Revised January 23, 2024
Revised January 12, 2022
Revised October 15, 2020
Revised January 9, 2019
Social media monitoring is vital for virtually every B2B or B2C brand. 58% of consumers follow brands on social media. 71% say they are likely to purchase an item based on social media referrals; in fact, consumers report that social media plays almost as big a role in purchasing decisions as does television.
However—96% of the people who discuss brands online do not follow those brands’ owned profiles. That means if you are only monitoring your brand’s social media accounts, you’re missing most of the social conversation about your company, products, and services.
The social media monitoring tools listed here do far more, enabling you to monitor brand mentions across social networks and online forums in real time. Several also provide features like competitive benchmarking, follower demographics, key influencer identification, sentiment analysis, campaign impact, and reporting.
No matter what you sell, people are talking about your brand online; do you know what they are saying? These tools can help you find out.
1) Socialbakers (now Emplifi)
Google Review Count: 345
Social media monitoring, analytics and stats for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Instagram, with benchmarking to measure your performance against peers, insights to optimize content, and reporting capabilities.
Sample review: “If you want to do general research on Facebook Stats use Socialbakers.” — RazorSocial (Tips)
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Tips)
2) Netvibes
Google Review Count: 298
Monitor the things you care about online—follow your social networks, be alerted to breaking news, or read articles on just the topics that interest you. View your calendar, to do list, emails and apps in one place.
Sample review: “Netvibes is a tool that even the biggest automation skeptics can get behind. With Netvibes, you can offer clients your very own proprietary, custom-branded social dashboard that automatically pulls in real-time results from all the social campaigns you’re running.” — PRDaily (Automote)
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: PR Daily (Automate)
3) Tagboard
Google Review Count: 290
Tagboard uses hashtags to search for and collect public social media within seconds of being posted to networks like Twitter and Facebook. Retweet, reply, comment, and like relevant content, right from your tagboard. Embed posts from all the major social networks in a single view, and automatically notify users when their content has been featured.
Sample review: “Find interesting content on ANY topic. Simply enter a hashtag and tagboard will pull in great content from across the web. It aggregates all of the recent posts from Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, and others that contain that specific hashtag. This real-time social search engine is an endless oasis of content ideas.” — BuzzBlogger
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: BuzzBlogger, Social Media Today
4) Crowdbooster (now Flow Club…?)
Google Review Count: 210
Get real-time visibility into your number of likes, comments, shares, retweets, replies, potential impressions, reach, followers, and more on Twitter and Facebook. Identify top followers and fans, see recommendations on when to post and who to engage, and pre-schedule posts.
Sample review: “Many small businesses focus only on Facebook and Twitter, so the ability to manage other platforms isn’t top of mind. Crowdbooster helps streamline your social media activity so can you pay attention to what matters most.While you can use it as a scheduling tool to post updates, the real advantage Crowdbooster comes in its ability to identify your most valuable and most active fans and followers so that you can interact with them directly. It also analyzes the data in order to recommend ideal posting times for both Facebook and Twitter.” — Visually
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Catherine Pham/SlideShare, iMedia Connection, Visually
5) Iconosquare
Google Review Count: 210
Sample review: “Become more familiar with your Instagram account and how it’s performing with key metrics offered by Iconosquare…The company says it helps improve audience engagement via sponsored photo and video contests, while allowing marketers to discover their total “likes,” the origination of responses, and how followers are finding them.” — MarketingLand
Pricing: $54, $174, or $990 per Instagram account per year
Showcase reviews: MarketingLand, Social Media Today, StoreYa Blog
6) BrandWatch
Google Review Count: 188
Social listening to gauge consumer opinion on any topic from across the social web with sentiment analysis, customer feedback, trend spotting, brand analytics, competitive benchmarking, influencer identification, and reputation management across blogs, forums, reviews, and top social networks.
Sample review: “Brandwatch is an enterprise level tool so is priced considerably higher than other tools on this list but it’s extremely powerful…One great way to use Brandwatch is to measure your ‘voice’ against your competitors – this allows you to compare your online presence to your competitors and see exactly why they’re getting so many mentions.” — Blogging Wizard
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard, MarketingLand, ViralBlog
7) Simply Measured (now part of Sprout Social)
Google Review Count: 181
Social media monitoring and analysis to measure the impact from campaigns and content, social attribution to help allocate budgets, and an analytics API to connect to dashboards and reporting tools.
Sample review: “Simply Measured is a really powerful social media analytics platform that provides an extensive range of really nicely designed reports that are available either online, or through Excel and Powerpoint. Their free reports are a great starting point and definitely worth using. The fact they support such a broad range of social media platforms, together with their high starting price point, means that it’s really suitable for the larger brands.” — RazorSocial (Analytics)
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Catherine Pham/SlideShare, Lilach Bullock, Kissmetrics, RazorSocial (Analytics), RazorSocial (World)
8) Curalate (now part of Bazaarvoice)
Google Review Count: 181
A multi-channel marketing platform primarily for B2C marketers. Source, manage, and distribute visual content, get visual insights in content/product/contributor performance, improve targeting with audience data, and integrate to other martech tools.
Sample review: “One of the downfalls of Instagram for brands is the lack of analytics and ROI of posts. Thanks to Curalate, you don’t have to spend your time calculating likes and comments by hand. The tool, which also works for Pinterest, uses image algorithms with data technology and reports insights of your photos. Curalate also has community management capabilities that allow you to discover uncovered conversations about your brand.” — Social Media Today
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: MarketingLand, Social Media Today
9) Mention
Google Review Count: 180
Real-time media monitoring for your brand, products, competitors, and/or keywords, across social media and the web. Track brand mentions, study competitors, discover new key influencers, and create reports.
Sample review: “Mention was developed as a user-friendly replacement for Google Alerts. They’re a textbook example of how to build a platform by doing one thing better than anyone else. As well as being an absolute joy to use, it captures so many more, ahem, ‘mentions’ online.” — Nikki Woods
Pricing: $29 or $99 per month; enterprise pricing by quote
Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard, BuzzBlogger, Nikki Woods, Rebekah Radice, Social Media Today, StoreYa Blog
10) Attentio
Google Review Count: 175
The Attentio Industry Dashboard provides industry insights wrapped up in a straightforward subscription access package. Log in daily to get updates on the key movements of your industry, with useful visualizations and actionable conclusions.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
11) quintly
Google Review Count: 174
quintly is an online social media analytics tool to help track, benchmark and optimize your social media performance. Benchmark your numbers against competitors to help optimize your social media marketing strategy. Get analytics for Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, Instagram, and blogs.
Sample review: “A nice, easy user interface is provided by Quintly and I particularly like the dashboard approach where you can customize your own widgets. It comes in at an attractive starting price for your social media analytics.” — RazorSocial (Analytics)
Pricing: $129, $299 pr $479 per month; enterprise pricing by quote
Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Analytics), ViralBlog
12) Visible Measures (now part of illumin)
Google Review Count: 170
A measurement platform for digital video advertising: measure and benchmark against your competition, track audience attention for social videos, and optimize campaigns in real time.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
13) Sysomos (now part of the-company-that-shall-not-be-named-here)
Google Review Count: 169
Identify key influencers, monitor brand mentions and conversations, curate and share engaging content, respond to your community, and measure the impact of campaigns.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
14) SharedCount
Google Review Count: 150
Track shares, likes, tweets, and more for any URL.
Sample review: “Want to see how your content (or anyone else’s, for that matter) has spread across the web? For sites that don’t display social media share button numbers, just paste the web address into SharedCount. Or use the multi-URL dashboard to enter lots of different web addressed and export a quick report.” — Buffer Social
Pricing: $40, $120, or $450 per month
Showcase reviews: Buffer Social, Lilach Bullock
15) CrowdTangle
Google Review Count: 147
Identify trending content, discover content and comments relevant to your brand, and compare your social media presence to competitors. Track keywords, get alerts for brand mentions, and find key influencers across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, Vine, and blogs.
Sample review: “CrowdTangle can show you where your social traffic comes from, and it allows you to track as many social accounts as you want–including those of competitors. The tool makes all of this information easy to digest, too, by sending customized alerts and digests based on e-mail preferences.” — Inc.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Inc.
16) Nuvi (now part of Reputation)
Google Review Count: 146
Monitor groups, topics, the sentiment surrounding the conversation, and the influence of each post. Track any keyword, phrase, hashtag, URL, or combination of these search terms and find the relevant posts across top channels including Twitter, Google+, Instagram and Facebook. Analyze results to make decisions. Schedule and publish content across social channels.
Sample review: “As an analytics tool, Nuvi can see what others cannot see in terms of Facebook conversations, including private and public posts. This means you can get insights into what people are saying behind the scenes that can help you to further shape your social media messages.” — Entrepreneur
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Entrepreneur
17) Brand24
Google Review Count: 144
Sample review: “Brand24 is a great monitoring tool for tracking mentions of your brand or any particular keywords. For a relatively low price it gives some of the bigger more expensive tools a run for their money. You can filter any results to view mentions on Facebook, Twitter, Website/Blogs, Forums etc.” — RazorSocial (World)
Pricing: $49, $99, or $399 per month
Showcase reviews: Entrepreneur, RazorSocial (World)
18) SocialClout
Google Review Count: 143
Apparently now defunct, SocialClout was a tool to monitor brand, product, topic and keyword conversations across Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Explore social media analytics, evaluate sentiment, and manage social campaigns across platforms.
Sample review: “Social Clout looks at where you can make significant improvements in engagement, campaigns and keywords. It also delivers reports on demographics and social-media results. All of these reports provide data on multiple social-media accounts to help you track the progress and be able to note the differences in responses across platforms.” — Entrepreneur
Pricing: free, $49, or $99 per month, with enterprise pricing by quote
Showcase reviews: Entrepreneur
19) Simplify360
Google Review Count: 141
Do real-time social media listening across social media platforms and major review sites; route cases into designated “workbaskets” for social customer service; and integrate with in-place CRM and marketing software.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
20) Cision
Google Review Count: 139
Monitor the social presence and engagement of your brand across traditional online media, blogs and social networks. Identify key influencers to help build awareness. Identify performance trends and insights with social media listening and interact with your brand’s community.
Sample review: “Cision has some smart solutions for brands. Cision is a global provider of PR software and services including media monitoring, media list building, press release distribution, and media analysis.” — ViralBlog
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Oktopost, ViralBlog
21) Geckoboard
Google Review Count: 139
Live TV dashboard software that enables you to build dashboards that show live progress towards goals; integrates with Google Analytics, Buffer, Facebook, MailChimp, HubSpot, mixpanel, Twitter, Trello, Salesforce.com and other data sources.
Sample review: “Geckoboard allows us to glance at our social stats and mentions any time, and in real time. It also allows the whole team to see what’s going on online, so there’s more transparency. By dedicating a monitor, television or iPhone as a port, you can have your social numbers available to your team at all times.” — RazorSocial (Software)
Pricing: $25, $149, or $599 per month
Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Software)
22) Social Report
Google Review Count: 103
Now defunct, Social Report provided analytics to track your content marketing performance across social channels, organized by customers or business, and compare results to competitors. Schedule new and repeat posts across social networks. Monitor mentions of keywords, trends, and brand/product terms.
Sample review: “What you’ll really love about this tool is that you can get a daily digest summarizing the most important activity from each of your connected accounts (pages, profiles and groups) via email…Social Report’s daily digests keep you up to date about most—if not all—of your social media activity, without you leaving your inbox!” — Social Media Examiner
Pricing: $49, $99, or $199 per month
Showcase reviews: MarketingLand, Social Media Examiner
23) WaveMetrix
Google Review Count: 102
Provides a combination of human analysis and technology to help consumer brands and entertainment companies analyze product/movie launches, track campaigns, and monitor social buzz across Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
24) Sotrender
Google Review Count: 78
Monitors Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube to provide competitive benchmarking, performance reporting, audience insights, and recommendations for optimization.
Sample review: “If you want a way to look at your social media analytics in a way that is nicely presented and accessible, SoTrender is a good, affordable option. It may not be as high performance a some, but it will give you a new perspective on your social media stats and help you to improve your performance and engagement.” — RazorSocial (Analytics)
Pricing: four levels from $15 to $450 per month
Showcase reviews: RazorSocial (Analytics)
25) SecureMySocial
Google Review Count: 68
It’s social media monitoring, but with a different twist: SecureMySocial addresses the business, legal, regulatory, physical, and human risks of social media by warning people in real-time if they post problematic material so as to ensure immediate removal. SecureMySocial can also auto-delete such posts if so authorized.
Sample review: “Tracking what is being said on social media goes beyond just looking after your audience. You need to consider what your employees are saying and doing that might reflect on the company. This tool provides a way to get an alert in real time if any social-media posts which others make violates a company policy or the law. ” — Entrepreneur
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: Entrepreneur
26) ShareTally (now part of WebUpon)
Google Review Count: 63
Enter any URL to see how many shares, tweets and likes it has garnered across the major social networks plus Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Delicious, and other sites.
Sample review: “Sharetally…is a series of scripts, one for each social media outlet it covers. You simply type any URL into the bar, and you instantly (well, almost instantly) get a tally of how many social shares that URL has earned. The only weak spot for this tool is that it no longer shows Twitter shares since Twitter cut everybody off. But you still get all the other big ones, including Facebook, Google Plus, Pinterest and LinkedIn.” — SmallBusinessNewz
Pricing: free
Showcase reviews: Blogging Wizard, BuzzBlogger, SmallBusinessNewz
27) Alianzo
Google Review Count: 56
Now defunct, Alianzo was a suite of three tools for analytics (market potential and market share, areas for improvement); rank (rankings of brands, people and media to measure social influence); and social raffle (contest to help grow social media following).
Sample review: “Alianzo is a blog catalog-like blogging community tool that lists and organizes blogs, Twitter and Facebook accounts by an impact/influence algorithm. Focused on European and Latin American (Spanish) speaking sites.” — ViralBlog
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Showcase reviews: ViralBlog
28) BrandMentions
Google Review Count: 48
Sample review: “BrandMentions notifies you of any mentions of your content/pages and if they’re not linked to you, you can ask webmasters to credit you for referencing your works.” — Robbie Richards
Pricing: $49/$79/$299 per month
Showcase reviews: Robbie Richards
29) Who Shared My Link
Google Review Count: 11
Enter any URL to find out how many times it was shared by journalists, or shared on LinkedIn, Facebook or Google+. If you have a Muck Rack account, you can see which journalists shared the link.
Sample review: “This site lets you find out how many times a URL was shared, as well as the journalists and bloggers who shared it.” — PR Daily (Digital)
Pricing: free
Showcase reviews: PR Daily (Digital)
More Tools
Union Metrics (now part of Cision)
Google Review Count: 168
A social marketing intelligence tool that lets you monitor mentions of keywords, brand/product names, and topics across social media platforms. Track campaign results and generate reports, analyze and benchmark against competitors, and discover new audiences and topics.
Pricing: $23/$79/$159 per month
Keyhole
Google Review Count: 146
Use hashtags, keywords, and company/product names to monitor almost anything online: campaign analytics, influencer marketing, brands and competitors, and events. Perform market research to gain insights into trends, brand mentions, and online conversations. Track hashtags and keywords across Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and media sites.
Pricing: $99/$299/$999 per month
Socialert
Google Review Count: 120
Hashtag tracking and analytics for Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Monitor brand mentions, amplify your brand reach, track competitors, stay current with industry topics, and generate reports that showcase the performance of a campaign to your company leadership or clients.
Pricing: $25/$50/$100/$200 per month
Digimind
Google Review Count: 109
Monitor brand mentions, reputation, and sentiment across unlimited social media accounts and media sites; add custom sources as needed. Identify top influencers, benchmark performance against competitors, and engage in social conversations through Hootsuite integration. Measure reach, and build personalized dashboards and custom reports.
Pricing: contact the vendor for quote
SHIELD
Google Review Count: 53
SHIELD provides a unified dashboard for all of your LinkedIn analytics and reporting. It enables agencies and enterprises to track and measure performance of multiple LinkedIn accounts and understand how content performs across different metrics, time periods and accounts. Features include content metrics, audience insights, and performance reports.
Pricing: $10/$30 per month for individuals; multi-account pricing by quote for enterprises and agencies
Oscilloskope
Google Review Count: 50
Now defunct, Oscilloskope tracked brand mentions and conversations across popular social networks and forums. It provided real-time insights about the awareness, usage, sentiment, and perception of your brand. Set up alerts, analyze competitors, and find influencers in your market space.
Pricing: $30/month; contact the vendor for enterprise pricing
Goodvidio
Google Review Count: 43
Another one bites the dust.
Pricing: contact vendor for quote
Notifier
Google Review Count: 39
Pricing: $11/$23/$79 per month
PMAlerts
Google Review Count: 30
Possibly the simplest social media monitoring tool around. Just create queries in the form of “When someone mentions _______ on _______, alert me via _______.” and you’ll receive alerts by email when that company or other search term is met. Supports a dozen of the most popular social networks.
Pricing: free or contact vendor
Fammio
Google Review Count: 29
And another one’s gone, another one’s gone…
Pricing: $29/$99/$159 per month
Commentify
Google Review Count: 19
The service monitors reviews and comments on social networks such as Instagram, as well as popular review platforms including TrustPilot and TripAdvisor. The results are automatically sent to instant messengers such as Telegram and the web version of the service, providing timely notifications of all reviews and comments.
Pricing: four levels from $17 to $189 per month
Showcase Reviews
Blogging Wizard
Buffer Social
BuzzBlogger
Catherine Pham/SlideShare
Lilach Bullock
Entrepreneur
iMedia Connection
Inc.
Kissmetrics
MarketingLand
Nikki Woods
Oktopost
PR Daily (Digital)
PR Daily (Automate)
RazorSocial (Analytics)
RazorSocial (Software)
RazorSocial (Tips)
RazorSocial (World)
Rebekah Radice
Robbie Richards
SmallBusinessNewz
Social Media Examiner
Social Media Today
StoreYa Blog
ViralBlog
Visually
This was the 26th post in the Best Online Business Tools series.
#1: Best Online Business Tools Series Kicks Off Today
#2: The 12 Best Competitive Intelligence and Benchmarking Tools
#3: The Nine Best Facebook Marketing Tools
#4: The 14 Best Content Planning and Research Tools
#5: The 23 Best Content Ideation Tools
#6: The 24 Best Online Writing Tools and Apps
#7: The Six Best Google+ Marketing Tools
#8: The Four Best Online Education Tools For Business Pros
#9: The 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools
#10: The 17 Best Keyword Research Tools for SEO and SEM
#11: The Seven Best File Sharing Tools
#12: The Five Best Infographic Creation Tools and Services
#13: The 28 Best Influencer Marketing Tools
#14: The Five Best Pinterest and Instagram Marketing Tools
#15: The 24 Best Visual Content Creation Tools
#16: The Six Best Online HR, Payroll, and Employee Scheduling Tools
#17: The 20 Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools
#18: The Six Best Screen Capture Tools
#19: The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools
#20: The Four Best Online Survey Tools
#21: The 26 Best All-in-One SEO Tool Suites
#22: The 32 Best Twitter Marketing Tools
#23: The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools
#24: The 24 Best Email Marketing Tools
#25: The 28 Best Web Design Tools
#26: The 29 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools