10 Free Social Media Listening & Monitoring Tools: What’s Being Said About Your Business?

Wondering what people are saying about your brand, product or service but in a more budget-friendly way? We got you covered with this free social media monitoring tools 2023 list!

There’s a lot of mention going around on social media. As monitoring every single comment or mention is pretty overwhelming for brands, social media monitoring tools have come into prominence. These tools can take the stress out of navigating between many platforms.

The rising demand for social media made a massive impact on the rate of use of social media marketing tools. Now, people want to discuss their experiences, give suggestions, and get feedback from other users. According to the survey, 47% of consumers reach out to brands on social media because they have a product or service question. Monitoring these contexts allows brands to identify their prospects. With the right social media monitoring strategy, brands can discover all conversations have been made about their businesses.

Since almost every social media management tool provides all-in-one services, some appeal to more specific needs than others. That’s why we started to see rapid growth in the number of social media monitoring, listening, reporting and analytics tools independently of the social media platforms.

No doubt that these tools, which serve different purposes, have been segmented as free, paid or open-source recently. So now, it is possible to explore the best digital marketing solutions for each unique request. In this blog post, we wanted to take a budget-friendly approach and cover the best free social media monitoring tools for you!

What are social media monitoring tools?

Social media monitoring is an algorithm-based process that tracks keywords, mentions, conversations, blogs, wikis, search engines, social media, and other online platforms. 

In broader words, a social media monitoring tool focuses on gathering and analyzing all conversations about your brand through social networks. Most businesses, especially eCommerce store owners use a monitoring tool to get to know what their businesses’ public perception is. Once they have an idea of their perception, they can take relevant actions to build strong relationships and raise awareness online. 

Why is social listening essential?

After understanding what social media monitoring tools are, let’s delve into why social listening is an indispensable component of any comprehensive digital strategy. Social listening involves actively tracking, analyzing, and responding to conversations about your brand, industry, or relevant topics across various social media channels. Unlike social media monitoring, which focuses on quantitative data, social listening aims to understand the qualitative aspects of online discussions. Here are some reasons why social listening is crucial:

• Customer Sentiment Understanding: Gain real-time insights into audience feelings about your brand, products, or services.
• Identifying Emerging Trends: Recognize industry trends early, before they go mainstream.
• Competitor Analysis: Monitor competitors’ online activities to pinpoint strengths and weaknesses.
• Feedback for Improvement: Utilize customer feedback on social platforms to identify areas for enhancement.
• Crisis Management: Act as an early warning system to detect and address potential crises promptly.
• Enhancing Marketing Strategies: Inform and optimize marketing strategies based on current consumer preferences.
• Building Community Engagement: Foster a sense of community and strengthen brand relationships through real-time engagement.

Even though there are a vast number of other benefits that social media listening tools can provide, some services might cost unreasonable amounts to take advantage of these benefits.

That’s why we have gathered the best free social media monitoring tools together to save your pocket!

Top 10 Free Social Media Monitoring & Listening Tools

Before we start, we would like to mention that numerous social media tracking tools in the market offer paid services with free-trial options. In this post, we have listed both free social listening tools and paid social media monitoring tools for you.

Scroll down and take a closer look at these free monitoring tools!

Iconosquare

The list starts with one of the best social media listening tools, Iconosquare. The social monitoring solution helps digital agencies and brands make data-driven decisions for each social media channel. Scheduling, advanced reporting and in-depth analytics features come with an easy-to-use dashboard. Iconosquare allows multi-profile management from one dashboard and increased efficiency.

Source: Iconosquare

Maximizing your social media performance can only be possible if each metric is analyzed well. So, Iconosquare offers a customizable analytics & reporting dashboard to support you along the decision-making process. Its intelligent scheduling system helps automate content publishing so it saves you time. Iconosquare sends powerful notifications on the best time to post, user tagging, geolocation, Instagram feed preview and much more.

Best for: Agencies and brands.

Pricing: Payments are accepted with Credit Cards such as Discover Card, American Express, Visa Card, MasterCard, PayPal, ApplePay and GooglePay.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a widely recognized social media management platform offering robust social listening capabilities. It allows users to monitor conversations across multiple social networks in real-time, track brand mentions, hashtags, and specific keywords. Its dashboard provides a comprehensive view of social media activity, enabling businesses to engage with their audience, respond to comments and feedback, and identify emerging trends.

Key features of Hootsuite’s listening tools include the ability to filter conversations by location, language, and sentiment, providing deeper insights into audience perception. Users can also create custom streams to focus on specific topics or conversations relevant to their brand. Hootsuite’s analytics and reporting features help users understand the impact of their social media efforts and refine their strategies based on the data gathered through social listening.

Best for: Businesses of all sizes, marketing teams, and agencies.
Pricing: Hootsuite offers a range of plans, including a Professional plan starting at $99 per month (billed annually) which includes essential listening features. More advanced listening and analytics capabilities are available in higher-tier plans. They often offer a free trial period.

Sendible

Sendible is a comprehensive social media management platform designed for agencies, marketers, and brand managers to amplify their brand stories. With a unified dashboard, users can efficiently manage major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. 

Notable features include content scheduling for consistent posting, real-time social listening tools for brand monitoring, and robust analytics to refine marketing strategies. The platform encourages collaboration through multiple-user access, simplifies content approval workflows and offers social CRM tools for effective relationship management with social media contacts. 

Sendible’s mobile accessibility and seamless integration with third-party apps like Google Analytics enhance its versatility, making it a powerful tool for optimizing engagement and monitoring brand presence effectively.

Best for: Agencies of all sizes.

Pricing: Sendible offers a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. You can cancel anytime, as it doesn’t require any contract.

Mention

Mention is mostly for agencies and brands who want to monitor their activities and online conversations. With its easy-to-use platform, you can keep track of what the audiences are saying about your business or service. As Mention gives you a real-time monitoring opportunity, you will always engage with the conversation. In the free plan, you will be able to get only 1 alert and 1,000 mentions but you can always upgrade your plan to get more details.

Thankfully, Mention offers reporting and analyzing capabilities to go deeper into your audience insights. The segmented reporting system allows you to monitor search terms by language, source or date. Another point that is worth mentioning is to be able to set alarms for each marketing campaign based on several keywords related to your business. 

Best for: Agencies, retail, and finance.

Pricing: Mention offers a 14-day free trial option to benefit all features. Once the trial is up, access to the platform will be limited. It doesn’t support PayPal payments. They accept credit cards and wire transfers for annual plans.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a widely used social media management platform offering a range of features, including social media listening capabilities. The social media tracking software helps you get valuable insights from social media data by monitoring mentions, keywords, and hashtags across social media platforms. This can help you learn more about your audience and track brand sentiment.

If you are an agency owner, the Team plan should be a good fit out of the other pricing options offered by Hootsuite. It will allow you to use the social media monitoring platform for up to 3 users and 20 social platforms.

Best for: Small and medium sized businesses, agencies, non-profits, real estate, education, healthcare, and legal.

Pricing: You’ll have a 30-day free trial once you decide to try out Hootsuite. They accept Visa, Mastercard, Discover credit cards, JCB, and PayPal.

XPro

In August 2023, TweetDeck was renamed XPro as part of Twitter’s rebrand to X. XPro is another handy free social listening tool for X accounts that offers a comprehensive dashboard to track users, hashtags, topics etc. You can divide the dashboard into parts for your niche audience and competitors. So, that makes it easier to see all the conversations happening around you. 

When you log in to your dashboard through your existing X account, you can tweet or mention someone within the platform. As XPro already lets you track real-time online conversations that have been made about you, what else would you like?

Best for: Marketers.

Pricing: From free to fee, XPro users now need to pay for their subscription monthly or manually to access the platform.

Exolyt

Exolyt is a powerful social listening tool specifically designed for TikTok. It goes beyond basic analytics and delves into the conversations happening around your brand, competitors, and industry on this popular platform. This social media scanner helps brands, agencies, and influencers to gain valuable insights from the platform.

Exolyt tunes into the whispers, shouts, and everything in between to give you a clear picture of what people are saying about you, your competitors, and anything else that matters in your TikTok world. It doesn’t just listen to comments on posts, but delves into video captions and even those fleeting mentions in the videos themselves. This gives you a 360-degree view of what’s being said. What is more, all wrapped in a free trial bow!

Best for: Agencies of all sizes, creators, analysts, marketers, and researchers.

Pricing: Exolyt supports all the major credit cards for payment. You can cancel your subscription at any time. 

BuzzSumo

In reality, BuzzSumo is known as a content marketing software. However, content creation is mostly related to finding the best topic or competitor that performs well, discovering the most popular content across all social networks becomes easier with getting help from the monitoring tools. Although BuzzSumo offers a 30-day free trial with limited access to the features, you can upgrade your package at any time.

BuzzSumo enables you to see the content when you mention your keyword in the first place. Also, if one of your competitors mentions the keyword too, you will get notified through the platform. Thanks to the BuzzSumo dashboard, it stores all activities as a daily, monthly or yearly report in case you need any time. 

Best for: Marketing agencies and marketers.

Pricing: BuzzSumo can only provide invoicing on Enterprise plans when paid yearly. All other plans must be paid for by credit or debit card.

Followerwonk

If we are creating the best free social media monitoring tools list, it cannot exist without mentioning Followerwonk. The monitoring platform lets you search Twitter bios to expand your network, analyse your audience preferences and optimize your followers to give what they like best. 

Followerwonk digs deeper into your Twitter audience data from who your followers are, what topics they mostly tweet and what time to where they are mostly based. The platform is mostly preferred for searching through Twitter bios as above-mentioned. The good thing is the data Followerwonk provides refreshes on a monthly basis. 

Best for: Agencies and marketers.

Pricing: Free-forever.

Google Alerts

If you are wondering which social media monitoring tool is the easiest to use, Google Alerts shines! You can simply enter the topics that you would like to monitor. Then, let Google scan through the web and report to you when and how many times it was mentioned.

You can even set alarms to know when your brand or product gets mentioned, so you can always be on track. Google Alerts also segments sources like blogs, news, and forums depending upon your requests mostly by language, location or date. 

Best for: Marketers, agencies, and brands.

Pricing: Free-forever.

Last Words

Free social media monitoring tools offer a valuable entry point for businesses of all sizes to gain insights into their online presence. From keyword trackers analyzing brand mentions to sentiment analysis tools gauging customer opinions, these diverse solutions provide a wealth of data and actionable intelligence. Ultimately, the best tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals. 

Hope we’ve encouraged you to explore the options presented in this article and identify the solution that best aligns with your unique requirements.