What is the best social listening tool?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to social listening. It depends on your budget, the size of your firm, and the use cases you have in mind. It is recommended that you carry out a social listening tools comparison taking into consideration the specific goals of your social listening program and the objectives of the teams who will be using the tool.

What are the benefits of social listening tools?

They can help you increase brand awareness and engagement on social channels, inspire content and product development, improve the performance of your social media and digital marketing campaigns while reducing ad spend, manage crises more efficiently and effectively, and provide more attentive support to your customers on social networks.

Why are UTM parameters valuable for your social listening program?

They are important for social listening because they allow you to track data about your campaigns—about website traffic, lead generation, and conversions. By enabling you to identify the social network and specific campaign sending traffic to your site, you can measure the performance and ROI of your social media marketing campaigns and find out which strategies are most effective.

Social listening tools comparison

For businesses that want to better understand their performance on social media—to improve their social media marketing strategies, reach more customers on digital platforms, and stay in tune with the changing social landscape—social listening tools are vital. But with the number of solutions crowding the market, it can be difficult to find the right tool for your needs. This is where a social listening tools comparison can help.

By encouraging to define and consider your objectives, needs, and priorities for your social listening program, a social listening tools comparison can help you filter out the products that don’t suit your needs and focus on the services that do.

Social listening tools comparison step one: Develop your strategy

Your first step in conducting a social listening tools comparison should be to develop a social listening strategy. Determine what it is that you want to understand and/or accomplish with your social listening program and decide on the platforms, geographic regions, and languages you want to monitor. Here is a shortlist of common use cases to consider as you develop your listening strategy:

Brand reputation and social media crisis management
Market and consumer trends research
Audience profiling and segmentation
Competitor analysis and competitive benchmarking
Product innovation and development
Marketing campaign analysis and content development
Influencer discovery and assessment

Social listening tools comparison step two: Determine the features you need

Once you’ve identified your objectives and determined how you will use social listening at your organization, you should be able to decide whether you need certain features or not. Here are some features that differ among social listening services to consider when carrying out your social listening tools comparison:

Data coverage. Does the tool offer coverage of the social data sources, locations, and languages you want to monitor? Do you require historical data?
Data analysis. Do you need image recognition technology? Automated sentiment analysis? Influencer analysis? Audience analysis? Trend analysis?
Data exporting. Do you want to integrate your social listening streams with your CRM data, BI systems, or other internal data streams?
Unique metrics and technology. Does the tool offer any proprietary metrics or technologies that will help you obtain meaningful insights faster?

Social monitoring vs. social listening tools comparison

For those new to social listening, you may also be looking at social media monitoring tools or considering a social media monitoring service. While there remains some confusion in the online discourse about the difference between the two types of solutions. It is the case that social listening tools in comparison to social monitoring offer more advanced data analytics capabilities. An industry leader like Synthesio, for example, leverages state-of-the-art data science algorithms to process and extract accurate insights from vast quantities of data. For global brands, a social listening platform can help you sift through large numbers of social mentions more efficiently and enable you to make sense of millions of conversations happening around the world using natural language processing technology and multi-lingual automated sentiment analysis.

Social media intelligence vs. social listening tools comparison

Synthesio’s Social Media Intelligence Suite gives brands comprehensive social listening capabilities, offering you access to the largest collection of social data sources in the industry. Synthesio also leverages AI for social media data analysis, making it simpler and easier for you to find and understand the conversations and trends that matter most to your business.

What makes this solution different from other social listening platforms is Synthesio’s ability to empower all your teams with actionable insights that they can use in their own workflows to grow your business. Synthesio encourages organizations to make the shift from social listening to social media intelligence by making social listening streams accessible and visible throughout the organization:

Distribute insights across departments and with your executives via BI-style reporting and use-case based Social Listening Dashboards
Share topline business KPIs with all internal stakeholders via Synthesio Beam, a real-time social media command center
Make sure that all your decision-makers are measuring their success against the same business objectives