5 Best Free Tools for Social Listening you Need to Know!
Tools for Social listening are here to help you. Have you ever wondered what your brand needs in terms of insights of your target customer? What are they talking about? What are they speaking of?
Or in more detail: Are you a relevant topic in their conversations? Does your brand resonate in their minds as relatable and important? These questions may sound hectic and a burden but with social listening tools your work will be much easier.
Here in DiHunch, we will tell you how you can benefit from actively searching for information about your brand, your customers, and your competition. All of these can be achieved with a content strategy based on tools for social listening.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is an activity on how to be alert to what your customers are asking and what your competition is doing. In other words, a process of collecting data on social platforms. Especially, since your target customer is wired to social media, through Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and so on.
Those social media platforms are the fuel of social listening tools because it is where you will discover potential clients, future trends and topics, along with such an amount of information for your marketing strategy to rise and shine.
Why do you need Social Listening tools?
As we have said before, if you want your services or products to be in the spotlight, social media listening will help you optimize your resources by knowing the right audience and how to address them directly.
Social listening tools can be a helping hand, when it comes to structuring your content strategy. That’s why we want to give you three reasons why is a good ally to create a powerful content strategy:
- Helps you find and understand your audience and what type of content they would like.
- You can research the tone and voice of your community, and how to appeal to them.
- Last but not least, delineate your business goals, whether is brand awareness, engagement or more traffic to your website.
5 Social Listening tools for Free
Buffer has been in business for more than 10 years with over 75,000 customers and the number keeps increasing. They also praise themselves on being salary transparent and being supporters of diversity.
Buffer is one of the most known tools for social listening and social media with 3 tools that are interconnected. First, you have Publishing, which is about how to “Plan, collaborate, and publish thumb-stopping content that drives meaningful engagement and growth for your brand.” (Buffer, 2021). They work on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, having access to all of them from one dashboard.
The second tool for social listening is Analytics, the goal is to measure your social media performance by having reports and recommendations that will help you grow your reach, engagements and sales. Therefore, you can track your performance in any of the social medias mentioned before, while also having one dashboard featuring all of them.
Buzzsumo, as a social listening tool, has four core elements in their platforms. Those key elements are Discovery, Research, Influencers, and Monitoring.
The first one is content discovery, here you can have content ideas by browsing topics, trends and forums. The platform can show you what’s going down and what’s rising up, according to the Buzzsumo page. They have a Keyword Tool that can generate thousands of keywords. You can access monthly search volume, cost-per-click, search trends and full insights.
Moving on to the second feature, we have content research with both data-powered content so you don’t have to guess what is popular at the moment, and backlinks, where you can see your competitors’ sites and key domains in your niche.
What is a content strategy without influencers, right? Or you probably have a hard time searching for the right influencer for a campaign? With this third tool for social listening, in Buzzsumo, you can identify creators and influencers with an engaged audience and an authority on their subject. Whether it is Instagram, Twitter or the web, you can look at metrics of engagement, competitors analysis, and more.
Here is how it looks like:
The last tool on social listening is monitoring. Monitoring is the pre-step of social listening because you are looking and gathering the data from mentions, trends and updates as Buzzsumo does. Thus, you monitor your competitors, brand mentions, and industry updates. They even have Alerts as a way to ensure you are getting all the information about your business and other important actors.
As they say in their website, they can help brands and agencies to monitor the web, listen to their audience and manage social media, quite the statement, isn’t it?
Let’s start with their pricing, they have five different plans, including a free plan which is what this article is about. The free plan comes with monitored networks, ranging from news, forums and blogs websites to social media including only Instagram and Twitter. Moreover, you can have 1 alert and 1 user in this plan with 1,000 mentions and 3 social accounts. If you want to know more, here are all their prices and plans for you to consider as a tool for social listening.
Their features are Alerts, Monitor, Listen and Publish. In the first one you have access to advanced keyword search in a simplified way. This easy way is based on the capacity of selecting filters to narrow down, whether by source, country, or language.
Here is a sneak peek:
Monitor comes with knowing what is being said online about a brand or a product, so you will never miss a conversation on reviews or comments from your audience. Listen is their third tool for social listening with the idea of listening and learning from social media data, therefore it is based on an insights-driven strategy.
The last tool for social listening is Publish, as simple as its name, you can maximize your social media strategy by sharing relevant content for your community, while also building a digital presence on those social media. You can plan and manage posting on social media from one tool, having the perks of scheduling in advance and choosing when you want to publish them.
Agorapulse has a free trial that lasts 30 days that doesn’t require a credit card. Their achievements range from being the #1 social media management solution ranking, above the well-known Hootsuite and Sprout Social web platforms, in terms of social listening tools.
Agorapulse features are Unified Social Inbox, Intuitive Publishing, Social Listening, and Insightful Analytics. The first one is managing the chaos that your inbox can become. So, you can organize, manage, and assign the way you like it.
The second feature is about planning, collaborating, and scheduling content for all your social channels. Here you can optimize, organize, and collaborate with your team.
In a nutshell, this is what they offer as part of their tools:
As you can see, there is a lot you can do with this tool for your content management.
Moving on, for more specific tools for social listening we have their Social Listening. No brainy here for sure. As usual the goal here is to discover trends, having insights of your brand, and also of your competitors. The main objective is actively listening to social conversations to stay on top of your brand, your competition and the channels you are using. Then, you can quickly take action and respond via DMs, retweets, replies and more.
This social listening tool helps you focus on what’s important in Twitter, Youtube, Facebook and Instagram according to your parameters. You can use Boolean operators which are related to the words you are searching by using conjunctions such as AND, OR, and NOT. Thus, narrowing down the terms you are interested in. Other actions of this feature includes labelling important content, whether they are related to posts, competitors, and customer feedback.
The fourth and last one is Insightful Analytics. Agorapulse focuses on how you can create reports that are beautiful and actionable so you know what is really working or not. Their goal is that you can detect, track, and get recommendations about your next social content move with user behavior data.
Apart from pinpointing your content on the best platforms for its optimal performance, you can also detect major trends in your social media activity, as you can see in the image, while also measuring your team’s performance. How so? You can easily monitor who, when, how many replies have been made and comments to handle incoming brand conversations.
If you are hungry for more tools for social listening, visit their comparison of Hootsuite and Sprout in terms of what differentiates Agorapulse from the competition.
As you can see in the picture, they have a free demo for you to taste what they are up to regarding their services. Talkwalker highlights how they have already helped more than 2,000 companies with their listening and analytics tools, in order to protect their brands, measure their impact and obtain key consumer insights. All of this effort with the goal of driving purchase decisions.
They have 5 different products, which are Analytics, Quick search, Free tools, Paid social, and Social content rating®. We will focus on the free tools you can have access to.
Talkwalker’s main objective with these free tools for social listening is using monitoring tools to convert real-time customer conversations into what will be your next marketing campaign. How do they achieve that?
They have two main features for free. The first one is Talkwalker Alerts, and the second is Talkwalker’s free social search.
Talkwalker Alerts allows you to create an alert about any word that you write on their website, they even tell you they are free and an easy alternative to Google trends, quite the statement, isn’t it? You can even track the mentions of your brand and keywords across the internet. Their search tool’s main focus is Twitter, but they also incorporate blogs, forums, and websites.
Their second tool for social listening is their free social search. How does it work? You can enter your brand, a company or a hashtag, with the goal of monitoring your campaigns, brand mentions of you or your competition and hashtags for free.
When they say that an image worth a thousands words, here you have in a nutshell what you can do with their searching tool:
Little Gift for you
This is a list of the 10 top information you can access when you are doing, actively, social listening and using tools for social listening:
Final Thoughts
Tools for social listening are everywhere, some are free or are partially free and others are quite expensive. If you are just starting, getting advantages from anywhere you can is a must. But as you scalate in your business and traffic you might find it difficult to monitor and then practice social listening with just simple tools. Our advice is that you should always analyze how your business is growing, what are your objectives and your goals.
To be constantly upgrading and stepping your game is part of the business world and we know. That is why here in DiHunch we want to give you valuable content and convert that hunch into action.
Don’t hesitate to follow up and start a conversation.
