The 11 Best AI Social Media Monitoring Tools to Try in 2024

About 5.5 BILLION people worldwide use social media, and more than 2 BILLION posts are published daily. How can you handle such a large amount of information? The answer is to use social media monitoring tools. These tools monitor and analyze mentions on social media platforms. They will help you measure social media reach, boost your online presence, and detect the sentiment around your brand.

A social media monitoring tool tracks, gathers, and analyzes mentions and conversations across major social media platforms. It assists in keeping track of what people say about a brand, product, service, person, or any particular subject of interest in real-time. Those tools present the most important metrics, such as social media reach, sentiment score, volume of mentions, likes, shares, and AVE. Social media monitoring tools help you quickly find the most relevant mentions.

There are many tools available on the market. Even though they look similar, they vary greatly.

Some are dedicated, standalone social media monitoring tools, whereas many are all-in-one solutions that combine monitoring, scheduling, publishing, content creation, etc.

I decided to make it a little bit easier for you by picking the 11 best tools that offer great value for your buck!

The best social media monitoring tools:

1. Brand24
2. Keyhole
3. Hootsuite
4. Sprout Social
5. Mention
6. XPro (Tweetdeck)
7. Awario
8. Agorapulse
9. Talkwalker
10. BrandMentions
11. Zoho Social

The 11 best social media monitoring tools

01 Brand24

Free 14-day trial.

Brand24 is one of the most advanced social media monitoring tools with AI features and insights.

The tool collects social mentions in real-time across vide number of sources, including the most important social media, such as:

• Instagram
• X (Twitter)
• Facebook
• Reddit
• LinkedIn
• Quora
• YouTube
• TikTok
• Telegram
• Twitch

And that’s not everything. With Brand24, you can monitor news sites, blogs, forums, reviews, newsletters, podcasts, and much more!

Whether you care about tracking brand mentions and social media conversations, tracking hashtags, monitoring your competitors, or evaluating the results of your marketing campaign, a user-friendly dashboard has it all.

It provides sentiment analysis, so every detected mention in social media is analyzed, and the sentiment is attributed to it.

Brand24 shows which source generates the most of what kind of sentiment. Nike has the most positive sentiment on Instagram:

Also, look at Nike’s untagged mention on TikTok.

Without Brand24, the best social media monitoring tool, Nike would NEVER have seen this mention.

Brand24 also measures the social media reach of your brand mentions. So, you can see how many people have seen posts with your brand on social media.

Nike generated a social media reach of almost 600 MILLION in just 30 days.

Moreover, Brand24 provides you with advanced AI features!

One of them is the Anomaly Detector. It quickly detects sudden spikes in your social media mentions and reach and explains why.

There’s also the AI Brand Assistant. It works like ChatGPT except that in the context of your project.

You can ask him literally anything:

Another helpful feature is custom reports. Whenever you need to present the results of your work to your supervisors or share the customer insights you collected, you can do it by preparing a report.

You can choose the metrics in the report and add your company branding colors and logo. Brand24 can deliver AI reports with contextual insights, emerging trends, and recommendations to your inbox.

Brand24 provides historical data. This social monitoring tool lets you easily track your social media growth. 

For example, during the last 30 days, the number of Nike mentions on X (Twitter) was 50% less than a month earlier.

Are you hesitant to use Brand24? Look at the users’ reviews:

“Brand24 allows me to track mentions of my brand, products, or services across social media, blogs, forums, and other online sources in real-time. This helps me stay informed about conversations and respond promptly to customers or potential customers.

The platform provides sentiment analysis, which helps me understand the overall tone of the discussions surrounding my brand. This information is valuable for refining my marketing strategy and addressing any negative sentiment that may arise.”

Lukasz Z. SEO Expert and Consultant

02 Keyhole

Keyhole is a real-time social media analysis tool that monitors X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Keyhole will help you in many different areas, from brand monitoring, market research, and influencer marketing to social media insights and competitive analysis.

What’s interesting is that you can analyze your profile growth and engagement. Furthermore, the tool will help you identify relevant influencers and track campaigns.

The tool offers sentiment analysis and other valuable features, such as tracking engagement and reach of posts and social media reporting.

You must buy the most expensive plan to fully benefit from Keyhole listening features and access all monitored sources.

Key features:

• Brand monitoring
• Sentiment analysis
• Influencer marketing
• Campaign monitoring
• Robust analytics

Check the best Keyhole competitors!

03 Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management software focusing on Instagram, Facebook, X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and TikTok. The monitoring feature is an add-on available for customers choosing the enterprise plan.

The tool also offers robust social media analytics and a scheduling section.

What’s great about this tool is that through its dashboard, users can directly engage with social media posts, mentions, or messages without switching between different platforms.

Hootsuite allows you to track your social media presence, analyze your social media performance, create and manage advertising campaigns, create and publish posts, and manage incoming messages.

Key features:

• Publish and schedule posts
• Social media monitoring as an add-on
• Analytics
• Content curation
• Campaign management

04 Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a social media management tool that supports various social media platforms: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

Sprout Social provides sentiment analysis to gauge the tone of mentions and conversations. It can also help you analyze and compare competitors.

This platform will let you uncover audience insights from online conversations and improve your overall social media strategy.

By identifying content that sparks your customers’ interests, you can improve customer experience.

You will be able to understand your customers better, prepare campaigns that will reach the right audience, and measure the results of those campaigns.

The social media monitoring feature is available only in the enterprise plan (the most expensive plan).

Want to compare Sprout Social with other tools? Check the alternatives!

Key features:

• Social media monitoring inside the enterprise plan
• Publishing and scheduling
• Audience analysis
• campaign analysis
• Influencer recognition

05 Mention

Mention is one of the most popular social media monitoring software with publishing features. The tool monitors Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, and TikTok.

Mention (as most social media monitoring tools) gauges the sentiment behind tracked mentions, categorizing them as positive, negative, or neutral.

An interesting feature alerts that help sift through the Internet noise and get to the information you need to make better decisions.

Moreover, mentions allow you to precisely track the impact of your work and compare trends by filtering critical online conversations.

Analyzing online content will help you manage your customer service and stay one step ahead of your competitors.

You must pick the most expensive custom plan to get social media data from the most important platforms.

Key features:

• Social media listening
• Publishing social media posts
• Influencers discovery
• Custom reports

Check Mention’s alternatives!

06 XPro (Tweetdeck)

Tweetdeck was one of the free monitoring tools developed by Twitter. Right now, this tool is called XPro, and it’s available only for premium subscribers with a blue checkmark. 

It’s fully customizable, so you can set up a column that will help you track your X (Twitter) presence and manage messages. You can see all the conversations about your brand on a single X (Twitter) page.

On top of that, you can also monitor the activity of the people you follow or add a list column.

XPro (Tweetdeck) is an excellent tool for examining your Twitter presence in more detail. It allows you to spot trending topics and emerging trends and prepare content that will boost your brand awareness.

This platform has a few drawbacks. Firstly, it does not offer any X (Twitter) analytics. You still need an additional tool to measure reach or track your keywords in real-time.

Also, measuring customer sentiment or conducting social monitoring of any other platform is impossible.

Key features:

• X (Twitter) monitoring
• Post scheduling
• Sending direct messages

07 Awario

Awario is a media monitoring tool that tracks Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and Reddit. The tool tracks and analyzes mentions of specified and relevant keywords, brand names, or phrases across social media platforms, news, forums, blogs, and review sites. Unfortunately, it doesn’t monitor Telegram, TikTok, and LinkedIn.

The tool evaluates whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral so you can discover the sentiment around your brand or topic of interest.

It might help find influencers or brand advocates for cooperation. What’s interesting, Awario offers market research features that will help you understand your audience.

Awario is an affordable and basic social monitoring tool. The number of monitored social media platforms could be more impressive.

Are you looking for social media monitoring software that monitors more sources? Check Awario alternatives!

It also offers a geo-localization feature, but it needs to be fixed.

Key features:

• Social media monitoring
• Sentiment analysis
• Email alerts
• White-label reports

08 Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a comprehensive social media management tool that offers Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook listening.

The tool will help you publish, engage, listen, report, and collaborate on your digital marketing projects.

The listening feature I found the most useful is customer sentiment, as it lets you identify the best content and grow your social media presence. You can easily track your competitors and thus prepare a more informed social media strategy.

Agorapulse consolidates comments and messages from various social channels into one inbox, making it easy to engage with your audience.

Moreover, you can monitor the results of your activities and report them to your colleagues and supervisors.

It caters to small businesses as well as agencies and large teams. Moreover, Agorapulse is famous for its exquisite customer relationship management!

Unfortunately, social media tracking only covers 3 platforms.

Key features:

• Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook monitoring
• Social media publishing
• Social media inbox

09 Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a bit of both worlds – you can go for its pricier version or settle for one of the free products – Talkwalker Alerts or Talkwalker’s Free Social Search. When it comes to social listening tools, Talkwalker is definitely worth looking at.

While Alerts seem to be a Google Alerts alternative, the social search mode is about tracking your brand, company, hashtags, or any other conversations across the web.

Besides real-time social monitoring, Talkwalker offers customers insights and consumer segmentation.

The tool gathers data from social networks and other online sources and combines them with market data. This will help not only your customer service but also help you make smarter and more informed decisions regarding your products, brand, or services.

The main product consists of a social listening and analytics suite, an influencer marketing platform, and an AI engine. Thanks to KPIs and machine learning algorithms, you will be able to produce and distribute content your audience wants to interact with.

This social media monitoring software covers multiple social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, to give you the most comprehensive social media data.

Talkwalker is a pricey 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.

Key features:

• Social media monitoring
• Audience Insights
• Sentiment
• Customer feedback analysis

Are you looking for the best Talkwalker alternatives? Check the best of them!

10 BrandMentions

BrandMnetions is a social media tracker – it will help you monitor conversations and mentions across the web and social media, such as X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, and Quora. However, the tool doesn’t support TikTok, which is disappointing.

With BrandMentions, you can monitor competitors to discover their online activities and reputation. The tool will help you spy on competitors by delivering insights about any brand or topic from any market.

It also analyzes the sentiment of mentions and relevant conversations so you can discover whether the target audience talks about you positively or negatively. Tracking mentions is real-time, so you will get alerts whenever new mentions or links appear.

Need a more detailed overview of BrandMentions features? Check BrandMentions competitors!

BrandMentions is a cost-effective tool, but you can use one that monitors more sources at the same price.

Key features:

• Brand monitoring
• Alerts and notifications
• Reputation management
• Sentiment

11 Zoho Social

Zoho Social is another powerful social media management tool that helps you in several areas, from creating, scheduling, and publishing content to monitoring brand mentions and keeping all your social conversations in one place.

It’s a good solution for various marketers, even social media managers.

You can work with major social networks like Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.

You can engage people mentioning your brand directly from the dashboard, but what makes it stand out is the Facebook Lead Ads integration, which helps you capture and monitor leads in real-time.

Zoho Social helps you better understand your audience, create the most engaging content, and prepare pre-built reports to share the results of your work.

The platform examines every social mention to provide the most accurate social data set possible.

Test the tool for 15 days for free before choosing one of the available plans.

Key features:

• Customized monitoring dashboard
• Social engagement tracking
• Alerts and notifications

What is the most important while developing a social media monitoring tool? 

“We’ve experimented with numerous social media monitoring tools, only to find that many fail to capture critical brand mentions. This shortcoming fueled our determination to develop our own social media monitoring tool, prioritizing comprehensive coverage of brand mentions.

Our tool aggregates mentions from a vast array of public sources: social platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Telegram, and more), news outlets, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, and reviews.

Furthermore, we firmly believe that a social media monitoring tool should be more than just a notification platform. Beyond mere mentions, our objective is to deliver actionable insights and recommendations. Through our tool, social media monitoring becomes a time-saving process, meticulously analyzing thousands of brand mentions so you won’t have to.”

Michał Sadowski, CEO at Brand24

Can you monitor social media mentions manually without using dedicated tools? 

It’s nearly impossible. And it would be very time-consuming. 

Firstly, you must put time aside to browse all social media platforms and look for brand mentions.

Well, each social media platform offers mention notifications. But the more mentions, the harder it will be for you to keep up with them.

Furthermore, you can stay updated with mentions whenever users tag you, but what if they don’t? Like here:

Secondly, you must set up a reporting panel for your research.

Some metrics, such as the volume of mentions, are easy to measure manually. Others, such as presence score or social media share of voice, are more challenging.

Thirdly, the advantage of using dedicated tools is their effectiveness and analytics features. 

For example, each mention detected by the Brand24 tool has an influencer score and is categorized as positive, negative, or neutral. 

In summary, using social media monitoring software makes social media marketers’ jobs much easier.

What are the most important features of a solid social media monitoring tool?

Why do brands use social media monitoring tools?

Look at the answer written by Adam Górnicz, Customer Success Manager at Brand24.

Social media monitoring can be a powerful tool, providing valuable insights that would otherwise be challenging, time-consuming, and costly to obtain. 

Yet, acquiring data is just the beginning. The real value lies in processing, analyzing, identifying patterns, and extracting insights — and that’s where social media monitoring platforms shine. 

They provide quick and effective results with minimal user input required. The question shouldn’t be why use it, but rather why not! 

Its applications are diverse, with popular use cases such as PR management for rapid response to brand sentiment, tracking marketing efforts to gauge brand presence, and monitoring product opinions for informed decision-making. 

The rise of AI features adds another layer, offering a broader perspective and insights without the need for extensive data analysis experience. Moreover, social listening isn’t confined just to conventional areas. Unconventional uses, like tracking harmful bot makers by one of our clients, showcase its versatility. 

With these tools, you can monitor anything describable in words, expanding the possibilities into limitless territories. The power of online monitoring goes beyond brands and industries, offering a tool that can be adapted to a wide array of scenarios.

Conclusion

When choosing social media monitoring software, I recommend you pick the one that uses social monitoring as its core feature, such as social listening tools. This ensures you can access the most comprehensive number of mentioned sources and the most reliable 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 in the most expansive plans. 
• You need to buy an add-on to start social media monitoring using Hootsuite.
• Awario and Mention are basic tools that are perfect for beginners.
• Talkwalker is the most expensive tool dedicated to large companies.

Ready to set up your social media monitoring project? Start a 14-day free trial!