If you’ve read my blog before, then you might know that I’m a big proponent of social listening. Knowledge, after all, is one of the most powerful tools you can have – and knowledge is exactly what social listening brings to the table. Social listening helps you:

• Research your industry and your competitors
• Identify your target audience and learn relevant information about their online behaviour, interests, and needs
• Identify the top social influencers in your niche that you could potentially collaborate with
• Learn what type of content works and makes your audience take action

Plus, it allows you to stay on top of any mention of your brand online so that you can take action as needed.

So, whether you’re planning a content marketing strategy, thinking of collaborating with influencers, or want to improve your social media presence, then you need a good social listening tool to help you gather all of this data.

In this blog post, I’m going to share 5 social listening tools to consider for 2019:

5 Best social listening tools to consider for 2019

Awario

Awario is a pro social listening tool that allows you to monitor the entire web – from popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook to blogs, forums, and news sites, pretty much no stone is left unturned.

And because it has this huge scope, you can use it for a variety of reasons:

• For researching your industry and gaining important customer insights
• For discovering great opportunities to engage with prospective customers
• For identifying and researching top influencers
• For managing your brand reputation and engaging the people who are talking about you and your business

But one of my favourite things about Awario is its focus on social selling; every plan you get gives you access to a free extra module, Awario Leads. This social listening feature allows you to look up and generate social media leads automatically; you enter your product description (as many keywords as you want), your competitors, and any other relevant filters (negative keywords, languages, countries, sources, and the date ranges you prefer) in order to find social media posts from prospective leads:

The tool then pulls up any relevant social media updates, such as anyone looking for product or service recommendations (like your products or services!) or anyone who is complaining about the service or products they’re getting from your top competitors.

This gives you the perfect chance to jump into the conversation and engage some quality leads.

And of course, you can also use Awario for your other social listening needs. However, with Boolean search features, you can actually pin point your searches to the absolute smallest details in order to make sure you only get relevant mentions and not a plethora of irrelevant social media posts:

The cool thing about Boolean search features is that you’re not as limited as you are with a regular keyword search; for example, when you enter a keyword formed of multiple words, you can make sure that you’ll see every mention features those words, so long as they’re not separated by more than X words (the number is up to you). To give you a specific example, if you were offering social media marketing services, you might look up “social media marketing”; with Boolean search, you can specify whether you want to also find mentions of these keywords even if the words aren’t used together, like “I’m looking for a social media manager to help me with my marketing”.

As I mentioned before, you can use Awario to monitor the entire web, and not just top social networks; plus, another cool feature is that you can actually respond directly to any relevant mentions from within the Awario dashboard – below is an example of what that looks like:

Other useful features include:

• Setting up alerts and notifications for specific searches
• Analytics for any of the keywords you’re monitoring
• Identify social influencers for any keyword search
• Set up comparisons between 2 different keyword monitoring searches

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @awarioapp ” quote=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @awarioapp “]

Mention

Mention is a real-time media monitoring tool that allows you to monitor the entire web and social media in particular (over 1 billion sources in total, including forums and blogs), for your brand name, your competitors, or any other keywords you need to monitor.

You can use it to:

• Monitor your brand and/or your competitors for any relevant mention + respond to mentions directly from the Mention dashboard
• Discover top social influencers in your industry
• Get insights into your searches and generate reports

Like with Awario before, Mention lets you narrow down your searches with the same useful feature: Boolean search:

As I explained earlier when I talked about Awario, this type of search lets you truly narrow down your search so that you can make sure you’ll find any relevant mention. And while it might look a bit complicated seeing these screenshots if you’ve never used it, it’s actually quite easy to get the hang of once you’re clearer on the formulas.

Plus, it’s worth it; a regular monitoring search will likely miss a lot of relevant updates and posts that you’d want to know about that a good Boolean search would definitely find.

You can, of course, also set up alerts for your mentions so you immediately get a notification as soon as a relevant result pops up.

Other useful features include:

• Team collaboration features: add team members and assign them tasks/mentions
• Generate real-time reports and share them with clients/managers/etc.
• Identify social influencers and check their influencer scores

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @mention ” quote=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @mention “]

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is another pro social listening tool that not only allows you to set up complex monitoring searches online, but also provides in-depth analytics for any of your searches; this makes it a great option for those who want to:

• Research a specific industry in great detail
• Gain more customer insights about a specific target audience

In terms of its scope, Brandwatch allows you to monitor pretty much the entire web, like the other tools in this list, from social media to blogs, forums, and news publications. You can create in-depth searches and furthermore, you can even use automated rules to segment your data into different categories to make things easier for you, as below:

Brandwatch will pull up conversations and mentions in real time; you can then filter through these results using a combination of over 50 different filters which can come in very handy when you get a lot of results (like sentiment, location, languages, and so on).

An interesting feature from Brandwatch is that you can actually personalize the sentiment algorithm; meaning, you can select what keywords mean a negative sentiment, a neutral one, or a positive one:

As I’ve mentioned before, Brandwatch focus quite a bit on analytics; for every search you make, you’ll get very detailed insights including comparisons, sentiment, demographics, and more.

Other features include:

• Audience analytics to help you find relevant audiences and social influencers
• Discover the top performing content for your target audience
• Image detection and analysis that helps you find images mentioning your brand (which is so important in an age where visual content is overtaking social media)

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @brandwatch ” quote=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @brandwatch “]

Synthesio

Synthesio is a social listening tool built mostly for enterprise-level with several features for social listening, social intelligence, and in-depth audience insights.

The tool gathers data from all over the world (from 195 countries and in over 80 different languages) to help paint a clear picture of your social media presence and your audience.

However, as I mentioned before, this social listening software is better suited for larger enterprises, while the other tools in this list work well both for smaller businesses and large enterprises. That said, in the world of enterprise social listening, Synthesio is definitely one of the top leaders – and for good reason.

Since its built with enterprises in mind, you can collaborate with Synthesio to help you create your dashboards; but, of course, you can also set them up yourself if you prefer.

You can look up any brand name or keyword you want, as well as use Boolean search to further filter your results; plus, you can also add other filters, such as languages and countries.

Once you’ve set up your search, it’s all about the analytics and relevant audience insights:

• Measure a specific campaign’s performance
• Measure your brands’ health
• Create in-depth analyses of any target audience you want based on different filters, such as location, age, and their interests

• Use pre-built audience persona templates to put together better social media campaigns and deliver highly targeted content at the right moment

You also have access to the so-called Command Center; this is where you can track and benchmark your brand and track your KPIs in real time, as well as make important decisions about your social media strategy based on real data. For example, you can track your mentions in real time along with the impact of your content, as well as follow conversations and hashtags across your top social networks.

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @synthesio ” quote=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @synthesio “]

Sentione

Sentione is a social listening tool primarily; however, it also offers social media management features and even a very interesting customer service feature: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help handle your customer service

In terms of social listening though, Sentione allows you to monitor the entire web, including social media, news sites, blogs, and forums. Plus, you can look up as many keywords as you want, in any language – with no limit on the results you get.

Once you’ve set up your listening searches, the tool will analyse the results to uncover important insights, such as:

• Sentiment analysis for your keyword searches
• List of the top influencers and content creators in that niche
• A look at the top sources of mentions across the web

• Insights about your audience demographics
• Competitor analysis

And some other useful features worth mentioning:

• Integrate with your social channels to reach out directly to your audience
• Generate PDF reports and export data and charts
• Enterprise features, including multi-market dashboards, unlimited users, and a dedicated account manager

[click_to_tweet tweet=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @onesenti ” quote=”5 Best #social #listening #tools to consider for 2019 – @onesenti “]

Conclusion

Whatever your business size and your niche, social listening can help you improve your digital marketing strategies and grow your business in the process. Use social listening software to keep track of your mentions, analyse your competitors, gain in-depth customer insights, discover top social influencers to collaborate with, and much more.

Do you use social listening for your business? And if so, what is your favourite tool? Leave your comments below and please share if you enjoyed the post 🙂