6 Social Listening Tools and What They’re Best for (With Alternatives)

Social listening is the art and science of monitoring what your buyers and potential customers are saying about. Here are the six best tools that make this job easier.

Social listening is the art and science of monitoring what your buyers and potential customers are saying about:

Your brand
Your competitors
Topics related to your product or service

Staying “in the know” about all these simultaneously is no easy feat. This is where social listening tools come in. They help you monitor brand mentions on major social media platforms, identify emerging trends in your niche, and package these online conversations into actionable insights for your social media strategy.

In this article, I’ll share a list of six social listening tools (with alternatives) to help you choose the best software for your needs.

Click on one of the tools below to jump to a section, or scroll for a big-picture overview in the table.

Social listening tools	Best for	Price	Top features	Alternatives
AnswerThePublic	Affordable social listening	Free for 3 searches/day. Paid plans from $10/month for 100 searches.	Understand audience search behaviors. Supports platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and more. Organize and present research using high-res images or export as CSV.	Google Alerts Answer Socrates
Exploding Topics	Finding trending topics	Free plan available. Paid plans start at $39/month (billed annually).	Spot trends before they go mainstream. Discover niche markets for your products. Receive trend alerts for emerging topics.	Trendwatching TrendZeer
SparkToro	Deep audience insights	Free plan for 5 searches/month. Paid plans start at $38/month.	Understand audience interests and search behavior. Discover influencers and content preferences. Identify popular social media channels for your audience.	BuzzSumo Talkwalker
Mention	Advanced analytics	Plans start at $599.	Track online conversations across multiple channels. Analyze sentiment of brand mentions. Compare your brand’s analytics with competitors.	Keyhole Mentionlytics
Brand24	Monitoring millions of online sources	Starts at $149/month.	Monitor mentions and detect negative sentiments. AI assistant for trend identification and actionable insights. Track media coverage across social media, news, blogs, and podcasts.	Meltwater SentiOne
Brandwatch	Comprehensive tool for social media management and listening	Pricing not publicly available.	AI assistant for actionable insights. Access 1.7 trillion historical data points dating back to 2010. Upload custom data for monitoring trends.	Awario Quid

The perfect social listening tools will help you track brand mentions and online conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry in the most relevant channels.

Social media listening tools monitor social media conversations in major social networks. Some social listening tools extend this to include news sites, blogs, and forums.

Which social listening tool you need depends on the channels your audience is most active in. For instance, you don’t need to invest in a social listening tool monitoring that tracks news sites if most of your buyers express their sentiments on social media. A social media listening tool would suffice in this instance.

After you know which channels are the most important to you, it’ll be easier to narrow down the best social listening tools for your needs.

1. AnswerThePublic

Free plan/trial: Free for three searches every day. You can also take a free 7-day trial of the paid plans.

Price: Pricing starts at $10/month for 100 searches.

Top features:

Gain valuable insights about your audience by understanding what they’re searching for
Available for major social media platforms (Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube), search engines (Google, Bing), and third-party websites (Amazon)
Organize your research into folders and present them beautifully using high-resolution images, pruning search results that aren’t relevant conversations, and exporting results to CSV

AnswerThePublic is a website where you can enter a topic, your brand name, your competitor’s name, or your product to get valuable insights about the questions people are asking on your query. Let’s say you sell skincare products that cure acne, now this is what your potential buyers are asking, according to AnswerThePublic:

Now, you can create content around all of these questions to answer your audience’s pesky queries. AnswerThePublic isn’t a fancy tool with all the bells and whistles, but it’s the perfect choice for beginners and for those on a tight budget. It can help you add social listening into your social media plan without overwhelming you with tons of features.

Alternatives:

You can set up Google Alerts as your social media monitoring tool to track relevant online conversations and stay up-to-date with your brand reputation. It’s also the easiest way to find trending topics in your niche.
Answer Socrates is also a great alternative for AnswerThePublic, but it only monitors online conversations on Google. It combines valuable consumer insights from Google Alerts, too.

2. Exploding Topics

Free plan/trial: Free plan available with limited functions. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial for $1.

Price: Plans start at $39/month, billed annually.

Top features:

Find trending topics before they go mainstream
Discover lesser known markets where your product can be valuable
Trend tracking and alerts to know when a product or topic is about to become popular

Exploding Topics is a social listening tool dedicated to helping you find trending topics. You can use it to spot new competitors before they’ve become popular or the pain points of your customers before your rivals catch on.

With the database of Exploding Topics, they also claim to discover emerging trends before anyone else.

Alternatives:

Trendwatching is another AI powered social listening tool that can help you uncover trends before they become common knowledge. Trendwatching leans more toward consumer trends, while Exploding Topics has social listening data in everything – including social media platforms, online conversations, etc.
TrendZeer can be a good alternative if you need a social listening tool with a free plan. It does pretty much everything that Exploding Topics does.