The 11 Best AI Social Media Monitoring Tools for 2024

15 min read

Social media monitoring tools monitor and analyze mentions happening 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 is software that tracks, gathers, and analyzes mentions and conversations across major social media platforms. It assists in keeping track of what people are saying 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 aim to help you quickly find the most relevant mentions.

We have lots of tools available on the market. Even though they might look similar, they somehow vary a lot from each other.

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

I decided to make it a little bit easier for you folks and picked the 11 best tools that offer a great bang 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-powered reports 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, and Twitch.

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

Start social media monitoring! Track mentions!

Whether you want to collect brand mentions, keep an eye out on your competitors, or evaluate the results of your marketing campaign, it’s all there for you in a user-friendly dashboard.

Moreover, Brand24 analyses social media conversations and provides you with advanced analytics. Inside the dashboard, you can find:

  • Mention tab with chart and filters
  • Estimated social media reach
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Mentions categorized as positive, negative, or neutral
  • Competitor and period comparison
  • Social media engagement in the form of likes, comments, and shares
  • Top public profiles talking about your brand, product, or service
  • Influencer score
  • Trending hashtags that match your business niche
  • Emoji and emotion analysis
  • Topic analysis
  • The context of a discussion
  • Presence and reputation score
  • AI reports, alerts, and notifications
Brand24 - advanced social media monitoring tool

Another useful 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 that will appear in the report and add your company branding colors and logo. Brand24 can deliver AI reports with insights, trends, and recommendations straight to your inbox.

With Brand24, you can easily track your social media growth. For example, during the last 30 days, the Nike brand slightly increased its number of mentions and reach on TikTok.

The analysis of Nike's performance on TikTok

“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 to customers or potential customers promptly.

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 sentiments that may arise.”

Lukasz Z. SEO Expert and Consultant

Start social media monitoring! Track mentions!

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, influencer marketing to social media insights and competitor analysis.

What’s interesting 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 useful features, for example, tracking engagement and reach of posts and social media reporting.

To fully benefit from Keyhole listening features and access all monitored sources, you need to buy the most expensive plan.

Key features:

  • Brand monitoring
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Influencer marketing
  • Campaign monitoring
  • Profile analytics
Keyhole - social media monitoring and analytics tool

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 posts, mentions, or messages without switching between different platforms.

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

Key features:

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

04 Sprout Social

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

Sprout Social provides sentiment analysis to gauge the tone of mentions and conversations. Also, it will help you analyze competitors and compare them.

This platform will let you uncover audience insights from online conversations and improve your overall social media strategy. You will be able to improve customer experience by identifying content that sparks your customers’ interests.

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 in the enterprise plan that costs over $499 monthly.

Key features:

  • Social media monitoring inside enterprise plan
  • Publishing and scheduling
  • Audience analysis
  • campaign analysis
  • Influencer recognition
Sprout Social - one of the best social media monitoring tools

Use the Brand24 tool to track social mentions!

05 Mention

Mention is one of the most popular social media monitoring tools 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 allows you to precisely track the impact of your work and compare trends by filtering key online conversations.

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

You need to pick the most expensive custom plan to track all important social media channels.

Key features:

  • Social media listening
  • Publishing social media posts
  • Influencers discovery
  • Custom reports
Mention - one of the best social media monitoring tools

06 XPro (Tweetdeck)

Tweetdeck used to be a free tool developed by the Twitter company. 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 a great tool if you want to take a closer look at your Twitter presence. You will be able to spot trending topics 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, it’s impossible to measure customer sentiment or conduct social monitoring of any other platform.

Key features:

  • X (Twitter) monitoring
  • Post scheduling
  • Sending direct messages
XPro (Tweetdeck) - social media monitoring tool focusing on X (Twitter)

07 Awario

Awario is a media monitoring tool that tracks Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and Reddit. The tool track and analyze mentions of specified 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 be helpful in finding 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 tool. The number of monitored social media platforms is not impressive. It offers a geo-localization feature, but it doesn’t work well.

Key features:

  • Social media monitoring
  • Sentiment analysis
  • Email alerts
  • White-label reports
Awario - one of the best social media monitoring tools

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 social media content and grow your online 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, allowing you to engage with your audience easily.

Use the Brand24 tool to track social mentions!

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 support. Unfortunately, it monitors only 3 social media platforms.

Key features:

  • Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook monitoring
  • Social media publishing
  • Social media inbox
Agorapulse – advanced social media management and monitoring tool

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 all 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 will 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 to give you the most comprehensive data possible, including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Talkwalker is a costly tool. As far as the plans are concerned, the Basic one aimed at smaller brands or owned media-focused companies costs $9,600 yearly. The prices of the two remaining plans, Corporate and Enterprise, are discussed on request.

Key features:

  • Social media monitoring
  • Audience Insights
  • Sentiment
  • Customer feedback analysis
Talkwalker - one of the best social media monitoring tools

10 BrandMentions

BrandMnetions will help you monitor mentions across the web and social media, such as X (Twitter), Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit, Pinterest, and Quora. What’s disappointing, the tool doesn’t support TikTok.

With BrandMentions, you can conduct competitor monitoring 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 conversations. So you can discover whether the target audience talks about you in a positive or negative way. The tool also provides real time alerts every time you get new mentions or links.

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

Key features:

  • Brand monitoring
  • Alerts and notifications
  • Reputation management
  • Sentiment
BrandMentions - one of the best social media monitoring tools

11 Zoho Social

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

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

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

Track mentions across Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and more!

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 you with the most accurate set of data 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
Zoho Social - social media monitoring tool screenshot.

Zoho Social – social media monitoring tool.

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:

Unlinked mention of Adidas detected by the Brand24 tool

Secondly, you must set up a reporting panel for your research. Some of the metrics, for example, the volume of mentions, you can measure by yourself. Others, for instance, presence score or social media share of voice, are hard to track manually.

Thirdly, the big 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. 

To sum up, using dedicated tools makes social media marketers’ jobs much more easier.

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

I would say there are two main areas of features that are important to our users. The first group is focused more on making sure that your current business runs well and you can sleep peacefully. Things such as periodically sent reports that provide or alert messages that inform you when something unusual is happening are the most important in that matter. 

The second group is more advanced and brings in-depth knowledge about your brand, competition, or market trends that have an influence on your organization. We provide analysis that tells how effective your marketing and PR-related activities are, how much value you created, and how many people you probably reached. Comparison capabilities can show you how good you are compared to previous periods and competitors, which is crucial for any business. 

We also use AI-driven algorithms to find the most important topics and trends on the market to help you act upon them before others do. What is also important, you do not have to do it all by yourself – a lot of insights are generated automatically by our AI-powered insights and recommendations engine so that you can focus on planning how to react rather than finding out what is going on.

That is, of course, not everything, we have a number of other features that can serve many purposes – asking our success team can help you find how.” 

Karol Kłaczyński, Head of Product at Brand24

Why do brands use social media monitoring tools?

Take a 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 wider 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.

Use ​the Brand24 tool and discover the power of social media listening! 

Conclusion

While choosing a social media monitoring tool, I recommend you pick software that treads monitoring as its core feature. This ensures that you can access the widest number of mentioned sources and the most reliable data.

Key takeaways:

  • With Brand24, you can monitor the widest 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. 
  • To start monitoring using Hootsuite, you need to buy an add-on. 
  • Awario and Mention are basic tools 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!

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