Social listening tools

Perch by Hootsuite Social listening

Perch is Hootsuite's social listening and competitive benchmarking tool that tracks brand mentions, industry keywords, and hashtags across major networks in real time. It surfaces sentiment trends, share-of-voice against named competitors, and audience conversation themes in a visual dashboard, helping marketing teams spot emerging topics and measure how their brand's social presence compares with rivals over time.

Lumen by Talkwalker Social listening

Lumen (formerly Talkwalker) is an AI-driven consumer intelligence platform that scans social media, news, blogs, and forums to surface brand mentions, image recognition of logos, and emerging consumer trends. It combines listening with predictive analytics so teams can detect shifts in public sentiment early and back campaign decisions with data drawn from millions of online sources.

Brandwatch Social listening

Brandwatch is an enterprise social listening and consumer intelligence platform that analyzes billions of online conversations across social media, news, blogs, and forums. It gives brands sentiment analysis, image recognition, audience demographics, and crisis-alert monitoring, helping large marketing and research teams understand how their brand and competitors are discussed at scale.

Sprout Social Social listening

Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management platform combining publishing, scheduling, engagement, and listening tools in a single dashboard. Its listening module tracks brand keywords and competitor mentions, while built-in analytics report on engagement and audience growth, making it a common choice for teams that want management and monitoring in one subscription.

Meltwater Social listening

Meltwater is a media and social intelligence platform that monitors news outlets, blogs, broadcast, and social networks to track brand mentions, sentiment, and industry trends. It's built for PR and communications teams that need to measure media coverage alongside social conversation, with alerting and reporting tools designed for larger organizations.

Sprinklr Social listening

Sprinklr is a large-scale customer experience management suite covering social listening, publishing, customer care, and paid social under one platform. Its listening tools monitor millions of conversations for sentiment and trends, while unified case management routes mentions to support and marketing teams, making it suited to enterprises running listening and engagement together.

Brand24 Social listening

Brand24 is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords across social media, news, blogs, and forums in real time. It scores each mention's sentiment and reach, sends alerts for sudden spikes in conversation, and offers a simpler, budget-friendly dashboard aimed at small businesses and individual marketers rather than large enterprises.

BuzzSumo Social listening

BuzzSumo is a content research and monitoring tool that shows which articles, topics, and social posts get the most engagement, alongside brand and keyword mention tracking. Marketers use it to find popular content angles, identify influencers and journalists, and track competitor content performance across social channels and the web.

Keyhole Social listening

Keyhole is a real-time hashtag and social media analytics tool that tracks campaign hashtags, brand keywords, and influencer performance across networks. It reports reach, engagement, and sentiment for tracked terms, making it a common pick for agencies reporting on campaign and event hashtag performance to clients.

Google Alerts Social listening

Google Alerts is a free monitoring tool that emails notifications whenever new web content matches chosen keywords, brand names, or topics. It scans Google's search index rather than social platforms directly, making it a lightweight way for marketers to catch news mentions, competitor coverage, and industry keyword trends without a dedicated listening subscription.

Social Mention Social listening

Social Mention is a free real-time search and analysis tool that aggregates user-generated content mentioning a keyword or brand across blogs, social networks, bookmarking sites, and other channels. It reports basic metrics like strength, sentiment, passion, and reach, offering a quick, no-cost snapshot of online conversation volume around a search term.

YouScan Social listening

YouScan is an AI-powered social listening platform that tracks text and image mentions of a brand across social media, forums, and review sites. Its image recognition detects logos and products in photos even without a caption mention, and it groups conversations into topics with sentiment scoring, aimed at brands that want visual as well as text-based monitoring.