What is AI Social Listening? 10+ Tools You Need to Try in 2025

Imagine trying to listen to every single conversation happening in a crowded marketplace. Impossible, right?

That’s what it’s like to monitor what people say about your brand online.

According to research, social listening boosts campaign ROI by up to 25% by guiding better targeting and content.

Now imagine what if you had a super-smart assistant to listen to you?

That’s where AI social listening comes in.

It’s like having a personal detective who searches the internet for alerts of your brand, competitors, and industry.

This digital detective uncovers hidden gems like what people like (and dislike) about your products, what your competitors are up to, and what trends are taking off.

Hence, AI social listening can help you learn what people want and improve your business.

Now, let’s find out how this can help you win.

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What is AI Social Listening?

AI social listening tracks alerts of your brand, analyzes what people say, and gives you insights into their opinions and feelings.

It can predict what your customers want and how to reach them.

This tool listens in on millions of online conversations happening every second.

It means monitoring alerts, keywords, and feelings about your brand, industry, competitors, and important topics.

With AI social listening, you can discover new trends, identify potential crises, and measure the impact of your marketing campaigns.

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Why is AI Social Listening Important?

AI social listening offers a holistic view of what’s happening online.

It empowers you to make data-driven decisions, improve your brand strategy, and ultimately achieve your business goals.

Gone are the days of manually sifting through comments and tweets.

AI social listening takes the busywork out of understanding your audience and industry.

What reasons make it essential?

Here’s why it’s become an essential tool for businesses in 2024:

1. You get to find hidden gems: The first reason is that AI can analyze vast amounts of data to identify patterns and trends you might miss.It can reveal what people genuinely think about your brand, even if they haven’t directly mentioned you.
2. Stay Ahead of the Curve: Social media moves fast.AI can detect emerging trends and topics before they go mainstream, allowing you to adapt your marketing strategy and stay relevant.
3. Identify Brand Sentiment: Understanding public perception is crucial.AI can analyze conversation sentiment, letting you know if people love your new product or a recent campaign is underperforming.
4. Monitor Competitors: Who are your competitors talking to? What are they saying?AI social listening keeps you in the loop, allowing you to learn from their successes and avoid mistakes.
5. Measure Marketing Impact: Does your latest campaign relate to your audience?AI can track alerts and engagement around your campaigns, providing valuable data to measure their effectiveness.
6. Improve Customer Service: Social media is a goldmine for customer feedback.AI can help you identify unhappy customers and address their concerns promptly, leading to better customer service and improved brand loyalty.
7. Identify Influencers: Finding the right voices to promote your brand can be tricky.AI can pinpoint influential figures within your industry who can amplify your message and reach a wider audience.

Now, let’s figure out how this works!

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How AI Social Listening Works

So, how does this magic happen?

AI social listening tools can be broken down into three key steps:

1. Data Collection: The tool scrubs the internet clean for alerts of your brand, competitors, and relevant keywords.
   This includes social media platforms, forums, news articles, blogs, and even review sites.

2. Data Analysis: This is where AI comes in.
   The tool uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand the context and sentiment of the conversations.
   It can identify positive, negative, or neutral alerts and categorize topics and themes.

3. Insights Generation: Finally, the tool translates the raw data into actionable insights.
   You’ll receive reports and visualizations that help you understand what people are saying, where they’re saying it, and how to use that information.

Many AI social listening tools offer additional features like:

Alerts: Get notified in real-time if a sudden surge in alerts or a potential crisis is brewing.

Benchmarking: Compare your brand’s performance to your competitors and industry averages.

Reporting: Generate comprehensive reports with charts and graphs to share with your team and stakeholders.

14 Popular AI Social Listening Tools

Now that we know about the technicalities behind how AI social listening works, let’s look at the most popular options for social listening in 2024

1. Social Champ

   Social Champ is known for its user-friendly interface and affordability, making it an excellent choice for small businesses or those new to social listening.

   

   1. • Alerts Tracking: The tool monitors brand alerts across various social media platforms, blogs, forums, and news sites.
        This feature helps businesses stay updated on conversations related to their brand, products, or industry.
      • Sentiment Analysis: Social Champ’s listening analytics goes beyond simple keyword tracking.With the help of AI, it identifies and highlights the predominant emotions associated with a topic, providing valuable insights into public sentiment.
        This allows businesses to understand the emotional landscape surrounding their brand or industry.
      • Basic Reporting: The platform provides straightforward reports summarizing key metrics and insights, making it easy for businesses to understand the data and make informed decisions.It’s an excellent option for small businesses or those starting with social listening.

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2. Brand24
   

   

   Brand24 is a comprehensive tool that combines ease of use with powerful features, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes

   1. 1. • Sentiment Analysis: Brand24 offers sentiment analysis to help businesses understand public perception.
           This gives businesses more profound insights into the audience’s emotional responses.
         • Influencer Identification: This feature identifies influential figures discussing your brand, enabling businesses to engage with key opinion leaders and potential brand ambassadors.
         • Competitor Tracking: Brand24 allows users to track competitors’ alerts and analyze their social media presence, providing valuable insights into industry trends and competitive positioning.

3. Hootsuite

   Hootsuite is another powerful tool for businesses leveraging comprehensive social listening capabilities.

   

   1. 1. • Broad Coverage: Hootsuite monitors various sources, including social media, blogs, news sites, and forums, providing a holistic view of online conversations.
         • Advanced Analytics: Hootsuite Insights offers detailed analytics and reporting, including sentiment analysis, trend identification, and demographic insights.

   It includes advanced features like specific audience emotion analysis, detailed engagement metrics, and content performance tracking.

   This gives businesses a clear view of their social media impact and audience preferences.

4. Mention

   Mention is a versatile tool suitable for businesses of all sizes, offering real-time social media monitoring and analytics.

   

   • • • Real-Time Monitoring: Mention provides real-time alerts for brand alerts, enabling businesses to respond promptly to conversations.This allows businesses to track alerts and immediately gauge the emotional tone of the conversation, enabling more nuanced and timely responses.
       • Sentiment Analysis: Mention includes sentiment analysis to help businesses understand the tone and context of alerts.This enhanced detail level allows businesses to better understand their audience’s emotional reactions, facilitating more targeted and effective engagement strategies.
       • Influencer Scoring: Mention identifies influencers and measures their impact on brand conversations, helping businesses target key figures effectively.

5. Sprinklr

   Next is Sprinklr, an enterprise-grade solution known for its comprehensive social listening and management tools suite.

   

   • • • Comprehensive Social Listening: Sprinklr offers extensive monitoring across various platforms and languages, providing a global view of brand conversations.
       • Social Media Management: The tool integrates social listening with robust social media management capabilities, including scheduling, publishing, and engagement tools.
       • Customer Service Tools: Sprinklr also includes customer service features, allowing businesses to respond to customer inquiries and issues directly from the platform.These features enable businesses to provide more personalized and efficient customer service, ensuring timely and context-aware responses to customer concerns.

6. Awario

   Awario is a social listening tool for businesses seeking real-time insights and detailed analytics.

   

   • • • Real-Time Monitoring: With Awario, you can track brand alerts and conversations in real time across social media, blogs, news sites, and forums.
       • Sentiment Analysis: This tool includes sentiment analysis.
       • Boolean Search: This feature offers advanced search capabilities, enabling users to create complex queries and filter results to focus on the most relevant data.

7. Zoho Social

   Moving on, we have Zoho Social, a wide-ranging social media management and listening platform that integrates well with other Zoho products.

   

   • • • Multi-Channel Monitoring: Zoho Social monitors conversations across various social media channels, helping businesses track brand alerts and relevant keywords.
       • Analytics and Reporting: The platform provides detailed analytics and reporting, including sentiment analysis and engagement metrics.This helps businesses understand their social media performance.
       • Integration with Zoho Suite: Zoho Social integrates well with other Zoho products, such as CRM and marketing automation tools.
         It provides a unified approach to managing customer relationships and marketing efforts.

8. Talkwalker

   Talkwalker is a robust social listening and analytics platform known for its deep insights and comprehensive data coverage.

   

   • • • Multi-Channel Monitoring: Talkwalker monitors various channels, including social media, blogs, forums, and TV and radio broadcasts.
       • Visual Analytics: The platform excels in visual analytics, offering features like image recognition to track brand logos and visual content across the web.
       • Customizable Dashboards: It allows users to create customizable dashboards, making it easy to focus on the most relevant metrics and insights.

9. Digimind

   Digimind is a sophisticated platform that provides in-depth social listening and data visualization.

   

   • • • In-depth Social Listening: Digimind monitors various online sources, including social media, news, blogs, forums, and review sites.
       • Data Visualization: The tool excels in visualizing data through customizable dashboards and reports, making it easier to identify trends and patterns.
       • Advanced Reporting: Digimind offers detailed reports that can be customized to suit specific business needs. It provides actionable insights into market trends and consumer behavior.

10. Brandwatch

    Next is Brandwatch, a leading social listening platform that provides in-depth analytics and consumer insights.

    

    • • • Consumer Research: Brandwatch offers consumer research capabilities, helping businesses understand audience behavior, preferences, and trends.
        • AI-Powered Insights: The platform uses AI to analyze large volumes of data, providing actionable insights into market trends and consumer sentiment.
        • Collaboration Tools: Brandwatch includes collaboration features, enabling teams to share insights and develop strategies.

11. Auris

    Auris is designed to be an affordable and easy-to-use social listening tool suitable for small and medium-sized businesses.

    

    • • • User-Friendly Interface: The platform is designed simply, making it accessible even to those with limited technical expertise.
        • Affordable Pricing: Auris offers competitive pricing, making advanced social listening features accessible to a broader range of businesses.
        • Core Features: Auris includes essential features like sentiment analysis, alerts tracking, and basic reporting.

12. Meltwater

    Meltwater is a comprehensive media monitoring and social listening tool, ideal for businesses looking for detailed insights and media coverage.

    

    • • • Global Coverage: Meltwater monitors various media outlets, including online news, blogs, and social media, in multiple languages.
        • Sentiment and Trend Analysis: The platform provides sentiment and trend analysis, helping businesses understand the impact of media coverage and social conversations.
        • Competitor Benchmarking: Meltwater includes competitor benchmarking, allowing businesses to compare their performance with industry peers.

13. Buzzsumo

    While Buzzsumo is not exclusively a social listening tool, it provides valuable insights that can inform social media strategy.

    

    • • • Trending Topics: Buzzsumo helps businesses identify trending topics and popular content in their industry, which can inform content creation and marketing strategies.
        • Content Performance: The tool tracks content performance across various platforms, providing insights into what resonates with audiences.
        • Influencer Identification: Buzzsumo also identifies influencers and key opinion leaders, allowing businesses to engage with influential voices in their industry.

14. NetBase Quid

    The last one on the list is NetBase Quid, an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that offers detailed social listening and analytics.

    

    1. 1. • Deep Insights: NetBase Quid provides insights into consumer behavior, market trends, and competitive intelligence.
          • AI-Driven Analysis: The platform uses AI to analyze and categorize social media alerts, providing a nuanced understanding of sentiment and context.
          • Data Integration: It integrates with various data sources, including social media, news, and proprietary data, for a comprehensive analysis.

Conclusion

To conclude, AI social listening is no longer a luxury – it’s necessary for businesses of all sizes.

With the help of good social listening tools, you can make your work much easier and quicker than manually monitoring competitors.

You can gain valuable insights into your audience, industry, and competitors.

This empowers you to make informed decisions, build stronger customer relationships, and achieve sustainable growth.

Frequently Asked Questions