Best Social Listening Tools in 2025

TL;DR:

• Social listening involves tracking digital conversations to understand what people are saying about your brand, industry, or specific topics.
• Types of social listening include brand mentions monitoring, industry monitoring, and competitive monitoring.
• Tools like Letterdrop, Brandwatch, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Talkwalker, BuzzSumo, and Mention offer features for social listening.
• When acting on results from social monitoring, focus on building credibility by being helpful and genuine before promoting your product.

If you're looking to increase your inbound pipeline, it's important that you're aware of:

• what your ICP is saying about you
• what posts and problems they're engaging with online
• which competitors or relevant influencers they're engaging with

Since only about 5% of folks are in-market to buy at any given time, it's important to keep track of what your ICP are doing and to gauge whether they're warm enough to pitch to.

This happens through social listening (or social monitoring), and for this guide, we'll be dropping some top-notch tools to go for.

How to Do Social Monitoring Natively on Google

Here’s how you can monitor the web for relevant insights, natively:

1. Use Google Search & Alerts

• Search specific keywords or brand names to find public posts, news, or blogs.
• Set up Google Alerts to notify you when new content is indexed mentioning those keywords.

2. Use Advanced Search Operators

• Search like a pro with operators like intitle:, site:, or “exact match” to zero in on relevant discussions or mentions.

3. Monitor SERP Trends

• Use tools like Exploding Topics or Glimpse to track growing interest in particular search terms over time.

Top 7 Best Tools for Social Listening

There are tools out there that can give you a more comprehensive overview of what your ICP are saying and engaging with online.

1. Letterdrop

G2 Review Score: 4.7/5

Letterdrop offers social listening and focuses on identifying in-market accounts so that you're always going after warm leads.

It does this by scanning public conversations via Google (using sources like Google Custom Search and Perplexity).

Key Features:

• AI-Powered Public Listening: Tracks conversations on the web, no scraping needed
• Custom Keyword & People Tracking: Enter problems, competitors, or signals you care about
• Intent Filtering: AI reads thousands of posts and flags only high-intent ones
• Auto-Drafted Outbound: Personalized messaging generated from each observation
• Direct Slack & Clay Integration: Surface leads where your team works

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2. Brandwatch

G2 Review Score: 4.3/5

Brandwatch is designed to provide in-depth social listening across multiple platforms, including Facebook and Reddit. It’s well-suited for large enterprises.

Key Features:

• Unlimited Search Queries: You can perform unlimited searches, giving you access to an extensive amount of data across different sources.
• Boolean Operators: Use advanced search operators to refine your results, helping you pinpoint exactly what you’re looking for.
• Sentiment Analysis: This feature categorizes conversations as positive, negative, or neutral, helping you understand public sentiment about your brand.
• Historical Data: Brandwatch offers a year’s worth of historical data, which helps you track trends and spot opportunities over time.
• AI Smart Alerts: The tool automatically alerts you when there are spikes or drops in mentions, allowing you to react in real-time.

3. Hootsuite

G2 Review Score: 4.1/5

Hootsuite is primarily known for social media management but also provides social listening capabilities.

Key Features:

• Streams for Keyword Monitoring: Streams allow you to track specific keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across platforms like Facebook and Instagram in real-time.
• Sentiment Analysis: Similar to other tools, this feature helps you gauge how audiences feel about your brand on a scale of negative to positive.

4. Sprout Social

G2 Review Score: 4.4/5

Sprout Social is especially useful for tracking brand mentions and analyzing audience engagement in real-time.

Key Features:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Track brand mentions and relevant conversations as they happen, so you can respond quickly.
• Sentiment Analysis: Evaluate the tone of online conversations about your brand, helping you understand public perception.
• Competitor Analysis: This feature allows you to monitor competitors’ activities and spot opportunities to improve your strategies.
• Influencer Identification: Identify key influencers within your industry who are discussing topics related to your brand.

5. Talkwalker

G2 Review Score: 4.2/5

Talkwalker is a powerful tool for social listening that goes beyond traditional platforms by including visual recognition and other advanced analytics.

Key Features:

• Trend and Sentiment Analysis: Monitor both the latest trends and public sentiment to stay ahead of industry shifts.
• Visual Recognition: Talkwalker can identify brand logos and images in social media posts, adding a unique layer to brand monitoring.
• Influencer Identification: This tool helps you discover and engage with influencers that are relevant to your brand.
• Competitive Benchmarking: Track and compare your brand’s performance against competitors across various platforms.

6. BuzzSumo

G2 Review Score: 4.6/5

BuzzSumo focuses on content discovery and social listening, helping businesses track trending topics, competitors, and influencers.

Key Features:

• Content Performance Tracking: Monitor the performance of specific content pieces across social media to understand what resonates with audiences.
• Influencer Identification: Find and engage with key influencers within your industry.
• Trend Monitoring: Stay up-to-date on trending topics to ensure your brand is part of relevant conversations.
• Competitive Analysis: Track what content is performing well for your competitors.

7. Mention

G2 Review Score: 4.4/5

Much like the other tools above, Mention can help track keywords and sentiment: it's best suited to smaller companies.

Key Features:

• Real-Time Monitoring: Track brand mentions across social media and the wider web as they happen, ensuring timely responses.
• Custom Alerts: Set up notifications for when your brand or specific keywords are mentioned, so you’re always in the loop.
• Sentiment Analysis: Understand the tone of mentions to see how your brand is perceived by the public.
• Trend Tracking: Stay informed about industry trends by monitoring relevant conversations and content.