sorts mentions by relevance, giving you the most important information first.

For those who run small or individual organizations, Awario’s pricing starts at just $24 per month billed annually. However, this version only lets you monitor three topics and have one team member. If you need more of either, you’ll have to step up to the Pro tier, which costs $74 per month.

An enterprise-level Awario plan exists for $249 per month, which will buy you all the bells and whistles like custom reports, API access, and training sessions with an Awario expert.

Get seven days to try this platform out by creating an Awario account today.

#6 – Sendible – Most Affordable for Smaller Brands and Agencies

The functionality of Sendible is extensive. It’s a sophisticated and powerful social media management tool that both small businesses and large companies use. It helps you keep track of your social media accounts and their audience interaction.

The Sendible dashboard includes an analytics tool that analyzes the effectiveness of campaigns, which can be viewed from the same dashboard where you manage your social profiles and respond to interactions.

What’s best, though, is how comprehensive its entry-level plan is. If you can suffice with just one user on the platform handling up to six social profiles, you get the ability to manage and monitor Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google My Business, and even WordPress for just $29 per month.

You can use Sendible to publish content, schedule posts, listen for and reply to comments, and more from a single, user-friendly interface.

For that low price, Sendible can be a great choice for small companies. But their highest-priced plan is also competitive and that, or the bespoke Custom plan, are great solutions for agencies that want powerful software without the hefty high-end price tag of other options on this list.

Here’s a breakdown of each pricing tier:

• Creator: $29/month; ideal for freelancers
• Traction: $89/month; ideal for startup agencies and brands
• Scale: $199/month; ideal for fast-growing agencies and brands
• Custom: $399/month; ideal for established large teams and agencies

All plans include a 14-day free trial period, so use it to give Sendinblue a try for your business or agency.

Methodology for Choosing the Best Social Media Monitoring Tool

Choosing the best social media monitoring tool for your organization can be a challenge. Many features overlap from one tool to another, but it’s vital to pay attention to the key differences that help you judge the value and potential efficacy of the options you’re considering.

The Size of Your Team

This has a direct impact on what you’re going to pay for a social media monitoring tool, first. Most pricing plans start with allowing for just one user and scale up from there to 5, 10, or 20 users. But the size of your team also needs to guide what you look for under the hood.

If you manage a small team or, better, are just using the tool yourself, you should have a good grasp on what sort of interface would be comfortable and what features are necessary to use it effectively. Small teams should also look for certain features that can help them perform like a larger one, like:

• Automation features
• Social listening capabilities
• Reporting and analytics tools

On the other hand, if you manage a large team, you’ll need a tool that is more robust and can handle all of your team’s needs and preferences. In addition to the features listed above, you’ll also want to look for a tool that offers:

• User management features
• Workflow management elements
• Team collaboration functionality
• Integration with other business tools (e.g. Slack, Asana, etc.)

The Type of Business You Run

Industry matters when choosing a social media monitoring tool. The type of business you run will dictate the features you need to engage with and please your customers, prospects, or audience on various channels. 

Here are a few example businesses and a few of the most important features to look for:

• Ecommerce businesses: product tracking, sales data integration, social listening
• Local businesses: location-based social monitoring, review/reputation management 
• Service-based businesses: sentiment analysis, customer service integrations
• Online publishers: social sharing data, click-through rates, audience segmentation
• Enterprise brands: competitive analysis, brand reputation management, customer service management, AI-assisted workflows
• Agencies: social media management, reporting and analytics, team collaboration, support for multiple clients and users

Make sure you understand the features you need before you start looking for a social media monitoring tool.

The Social Networks You Want to Track

Most social media tools will track the basic social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. That’s all well and good, but your business or agency might be more on the cutting edge. 

Keep an eye out for a full list of social networks that work with a potential monitoring tool. Many have features that work on YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google Business. Somewhat rarer are ones that incorporate platforms like TikTok, Pinterest, Etsy, or Tumblr.

Also consider the depth of capability that each tool offers for each social network. For example, a tool that offers in-depth analysis for Twitter might not offer the same level of coverage for Instagram. 

The Insights You Need

Not every social media monitoring tool is created equal. Some offer more comprehensive features than others.

When considering the features offered by each tool, think about the types of insights you need to make better decisions for your business. A few examples include:

• Competitive analysis
• Keyword and hashtag tracking
• Mentions
• Lead generation
• Campaign management
• Customer service responses
• Reporting and analytics

Semrush, for example, offers insights into your social media as well as your online content and web presence, whereas Sprout Social allows you to generate AI workflows and automate many tasks, which can be helpful if you manage a large social media presence. 

The Top Social Media Monitoring Tools In Summary

If you decide that a social media monitoring tool can help your business, it’s crucial that you choose the right one. To do that, you’ll need to consider your business needs, budget, the social networks you want to track, and the type of insights you need.

We think Hootsuite is the best choice for most brands, but there are several options above that can fit more specialized needs that define your brand’s marketing or customer service strategy.