- Research your industry and your competitors
- Identify your target audience and learn relevant information about their online behaviour, interests, and needs
- Identify the top social influencers in your niche that you could potentially collaborate with
- Learn what type of content works and makes your audience take action
5 Best social listening tools to consider for 2019
Awario
Awario is a pro social listening tool that allows you to monitor the entire web – from popular social networks like Twitter and Facebook to blogs, forums, and news sites, pretty much no stone is left unturned. And because it has this huge scope, you can use it for a variety of reasons:- For researching your industry and gaining important customer insights
- For discovering great opportunities to engage with prospective customers
- For identifying and researching top influencers
- For managing your brand reputation and engaging the people who are talking about you and your business
The tool then pulls up any relevant social media updates, such as anyone looking for product or service recommendations (like your products or services!) or anyone who is complaining about the service or products they’re getting from your top competitors.
This gives you the perfect chance to jump into the conversation and engage some quality leads.
And of course, you can also use Awario for your other social listening needs. However, with Boolean search features, you can actually pin point your searches to the absolute smallest details in order to make sure you only get relevant mentions and not a plethora of irrelevant social media posts:
The cool thing about Boolean search features is that you’re not as limited as you are with a regular keyword search; for example, when you enter a keyword formed of multiple words, you can make sure that you’ll see every mention features those words, so long as they’re not separated by more than X words (the number is up to you). To give you a specific example, if you were offering social media marketing services, you might look up “social media marketing”; with Boolean search, you can specify whether you want to also find mentions of these keywords even if the words aren’t used together, like “I’m looking for a social media manager to help me with my marketing”.
As I mentioned before, you can use Awario to monitor the entire web, and not just top social networks; plus, another cool feature is that you can actually respond directly to any relevant mentions from within the Awario dashboard – below is an example of what that looks like:
Other useful features include:
- Setting up alerts and notifications for specific searches
- Analytics for any of the keywords you’re monitoring
- Identify social influencers for any keyword search
- Set up comparisons between 2 different keyword monitoring searches
Mention
Mention is a real-time media monitoring tool that allows you to monitor the entire web and social media in particular (over 1 billion sources in total, including forums and blogs), for your brand name, your competitors, or any other keywords you need to monitor. You can use it to:- Monitor your brand and/or your competitors for any relevant mention + respond to mentions directly from the Mention dashboard
- Discover top social influencers in your industry
- Get insights into your searches and generate reports
As I explained earlier when I talked about Awario, this type of search lets you truly narrow down your search so that you can make sure you’ll find any relevant mention. And while it might look a bit complicated seeing these screenshots if you’ve never used it, it’s actually quite easy to get the hang of once you’re clearer on the formulas.
Plus, it’s worth it; a regular monitoring search will likely miss a lot of relevant updates and posts that you’d want to know about that a good Boolean search would definitely find.
You can, of course, also set up alerts for your mentions so you immediately get a notification as soon as a relevant result pops up.
Other useful features include:
- Team collaboration features: add team members and assign them tasks/mentions
- Generate real-time reports and share them with clients/managers/etc.
- Identify social influencers and check their influencer scores
Brandwatch
Brandwatch is another pro social listening tool that not only allows you to set up complex monitoring searches online, but also provides in-depth analytics for any of your searches; this makes it a great option for those who want to:- Research a specific industry in great detail
- Gain more customer insights about a specific target audience
Brandwatch will pull up conversations and mentions in real time; you can then filter through these results using a combination of over 50 different filters which can come in very handy when you get a lot of results (like sentiment, location, languages, and so on).
An interesting feature from Brandwatch is that you can actually personalize the sentiment algorithm; meaning, you can select what keywords mean a negative sentiment, a neutral one, or a positive one:
As I’ve mentioned before, Brandwatch focus quite a bit on analytics; for every search you make, you’ll get very detailed insights including comparisons, sentiment, demographics, and more.
Other features include:
- Audience analytics to help you find relevant audiences and social influencers
- Discover the top performing content for your target audience
- Image detection and analysis that helps you find images mentioning your brand (which is so important in an age where visual content is overtaking social media)
Synthesio
Synthesio is a social listening tool built mostly for enterprise-level with several features for social listening, social intelligence, and in-depth audience insights. The tool gathers data from all over the world (from 195 countries and in over 80 different languages) to help paint a clear picture of your social media presence and your audience. However, as I mentioned before, this social listening software is better suited for larger enterprises, while the other tools in this list work well both for smaller businesses and large enterprises. That said, in the world of enterprise social listening, Synthesio is definitely one of the top leaders – and for good reason. Since its built with enterprises in mind, you can collaborate with Synthesio to help you create your dashboards; but, of course, you can also set them up yourself if you prefer. You can look up any brand name or keyword you want, as well as use Boolean search to further filter your results; plus, you can also add other filters, such as languages and countries. Once you’ve set up your search, it’s all about the analytics and relevant audience insights:- Measure a specific campaign’s performance
- Measure your brands’ health
- Create in-depth analyses of any target audience you want based on different filters, such as location, age, and their interests
- Use pre-built audience persona templates to put together better social media campaigns and deliver highly targeted content at the right moment
Sentione
Sentione is a social listening tool primarily; however, it also offers social media management features and even a very interesting customer service feature: using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help handle your customer service In terms of social listening though, Sentione allows you to monitor the entire web, including social media, news sites, blogs, and forums. Plus, you can look up as many keywords as you want, in any language – with no limit on the results you get.
Once you’ve set up your listening searches, the tool will analyse the results to uncover important insights, such as:
- Sentiment analysis for your keyword searches
- List of the top influencers and content creators in that niche
- A look at the top sources of mentions across the web
- Insights about your audience demographics
- Competitor analysis
- Integrate with your social channels to reach out directly to your audience
- Generate PDF reports and export data and charts
- Enterprise features, including multi-market dashboards, unlimited users, and a dedicated account manager
Conclusion
Whatever your business size and your niche, social listening can help you improve your digital marketing strategies and grow your business in the process. Use social listening software to keep track of your mentions, analyse your competitors, gain in-depth customer insights, discover top social influencers to collaborate with, and much more. Do you use social listening for your business? And if so, what is your favourite tool? Leave your comments below and please share if you enjoyed the post 🙂Related: how to make money on Instagram with 1k followers
2026 Update: What Has Changed With Social Listening Since I First Wrote This
I wrote this post back in 2019 and, honestly, the social listening landscape looks almost unrecognisable now. If you landed here from a search, do read the original recommendations below for context, but please do not go signing up for anything based on those 2019 picks without reading this section first. Some of those tools have been acquired, rebranded, or priced themselves out of reach for small businesses entirely.
The biggest shift since 2019 is that AI has been baked into virtually every serious social listening platform. This is not just marketing fluff. The practical difference is that tools like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, and Talkwalker now surface sentiment analysis, trend spikes, and audience intent signals in ways that used to require a dedicated analyst sitting behind the data. For solo consultants and small teams, that matters enormously. You are getting genuinely useful context rather than just a wall of brand mentions to wade through manually.
What I would flag in 2026, though, is that the free tier and low-cost tier of social listening has shrunk significantly. Several tools that offered generous free plans in 2019 have quietly pulled them back or capped them to the point of being nearly useless for real work. If you are a small business owner reading this and budget is tight, I would honestly suggest starting with the native analytics and search functions inside the platforms themselves before paying for a third-party tool. TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram have all improved their own built-in listening features considerably.
The other thing worth saying plainly is that X (formerly Twitter) data access changed dramatically after the ownership change, and any tool that relied heavily on Twitter firehose data in 2019 has had to adapt or quietly deprioritise that source. If monitoring X conversations specifically is critical to your strategy, ask any vendor directly about their current data partnership before you commit to a contract. Do not assume the coverage is what it was.
I cover updated tool comparisons and what I am actually recommending to clients right now over at lilachbullock.com, so pop over there if you want my current shortlist. The five tools I listed in 2019 are still worth understanding as a baseline, but treat this post as history rather than a buying guide. Social listening in 2026 is more powerful than ever, but you need to ask sharper questions before you buy.
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