Why Social Listening Matters in 2021 and 5 Best Tools to Make Your Life Easier

Social listening is the perfect way for a business to keep its finger on the pulse of what its customers are saying about the industry. In 2020, over 3.6 billion people were using social media worldwide, a trend that is looking to continue through 2021 and beyond.

Why Is Social Listening Important?

No matter the business, it’s impossible to manage your customers/userbase without using social media. Any successful modern business will run a variety of social media pages, with the most common being Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

Social listening is important as it allows you to:

• Efficiently engage with customers.
• Solve problems proactively.
• Research keywords.
• Drive sales.
• Perform competitor analysis.
• Gain industry insight.

Lots of the above are time-consuming endeavors. To expedite the process, there’s a wide variety of tools available that help businesses derive useful data from their social media platforms. We’ve gathered the 5 best tools to help with social media listening.

5 Best Tools to Make Your Life Easier

1. Awario

Awario is a great tool for businesses of all sizes. With affordable plans starting from £24 per month, Awario allows for smaller businesses to get started with their social listening plans.

It features a variety of tools that help you monitor mentions of brands, competition, your industry, or complex Boolean queries (algebraic expressions that help users narrow down searches to unique parameters).

The latter can be used to identify plagiarism in your work. This works by searching for word-for-word copies from accounts other than your own. It can also identify mentions of your brand that are unlinked, allowing you to form relationships with those talking about you (but not giving you the super-valuable link!)

In addition to the above, Awario also offers a free social selling addon that uses predictive insights to locate users who are looking for products just like yours.

Pricing

Awario has three pricing models: the £24/month Starter package, £74/month Pro package and the £249/month Enterprise package, helping cater to most businesses.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a powerful, multi-faceted tool that provides an all-in-one social media management platform.

With features offering a host of listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis functionality, Sprout Social provides a comprehensive social media management platform that’s suitable for a variety of businesses.

Sprout Social prides itself on being able to streamline social media processes by allowing the user to plan, create, manage and deliver social content and campaigns across the entire team, before using powerful analysis tools to glean what you need.

Sprout Social offers a powerful, multi-faceted tool that provides an all-in-one social media management platform.

With features offering a host of listening, publishing, engagement, and analysis functionality, Sprout Social provides a comprehensive social media management platform that’s suitable for a variety of businesses.

Sprout Social prides itself on being able to streamline social media processes by allowing the user to plan, create, manage and deliver social content and campaigns across the entire team, before using powerful analysis tools to glean what you need.
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Pricing

Sprout Social offers a free 30-day trial to anyone considering using their services. Following from that, packages come in three shapes: Standard, Professional, and Advance, costing £70, £106 and £177/month respectively.

3. Falcon.io

Falcon.io is an all-in-one social media management and customer experience platform for established medium-to-large companies.

Falcon.io has all the features that you want social media listening tools to have, with engagement, scheduling, social listening, publishing, analysis, and advertising tools included.

This platform distinguishes itself by using a single dashboard to facilitate your social media requirements. Ease-of-use is key to Falcon.io, allowing users to find everything they need on a single, simple page.

Pricing

There are two pricing options for Falcon.io: ‘Essentials’ and ‘Full Suite’.

The ‘Essentials’ package comes in at £92/month and offers a more basic service for single users and small teams. There’s also a 14-day trial of this service if you want to get a taste before buying.

The ‘Full Suite’ package is the whole hog and features a plethora of features for larger companies. Pricing is done on a case-by-case basis for this package and requires a demo to be held to proceed.

4. Mention

A highly competitive and powerful solution, Mention combines social monitoring, analytics and competitor espionage into one svelte package.

With three key principles: Monitor, Listen and Publish, Mention aims to improve the social media experience for businesses/entrepreneurs.

Mention allows users to input competitor lists. This allows you to monitor your competitors, measure your share of voice and get insights on what social media content is working for them. This feature accompanies all the usual social crawling and management features that other options provide.

Pricing

One of the most cost-flexible options on this list, Mention has pricing options that suit anyone, from individual entrepreneurs to large multi-national corporations. They’ve even got a limited free plan that allows a single user to experiment and learn the platform.

For annual subscriptions, the prices are as follows:

Solo – £18/month

Pro – £59/month

ProPlus – £119/month

Company –  £320+/month

5. Brand24

Perhaps the most comprehensive social listening tool available on the market, Brand24 brings together all the most useful features into one easy-to-use platform.

Using their automated sentiment analysis functions, businesses can use advanced sentiment detection to separate positive, negative, and neutral mentions, allowing you to easily trawl through your social media interactions. Brand24 is one of the best tools on the market for a complete experience.
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Pricing

Brand24 offers three tiers: ‘Plus’, ‘Premium’ and ‘Max’, coming in at £35/month, £70/month and £142/month, respectively. Slightly pricier than some of their competitors, Brand24 might be prohibitively expensive for individuals or start-ups. As with many tools, they offer a 14-day free trial for you to get a taste before you commit.

What Businesses Benefit from Social Listening?

The short answer? Every business! In 2021, it’s more important than ever to have a developed, complete social media strategy in place. Managing multiple social media platforms can be incredibly difficult without the correct tools to facilitate efficient analysis.

Investing money into social listening tools will prove profitable in the long run, as you can find the data you need to get ahead of your competition.