For example, if your mentions grew by 20 percent one month, how would you know if that was actually good? Access to this data can be a good point of reference in measuring your success against competitors.

Or, suppose your sentiment analysis showed a negative trend – you could see how that compares to your competitors.

Finally, comparison reports can help you identify social media platforms or websites that your competitors get a lot of mentions from; chances are, those are also good for your brand.

The reporting includes unlimited historical data, meaning you can go back in time as far as the data allows. There’s also a white-labeling option available to enterprise users, so you can generate your own branded reports.

Pricing

Awario’s plans are catered to the individual up to enterprise or agencies on a monthly or yearly basis. The yearly plans save you the equivalent of two months worth of dues. You can sign up for a free trial to start.

Starter[1] Pro Enterprise $29 / month $89 / month $299 / month $290 / annually $890 / annually $2,990 / annually

2. Mention

Mention is another useful social listening tool mostly targeted to enterprises and agencies, though it has plans for the individual and small business.

Mention has a unique set of features, including:

Handy influencer dashboard.

Customizable API.

Useful insights center.

Influencer Dashboard

Mention’s influencer dashboard gives you multiple ways to connect with the important influencer segment.

Influencer scores can tell you just how significant someone is within the segment. You can monitor not only influencers, but also find brand advocates.

Important to note is that influencer data is mostly based on influencers who mention your brand, competitors or industry – so based on the mention alerts you set up.

There is an option to run real-time searches for influencers, but it’s limited and only works for Twitter and Instagram at the time of writing.

You can set up alerts to find the most influential websites in your sector as well, and build that into your marketing strategy.

API

For companies that want to build a more customizable social experience, Mention’s API can do just that. The API allows you to do things like:

Build your own monitoring tool using Mention’s crawler.

Integrate more data into your existing dashboards or reports.

Add new features to a product you already have.

Insights Center

The insights center provides rich data visualization in different formats including line charts, pie charts, bar graphs and more for easy reporting to company stakeholders.

You can drill down into the charts by clicking on a point to see individual mentions on social, and take actions accordingly.

Pricing

Mention has monthly and yearly plans. The solo plan is very basic; its “company” plan unlocks the most features. If you buy the yearly subscription, you save the equivalent of two months of dues.

Solo Starter Company $29 / month $99 / month Custom $25 / month for yearly plan $83 / month for yearly plan Custom

3. Talkwalker

Talkwalker is a platform that’s best for big brands and agencies. This tool is a good fit if you’re not looking for a daily feed of mentions, but instead are interested in the analytics and trends behind the conversations in your industry.

Its social analytics is its most powerful feature.

From tracking campaign performance to competitive benchmarking, the analytics follows online, social, print, and even TV and radio content in 187 languages going back two years in historical data.

Here are three appealing features:

Insightful demographics.

Content themes identification.

Expansive social media coverage.

Demographics

Talkwalker’s demographics present data about your target audience by age, occupation, interests, and much more.

Themes

The themes feature lets you discover popular themes visually, such as hashtags, emojis, demographics, sentiment, and so on.

“Top themes” shows emerging themes and themes that are decreasing in popularity compared to the previous time period.

Social Media Coverage

Talkwalker may be the leader when it comes to the platforms it monitors, which include major platforms and niche sites like Flickr, Foursquare, SoundCloud Twitch, Pinterest, and other local social media sites such as Vkontakte.

Pricing

Talkwalker offers three levels of pricing plans:

Basic Corporate Enterprise $9,600 / yearly Contact for quote Contact for quote

(They also offer a package of free social media tools you can find on their site.)

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a powerful social listening analytics platform that’s a great fit for marketing analysts at big brands and agencies.

Here are some of the interesting things Brandwatch offers:

Deep audience insights.

Powerful analytics.

Beautiful data visualization.

Audiences

The Audiences product may be the most powerful audience analysis on this list. In a nutshell, it lets you find and analyze the audiences that matter most to your brand.

You can identify them by searching audience demographics, interests, location, occupation, and much more.

You can also use the data to find out how your audience compares with that of your competitors to uncover opportunities for more targeted marketing.

Analytics

The Analytics product is a strong point for Brandwatch. It monitors everything from social sites to review sites and more with the ability to add custom monitoring as well.

The data is in real time, though you can also look at year-over-year trends. You have access to more than 50 filters to slice and dice the information, but you can also create your own rules to segment data and even customize the sentiment algorithms.

Data Visualization

Brandwatch’s Vizia product allows you to visualize real-time data in lots of intriguing formats. One of the nice features of Vizia is that you can integrate data from other sources as well.

Pricing

Brandwatch offers three levels of pricing:

Pro Enterprise M Enterprise Q $800 / month Contact for quote Contact for quote

5. BuzzSumo

As a subsidiary of Brandwatch, BuzzSumo operates a little differently than the other social listening tools on this list.

BuzzSumo’s main strength is to help users identify the most popular content across social mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Reddit. Individuals up to the enterprise could leverage BuzzSumo’s data.

There are several ways to analyze content on BuzzSumo, here are a few features worth noting:

Powerful search parameters and filters.

Helpful social backlinks data.

Convenient influencer data.

Search Functions

You can analyze content by filters such as:

Date

Country

Language

Domain

Content type

Word count

Publisher size

You can do a lot more content discovery research once you’re in the app.

Social Backlinks

Another neat feature is the social backlinks tool.

This allows you to see how many backlinks a piece of content has; along with shares, this is another indicator of the popularity of a piece of content.

Influencer Data

BuzzSumo’s influencer data is real time. Quickly search for influencers in any topic, area, or location.

Analyze them by filters such as reach, authority, influence, and engagement. Find out the topics and domains the influencers share most and build this into your content strategy.

Pricing

You can try the app in your browser until you reach your daily limit of searches. You’ll then be asked to sign up for the free trial.

BuzzSumo offers a solid free version with limited access to content analysis and influencer search tools that you can accomplish a lot with.

Four levels of plans exist if you want to upgrade from the free version. Buying the yearly plan saves you 20 percent:

Pro Plus Large Enterprise $99 / month $179 / month $299 / month $499+ / month $948 / year $1,668 / year $2,868 / year Custom / year

6. Hootsuite

From Fortune 1000s to small businesses, a lot of companies have traditionally used Hootsuite as a social media management platform.

However, it does have a social media monitoring and listening aspect. Most notably:

Powerful insights.

Valuable monitoring dashboard.

Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite acquired uberVu in 2014 and with that, expanded its social media listening capabilities. Hootsuite Insights brings those listening capabilities together to:

Gauge sentiment by specific audience segments.

Offer real-time data so the dashboard is always up to date without running reports.

Provide alerts that let you know of any unusual spikes in sentiment or something else (useful for risk management).

Pricing for this product is custom; contact Hootsuite for more information if you’re interested.

Monitoring Dashboard

Within its traditional social media management platform, the monitoring dashboard offers features such as:

Integrations with monitoring apps, including Brandwatch.

Filters you can use to find social conversations by keyword, hashtags, and more.

Assigning posts and comments to specific team members to handle.

Pricing

Hootsuite offers a free account that gives a limited version of many of its capabilities. For those who want more, its plans include four levels:

Professional Team Business Enterprise $29 / month $129 / month $599 / month Custom

The “professional” and “team” levels offer a free 30-day trial.

7. Social Mention

Last but not least is Social Mention, which acts like a search engine for social.

Social Mention monitors more than 80 social media properties, including Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, YouTube, Digg, and more. Any type of business can benefit from the data Social Mention offers.

You can filter search results by a number of different attributes, like dates and time, sources, results per page, and languages. Its analytics covers things like:

Top users

Top keywords

Top hashtags

Sentiment

It also displays its own scoring method, including:

Strength: The likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media.

The likelihood that your brand is being discussed in social media. Sentiment: The ratio of mentions that is generally positive to those that are generally negative.

The ratio of mentions that is generally positive to those that are generally negative. Passion: The likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly.

The likelihood that individuals talking about your brand will do so repeatedly. Reach: A measure of the range of influence.

Pricing

This is a 100 percent free tool.

How Will Your Brand Show Up in 2019?

The new year will bring more social data and more opportunities to listen and connect with your target audience.

Without access to the information that social listening tools can provide, you’re shooting in the dark when it comes to your social engagement strategy.

So, ask yourself: What type of brand will we be on social media in 2019?

Will you listen and engage in two-way conversations, or be the brand people ignore?