Social Media Monitoring Tools to Check in 2026
Table of contents
Social media monitoring tools enable you to listen to, analyze, and respond to online conversations about your brand or topic in real-time.
There are many tools available on the market.
Let’s focus on the best ones.
Best social media monitoring tools for 2026
Here’s a shortlist. I’ve picked the 10 best social media monitoring software!
| Brand24 | Real-time social & web monitoring, sentiment analysis, AI insights, influencer detection, alerts. Best for: Brands, marketers, and agencies focused on reputation management and insights. Pricing: From ~$149/month. |
| Keyhole | Hashtag & keyword tracking, influencer analytics, campaign performance, sentiment analysis. Best for: Campaign-based marketing and influencer tracking. Pricing: Custom pricing. |
| Hootsuite | Social listening streams, unified inbox, publishing, analytics, sentiment tracking. Best for: Teams that want monitoring + scheduling in one tool. Pricing: From ~$99/month (advanced listening on higher plans). |
| Sprout Social | Advanced social listening, Smart Inbox, collaboration tools, in-depth reporting. Best for: Mid-sized teams and agencies needing premium analytics. Pricing: From ~$199/user/month. |
| Mention | Real-time brand mentions, web & social listening, sentiment and influence metrics. Best for: Businesses focused on media monitoring and brand awareness. Pricing: From ~$599/month. |
| Awario | Social & web monitoring, sentiment analysis, lead discovery, API access. Best for: SMBs and agencies looking for affordable monitoring. Pricing: From ~$29/month. |
| Agorapulse | Unified inbox, mention tracking, publishing, reporting, team workflows. Best for: Small teams and agencies managing engagement daily. Pricing: From ~$79/user/month. |
| Talkwalker | Enterprise-grade social & media listening, trend analysis, custom dashboards. Best for: Large brands and PR teams needing global insights. Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing. |
| BrandMentions | Real-time brand monitoring, sentiment tracking, alerts, competitor insights. Best for: Brands focused on quick mention detection. Pricing: From ~$79/month. |
| Iconosquare | Social monitoring, analytics, conversation tracking (Instagram & Facebook focused). Best for: Social media managers working mainly with Meta platforms. Pricing: From ~$33/month. |
Research methodology
When selecting the tools, I considered the following 8 key factors: functionality, the sentiment score of a tool, data coverage, sentiment and analytics quality, reporting features, ease of use, customer support & reliability, and customer reviews.
01 Brand24
This is one of the most advanced social listening tools.
It collects social mentions in real-time across the most important social media (Instagram, X, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and more) and other sources.
Key features include:
- Mentions tab with advanced filters – you can easily track mentions across social media, which enables you to focus on what matters the most
- Sentiment analysis – automatically assigns sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral) to every detected mention
- Social media reach – see how many people have seen posts with your brand on social media
- Advanced AI features that can give you instant insights, speed up the analysis, and help with reporting.
- AI insights and recommendations – you get automated insights and actionable recommendations based on your brand’s performance
- Custom reports – generate tailored reports whenever you need to share insights with supervisors or clients
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- Quora
- YouTube
- TikTok
- Telegram
- Twitch
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Brand24 is perfect for medium and large companies that are looking for the highest-quality social media monitoring tool at a competitive price.
💪 Strengths:
- It has many powerful AI features, thanks to which you get in-depth analysis and valuable insights with just a few clicks.
- The notification system is very advanced. You receive alerts in the dashboard, app, via email, or even through a dedicated Slack channel.
👎 What could be better:
Historical data is quite limited; data collection begins once you set up your project.
02 Keyhole
Keyhole is a social media monitoring tool that is also a social media management platform.
It will help you in many areas, from brand monitoring, through hashtag tracking to influencer marketing.
The tool offers sentiment analysis and other valuable features, such as:
- Tracking audience engagement
- Measuring the reach of your posts
- Highlighting influential accounts
Unfortunately, you need to buy the most expensive plan to fully benefit from Keyhole social listening features and access all monitored sources – and honestly, there aren’t many sources anyway 😢
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
- TikTok
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Keyhole is perfect for small to medium-sized businesses that care the most about tracking hashtags and campaigns.
💪 Strengths:
- It provides a very easy-to-use hashtag tracker that works exceptionally well.
👎 What could be better:
This tool monitors only six major social media channels, skipping one of the most important: Reddit and Pinterest.
You might also want to check: Keyhole Competitors
03 Hootsuite
Hootsuite is mainly a social media management platform. But it offers robust social media analytics and a scheduling section.
The advanced social listening features are add-ons available only in the enterprise plan.
With this tool, you can:
- Receive sentiment analysis of your brand mentions
- Track your social media presence and performance
- Create and manage different campaigns, including ads campaigns
- Schedule posts and publish content
What’s great about Hootsuite is that you can engage with social media posts, mentions, or incoming messages directly within this tool.
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
- TikTok
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Hootsuite is a great choice for those who mainly need a social media management platform and treat the mentions tracking as an additional feature.
💪 Strengths:
- It’s a comprehensive platform that allows you to effectively manage your social media channels while also monitoring social platforms.
- It provides historical data from the past 13 months.
👎 What could be better:
Most social listening features are only included in the enterprise plan, the most expensive plan.
04 Sprout Social
Sprout Social is another social media management tool that offers social media monitoring.
It will let you uncover audience insights from online conversations and improve your social media strategy.
With this tool, you can:
- Monitor different keywords and hashtags
- Discover audience sentiment toward them
- Identify content that sparks people’s interest
- Manage your social media accounts
Remember that Sprout Social’s monitoring features are only available as individual add-ons in any plan.
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Sprout Social is designed for medium and big companies that are able to pay extra for monitoring capabilities.
💪 Strengths:
- It has many management and publishing features. All of them are advanced but, at the same time, easy to use.
👎 What could be better:
As Sprout Social excels in social media management, its monitoring features are less developed, yet you still have to pay extra for them.
Want to find something cheaper than Sprout Social? Check the alternatives.
05 Mention
Mention is one of the most popular social media monitoring software. It also provides publishing features.
Like most social media monitoring tools, it gauges the sentiment behind tracked mentions, categorizing them as positive, negative, or neutral.
This tool also allows you to:
- Precisely track the impact of your social media work
- Benchmark your social media performance and gather market insights
- Compare trends by filtering critical online conversations
- Social media planning
Disappointing info: To get access to all the social media listed below, you must choose the company plan that is the most expensive.
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
- TikTok
⭐️ Overall verdict:
It’s best suited for businesses with a larger budget and no need for LinkedIn monitoring – unless they’re willing to pay extra for it.
💪 Strengths:
- Customizing the dashboard to fit your business’s social media strategy is possible.
👎 What could be better:
Access to historical data and keyword monitoring on LinkedIn requires an additional fee.
Check: Mention Competitors
06 Awario
Awario is a media monitoring tool that tracks mentions across Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and Reddit.
Beyond social media, it also monitors news sites, forums, blogs, and review platforms.
However, it lacks support for two key platforms: TikTok and LinkedIn, which may be a drawback for some users.
But at the same time, it is one of the cheapest tools on this list.
Two of its most important features:
- Social media sentiment analysis
- Mention alerts
Awario is particularly useful for identifying influencers and brand advocates for cooperation.
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Awario is quite a basic solution, but it is also budget-friendly, making it a good choice for small businesses and agencies.
💪 Strengths:
- Awario offers white-label reports.
- It is more affordable than other social media monitoring tools.
👎 What could be better:
The number of monitored sources could be more impressive.
Are you looking for a tracking tool that monitors all major social media platforms? Check: Awario Competitors!
07 Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube monitoring.
This tool will help you publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate on digital marketing projects.
The feature I found the most useful is customer sentiment. It lets you identify your best content and quickly grow your social media presence.
You can also:
- Track brand mentions, social comments, and conversations from different channels and have them in one inbox – it makes it easy to engage with your target audience
- Monitor the results of your activities and report them to your colleagues and supervisors
- Do competitive analysis
🔎 Monitored social media:
- YouTube
⭐️ Overall verdict:
This tool is ideal for businesses, agencies, or social media teams that don’t need to monitor multiple channels but want to focus on managing and tracking one specific platform, like Facebook.
💪 Strengths:
- Agorapulse provides outstanding customer support – very fast and enjoyable to interact with.
- It has a very clear and intuitive interface.
👎 What could be better:
Social listening capabilities are pretty limited – Agorapulse tracks only three platforms.
08 Talkwalker
Talkwalker is a bit of both worlds – you can go for its main paid version or settle for one of the free tools: Talkwalker Alerts or Talkwalker’s Free Social Search.
No matter what, Talkwalker is undoubtedly a powerful tool worth exploring!
In addition to real-time social monitoring, Talkwalker offers valuable audience insights and social content ratings.
With Talkwalker, you can:
- Track the performance of your digital marketing campaigns
- Find influencers, topics, and content ideas
- Get an instant answer to a quick question about your audience by asking Yeti, the AI assistant
- Protect and improve your reputation
Unfortunately, Talkwalker is a pricey tool!
🔎 Monitored social media:
30 social networks, including:
- X (Twitter)
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Talkwalker is a very advanced solution, ideal for larger businesses looking for powerful analytics, comprehensive data, and in-depth insights.
💪 Strengths:
- Talkwalker offers up to 5 years of historical data.
- It provides one of the broadest media monitoring coverages on the market, with 30 social media platforms and over 250 million websites.
👎 What could be better:
It’s a costly tool. Regarding the plans, the Basic one aimed at smaller brands or owned media-focused companies costs several thousand dollars yearly. The prices of the two remaining plans, Corporate and Enterprise, are discussed on request – thinking logically, they are even more expensive.
Are you looking for the best Talkwalker competitor? Check it out here!
09 BrandMentions
BrandMentions is a social media tracker – it will help you monitor conversations and mentions across the most important social media platforms and the whole web.
With BrandMentions, you can spy on competitors. You can get insights about any brand or topic from any market.
It also:
- Analyzes the sentiment of mentions and relevant conversations
- Provides real-time tracking – you get alerts whenever new mentions or links appear
The complete tool is subscription-based, but BrandMentions offers four trackers you can try for free!
🔎 Monitored social media:
- X (Twitter)
- YouTube
- TikTok
⭐️ Overall verdict:
It is a solution suitable for small and large companies seeking to monitor all essential social platforms and the web.
💪 Strengths:
- With BrandMentions, you can access the historical data no other tools provide – up to 10 years.
- This tool provides essential KPIs, in-depth analytics, and filters on all available plans.
👎 What could be better:
Some users may initially find the interface slightly overwhelming, especially with so many available filters and options.
Check: BrandMentions Competitors
10 Iconosquare
Iconosquare is an all-in-one social media management and analytics platform that includes monitoring features.
The tool tracks brand mentions and hashtags on social platforms, monitors competitor activity and industry trends, and generates reports on metrics.
With Iconosquare, you can:
- Track metrics like engagement, reach, and follower growth across multiple platforms.
- Plan and automatically publish posts.
- Unified inbox for comments, mentions, and messages.
- Track brand mentions, relevant hashtags, competitors, and trends.
🔎 Monitored social media:
- TikTok
- X (Twitter)
- Threads
- YouTube
⭐️ Overall verdict:
Iconosquare is a comprehensive social media management tool with basic monitoring ideal for brands and agencies seeking performance insights, reporting, and publishing features all in one platform.
💪 Strengths:
- The tool provides user-friendly analytics and reporting across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
- It also includes built-in scheduling, a content calendar, and useful benchmarking and competitor insights to support data-driven social media management.
👎 What could be better:
Social monitoring is limited, as it focuses mainly on mentions and hashtags within connected social platforms and does not cover blogs, forums, news sites, or full web monitoring.
Social Media Monitoring Tools Comparison
The internet is buzzing with chatter… and so are the tools that help you listen in!
With SO MANY social media monitoring platforms out there, the big question is: which one is actually right for you?
To find out, let’s peek into what people are really saying. I pulled real online conversations (using Brand24) and compared the top tools side by side, including sentiment analysis.
Ready to see which platforms people love (and which ones… not so much)?
Here’s what people say:
- Brand24 – number of mentions: 606 (89 positive, 4 negative)
- Sprout Social – number of mentions: 2822 (227 positive, 25 negative)
- Hootsuite – number of mentions: 8447 (1157 positive, 233 negative)
- Mentionlytics – number of mentions: 65 (26 positive, 0 negative)
- Brandwatch – number of mentions: 1323 (206 positive, 14 negative)
- Keyhole.co – number of mentions: 7 (1 positive, 0 negative)
- Awario – number of mentions: 82 (4 positive, 0 negative)
- Talkwalker – number of mentions: 704 (44 positive, 13 negative)
- Brandmentions – number of mentions: 145 (22 positive, 2 negative)
FAQ
What is a social media monitoring tool?
A social media monitoring tool is software that helps you track, analyze, and understand what people are saying online about a brand, product, person, or topic across social media and often the wider web.
It will help you to:
- Collect mentions from social platforms like X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, blogs, forums, news sites, and reviews
- Analyze sentiment and emotions
- Manage brand reputation
- Track hashtags and trending topics
- Identify influencers and sources driving the conversation
- Find out when something important happens
- Measure social media campaigns
What are the key features of a social media monitoring tool?
There are two main groups of features important in social monitoring tools:
- Real-time monitoring & alerts
The first group focuses on ensuring that your business runs smoothly, allowing you to stay informed and react quickly while also being able to sleep well.
Real-time monitoring is essential, but the real value comes from automated alerts and reports:
- Alerts notify you about significant spikes in mentions, potential crises, or unexpected engagement trends
- Periodic reports provide a comprehensive overview of your brand’s online presence, allowing you to stay informed effortlessly
- In-depth analysis & market insights
The second group is more advanced and brings in-depth knowledge about your brand, competitors, or market trends that influence your organization.
You can see how effective your marketing and PR-related activities are, how much value you created, and how many people you reached.
You can also see how good you are compared to previous periods and your competitors, which is crucial for any business.
You know it, for sure, but let me remind you: the best social media monitoring platforms, like Brand24, are powered by AI.
For example, this allows conclusions and recommendations to generate themselves, so you can focus on planning how to react rather than finding out what is going on.
✅ This answer was written by Karol Kłaczyński, Head of Product at Brand24
Why do brands use social media monitoring tools?
Social media tracking tools can be really powerful. They provide valuable insights that are normally very challenging, time-consuming, and costly to obtain on your own.
Acquiring data is just the beginning. The real value lies in processing, analyzing, identifying patterns, and extracting insights — and that’s where these social media tools shine.
They provide fast and effective results with minimal user input.
The question shouldn’t be why use them, but rather why not!
Their applications are diverse, for example:
- PR management for rapid response to negative brand sentiment
- Tracking marketing activities to assess brand presence
- Collecting customer feedback to make informed decisions
Moreover, their AI features give users a broader perspective and insights without the need for extensive data analysis experience.
Note that social listening is not limited to conventional areas. For example, one of Brand24’s clients uses it to track harmful bot makers.
With these tools, you can monitor anything that can be described in words!
The power of online monitoring goes beyond brands and industries, offering a tool that can be adapted to a wide range of scenarios.
✅ This answer was written by Adam Górnicz, Customer Success Manager at Brand24
How can you use social media monitoring tools?
There are various applications of social media monitoring tools in business, such as:
- Social media analysis: Collect the most valuable social data and get actionable AI insights to improve your social media strategy.
- Competitor analysis: Keep an eye on your competitors’ activities and compare their social media performance with yours.
- Measure campaign effectiveness: Analyze the success of your marketing campaigns by monitoring their reach, sentiment, and advertising value equivalency (AVE).
- Social media trends identification: Discover emerging industry trends and popular topics across different platforms.
- PR crisis management: Quickly identify and address potential PR issues before they escalate.
- Brand reputation management: Monitor the sentiment of mentions and respond to both positive and negative ones quickly.
Conclusion
As you can see, some social monitoring tools are all-in-one solutions that combine social listening with scheduling, publishing, content creation, and even more.
If you need the best possible social listening, choose a tool that treats it as its core feature, not an additional feature.
This ensures you’ll have access to the broadest range of mentioned sources and the most reliable social media data.
Key takeaways:
- With Brand24, you can monitor a large number of social media sources. The tool offers advanced analytics and AI reports.
- Sprout Social and Keyhole offer monitoring features only in the most expensive plans.
- Social media monitoring is an add-on in Hootsuite.
- Awario and Mention are basic tools that are budget-friendly.
- Talkwalker is the most expensive tool dedicated to large companies.
