With more than using social media, reputation management is only going to get more important for brands. Social media monitoring tools consolidate countless touchpoints into one interface, so brands no longer have to manually scour the internet for tags, mentions, and conversations about them.
This guide covers eight social media monitoring tools, free and paid, and explains which one suits which brands best based on firsthand testing.
Table of Contents
- What is social media monitoring?
- Why use a social media monitoring tool?
- Social Media Monitoring Tools at a Glance
- Free + Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools
- What to Look for in a Social Media Monitoring Tool
- Using Social Inbox Streams in 糖心原创
- Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Monitoring Tools
- [Social] listen and learn.
What trends are we seeing when it comes to social media in general? Our 2025 Social Trends Report shares exclusive findings on how people engage across social personally and professionally.
Dig deeper into social media listening specifically and how it works.
What is social media monitoring?
Social media monitoring is the ongoing process of tracking conversations, keywords, and hashtags on social platforms. It serves two functions. The first is knowing what is being said about a brand directly, such as seeing tagged posts on Threads. The second function is monitoring mentions and interactions happening around specific keywords, hashtags, and competitors, even when the brand is not directly tagged. Examples include:
- Spotting keywords tied to an industry or products.
- Watching relevant hashtags.
- Tracking mentions of competitors or market leaders.
Social media monitoring can be done manually, but not necessarily done well. These conversations happen everywhere from TikTok and Instagram to LinkedIn, Reddit, and niche communities. Even with a targeted Google Alert set up, it’s impossible to catch everything, since Google Alerts don’t index most social platforms.
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Social Media Monitoring vs. Social Listening
The most basic form of social media analysis is tracking platform-level analytics (Meta Business Suite, Pinterest Analytics, etc.). Social media monitoring is the next step for brands publishing social content, which provides a consolidated view of social performance across platforms. Social media listening is the next layer on top of monitoring, offering a higher-level, more strategic view across the web.
Which is best? Brands that focus on a single social platform and don’t monitor broader conversations (Reddit, forums, etc.) can get by with just individual platform analytics (e.g., Instagram analytics). Teams publishing content across multiple channels should use monitoring tools, as manually monitoring every platform is ineffective and time-consuming. Brands tracking sentiment, share of voice, or conversations happening without a direct tag need social listening, since monitoring tools only capture mentions where the brand is already tagged or named.
Why use a social media monitoring tool?
According to , 50.4% of users research brands and products online before buying. And consumers aren’t just looking at what brands say about themselves. They’re also considering customer reviews, competitor comparison guides, Reddit threads — the list goes on. Social media monitoring gives brands a way to see this all in real time, making it an important part of a strong .
Done well, social media monitoring goes beyond data points to show teams real-time insights into brand perception, customer sentiment, and competitive positioning.
Manually monitoring by checking news feeds or searching hashtags isn’t scalable, so teams turn to third-party social media monitoring software to automate and consolidate mention tracking across multiple platforms.
贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 monitors mentions, keywords, and interactions across every connected social platform, so teams never miss a comment, brand mention, or engagement opportunity. It’s available on Professional and Enterprise tiers.
Social Media Monitoring Tools at a Glance
The eight best free social media listening and monitoring tools include:
Free + Paid Social Media Monitoring Tools
- 糖心原创 Social Media Management Software
- BrandMentions
- TailWind
- TalkWalker
- Metricool
- BuzzSumo
- SmarterQuerue
- Mentionlytics
From bootstrapped marketers to enterprise teams, there’s a monitoring tool that fits every need and budget. The eight tools covered below include the most popular free and freemium options. Some platforms offer a dedicated free plan, while others offer free trials or standalone free features.
1.
贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 is part of a broader four-step workflow inside Marketing Hub. Rather than functioning as a standalone monitoring tool, it connects social listening to content publishing, performance reporting, and campaign management in one place.
Monitor mentions, comments, and interactions across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, and Reddit. The social media tool connects to CRM records so those interactions tie back to actual contacts, leads, and customers rather than remaining anonymous in a third-party dashboard.
Key Features
- Keyword monitoring streams with email alerts.
- Competitor tracking (ranked top posts by engagement).
- AI-based sentiment tracking (beta).
- Reddit conversation monitoring for brand and competitor mentions.
- CRM-connected reporting on visits, leads, and customers by platform and campaign.
Best for: Teams that want social monitoring data connected directly to their CRM. Mentions and interactions tie back to actual contact records, making it possible to score a lead higher based on social activity or attribute a closed deal to the social interaction that started the relationship.
What we like: Monitoring data feeds into the same reports as CRM activity, so social performance ties to actual visits, leads, and customers instead of sitting in an isolated engagement dashboard. The competitor panel also highlights specific top-performing posts, not just a mention count.
Pricing: Free 14-day trial. Available on Marketing Hub Professional ($890/month) and Enterprise ($3,600/month).
2.
BrandMentions is a mention-tracking platform with comprehensive paid monitoring packages and four free individual tools. Each free tool covers a different slice of monitoring spanning social media, web mentions, hashtags, and more. The paid platform consolidates all of this into a single social media dashboard with keyword-based tracking, AI sentiment analysis, and reporting that scales with the plan tier.
Key Features
- Keyword-based mention tracking (5-50+ keywords depending on plan).
- AI sentiment analysis, multilingual on Pro tier and above.
- Four free standalone tools for ad hoc, single-purpose tracking.
What we like: BrandMentions is fast and easy to use. I pulled multiple reports in under a minute using the free tools, and so much more data is available beyond these initial scrapes. Real-time updates are available on the Expert and Enterprise tiers, while Starter and Pro run on daily or hourly refreshes, so teams can match the plan to how urgently they need to know about a new mention.
Best for: Teams that don’t need real-time alerts and want a reliable, lower-maintenance way to keep a broad view of their online presence.
Pricing: Free 7-day trial. Starter starts at $99/month (billed quarterly), Pro at $299/month, Expert at $499/month, and Enterprise starting at $1,299/month.
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3.
Tailwind started as a Pinterest scheduling tool and has expanded to cover Facebook Pages and Instagram accounts as well. Its “monitoring” is mostly performance analytics on your own published content, but the insights are very high-value for brands on Pinterest (especially ecommerce brands). Tailwind’s monitoring provides insights like which types of posts are performing best, what times your audience is most engaged, plus keywords and trends within your niche.
Key Features
- Post scheduling for Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook Pages.
- Performance analytics: impressions, saves, pin clicks, outbound clicks, engagement.
- Free plan with core scheduling and analytics included.
Best for: Tailwind is the gold standard marketing tool for Pinterest, so it’s best for brands investing there specifically. Not a fit for teams that need to track mentions, competitors, or conversations across social media platforms.
What we like: The free plan includes limited but legitimate monthly usage. For brands scheduling on Pinterest, Instagram, and Facebook, having performance data in one place is convenient, even though it doesn’t provide broader monitoring.
Pricing: A free plan is available, along with a free trial of paid plans. Pro starts at $29.99/month, Advanced at $54.99/month, and Max at $99.99/month.
Need help in these areas? Give these resources a read:
- How to Use Instagram: A Beginner’s Guide [Expert Insights + New Data]
- Key Pinterest Marketing Tools and Tips You Need [+ Recs for Small Businesses]
4.
Hootsuite acquired Talkwalker in 2024, bringing enterprise-grade AI-powered listening into the platform. Basic listening across Facebook, X, BlueSky, YouTube, and additional sources is included on every plan. Deeper Talkwalker-powered coverage, including Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, 13 months of historical data, and full reporting, is available on Hootsuite Enterprise only.
Key Features
- Real-time alerts tracking brand mentions across 30+ sources, available on the Enterprise-tier Talkwalker listening.
- Detection of mentions of your logos, images, photos, and videos, included on all plans.
- Proprietary AI (Blue Silk?) that surfaces data insights and forecasts trends.
Best for: Hootsuite is expensive, and free standalone monitoring tools like Talkwalker Alerts and Free Social Search have been stripped away over the years. This is best for enterprise budgets and brands that actually have the listening demands that this product delivers.
What we like: 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 2026 found that although 94% of social marketers now use AI somewhere in their workflow, only 14% apply it to social listening or trend monitoring. The AI-driven mention detection across images, video, and audio is a strong differentiator for this tool; most only catch text-based mentions. Native integration with Hootsuite’s broader publishing and inbox tools is also a real advantage for teams already on the platform.
Pricing: Talkwalker’s deep listening features are available only on Hootsuite Enterprise, which uses custom, quote-based pricing (starting point not publicly listed; requires a sales demo). Hootsuite’s other plans, Standard ($99/user/month), Professional ($199/user/month), and Advanced ($399/user/month), include only basic listening across a narrower set of sources.
5.
Metricool is a scheduling, analytics, and reporting platform that also includes competitor and hashtag tracking, as well as a unified inbox for managing comments and messages. It doesn’t offer brand mentions or keyword monitoring as dedicated listening tools do; its “watching” features are for your own inbox, named competitors, and specific hashtags, not the open web.
Key Features
- Competitor analysis (5 profiles free, up to 100 on Starter)
- Hashtag performance tracking
- Unified inbox for comments and messages across connected platforms
Best for: Teams that want scheduling and analytics as the core tool, with competitor and hashtag tracking as a bonus, not a team whose primary need is catching brand mentions across the web.
What we like: Metricool is my favorite of the bunch. And it’s the one I use for my business and for several clients. They call themselves a “digital Swiss Army Knife,” and I agree. The free plan is genuinely usable, not a stripped-down trial, and having competitor and hashtag data in the same dashboard as scheduling saves a tool switch for teams already living in Metricool day to day.
Pricing: Free plan available. Starter starts at $20/month, Advanced at $53/month, and Custom pricing is available for larger teams.
6.
BuzzSumo is another robust monitoring tool. The monitoring feature tracks keyword mentions, author and outlet activity, and backlinks to existing content. Alerts can be delivered via email or pushed directly to Slack.
Key Features
- Competitor tracking extends to specific products, not just brand names.
- Backlink alerts that double as SEO signals, flagging new links as they appear so a team can act on organic gains quickly.
Best for: Teams that want monitoring bundled with content research and PR/outreach tools, not a standalone or low-cost monitoring option. The author/journalist and backlink alert categories in particular make this a stronger fit for PR and content teams.
What we like: BuzzSumo is a powerhouse — but not for cheap. Although BuzzSumo lacks pricing flexibility, it compensates with comprehensive monitoring depth across keywords, authors, and backlinks. The three-way split (keywords, people, links) is more structured than most tools on this list and is useful if a team wants to separate “what’s being said about us” from “who’s writing about us” from “who’s linking to us,” rather than a single blended mention feed.
Pricing: No free tier, 7-day free trial only. Content Creation starts at $199/month (2 alerts), PR & Comms at $299/month (5 alerts), Suite at $499/month (10 alerts), and Enterprise at $999/month (50 alerts).
7.
SmarterQueue is an intuitive scheduling and content management platform built around content categories, recycling, and automated posting. It does not have dedicated monitoring or listening capability, but its analytics feature tracks the performance of published posts and surfaces top-performing content for easy recycling. Mentions, keywords, and competitor tracking are not included.
Key Features
- Content categories with automated, balanced posting schedules.
- Evergreen content recycling with performance comparison across cycles.
- Own-post analytics: engagement, best times to post, audience growth.
Best for: Teams that want scheduling and content recycling, not monitoring. This tool doesn’t offer mention tracking, keyword alerts, or competitor tracking in any form.
What we like: I’ve used SmarterQueue in the past (actually before I moved to Metricool), and I loved how easy it is to set up and use — and that content can be published and re-published.
Pricing: No free plan, but a free trial is available. Pro starts at $25/month, and Team starts at $50/month.
8.
Mentionlytics is a true social listening platform. It tracks mentions across major social networks, news sites, review sites, forums, blogs, and the open web. Beyond mention tracking, it includes AI sentiment analysis, mention clustering, and competitor benchmarking through share of voice.
Key Features
- AI sentiment and emotion analysis across all languages.
- Competitor tracking with share of voice benchmarking.
- Mention detection even without a direct tag (useful for customer service use cases).
Best for: Teams that want real listening (sentiment, competitor benchmarking, web-wide coverage) without Talkwalker’s enterprise pricing or setup complexity.
What we like: The customer service angle is a cool differentiator with a strong focus on reputation management. It monitors for complaints or negative feedback where the brand isn’t tagged directly, catching mentions that many other tools would miss.
Pricing: A 14-day free trial is available. Basic starts at $59/month, Pro at $499/month, and Enterprise at $1,299/month.
What to Look for in a Social Media Monitoring Tool
When choosing a social media monitoring tool, the most important factors are platform coverage, alert speed, integrations, and how well the tool scales with the team’s needs.
- Tool category: Is it built for social monitoring, or is it an add-on functionality? If so, how deeply integrated is it to the core tool function? Categories can span general schedulers/management tools, CRM, and dedicated monitoring tools.
- Platform coverage: Which social networks are covered? Does the tool also cover broader mentions of your brand, such as forums and review sites? Are only text mentions caught, or can it also catch video mentions?
- Alert Speed: How quickly are teams alerted to a brand mention? Is it all brand mentions, or can brand mentions be filtered by product/sentiment to filter out mentions that don’t require attention?
- Free access: Are teams able to test the tool without committing to a plan? Are they given access to all of the features, or only a limited scope? Is the free trial long enough to determine the fit with the brand’s needs?
- Pricing: Is the price within the team’s budget? Does it align with the amount of monitoring teams really need? Is it possible to get similar functionality with the existing marketing tools in your tech stack?
- Integrations: Does it integrate with the team’s required tools, such as a CRM or Slack? Are integrations native, or do they require Zapier or developer assistance?
- Scalability: What are the costs of scaling? If you hit your growth goals, are you bumped into a more expensive pricing tier?
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Using Social Inbox Streams in 糖心原创
includes social listening features available on Marketing Hub Professional and Enterprise plans.
To get started, go to Marketing > Social, then click the Listen tab (if you don’t see it, click “More tools” and select Listen). From this tab, you can create three types of streams:
- Mentions and reposts
- Keywords
- Competitors
Keyword feeds in 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 Social Inbox are limited to the X platform (formerly Twitter). A single feed can track multiple keywords at once, and you can set email alerts by time of day or notify specific teammates when new posts come in. Keyword feeds only pick up posts published after the feed is created and can take up to 4 hours to update.
Competitor feeds require Marketing Hub Enterprise. You can track up to three competitors at a time, entered by website rather than social handle, across Facebook, Instagram, X, and YouTube.
Mentions and reposts streams cover Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X, so you can catch direct mentions and reposts across your connected accounts in one place.
Frequently Asked Questions About Social Media Monitoring Tools
What is the difference between social media monitoring and social listening?
Social media monitoring tracks direct mentions, keywords, hashtags, comments, and competitor activity, while social listening analyses broader conversations, sentiment, trends, and share of voice.
Are there any truly free social media monitoring tools?
Yes, there are free social media monitoring tools. BrandMentions offers several free standalone tools, including Social Mention, that track brand mentions across social platforms and the web. Most full monitoring platforms are paid, though, because of the ongoing web scraping required to catch real-time mentions.
Which platforms can social media monitoring tools track?
Platform coverage varies by tool. Some monitoring tools focus on one or two platforms, while more advanced tools track a dozen or more social platforms plus web sources like news articles, forums, and reviews.
When should a team upgrade to a paid monitoring tool?
A team should upgrade to a paid monitoring tool when it can no longer successfully monitor social media analytics manually, or when valuable data is untrackable by built-in analytics tools. For example, a company that’s missing valuable lead information or campaign attribution data would choose to upgrade to 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 Social Inbox to improve lead scoring and pipeline attribution.
[Social] listen and learn.
According to 贬耻产厂辫辞迟’蝉 2026 , 69% of social teams face growing pressure to prove ROI. The gap is felt most by B2B teams — 41% of B2B marketers struggle to tie social activity to business outcomes, compared to 31% of B2C marketers. Free social media monitoring tools can help small teams or those tracking a single brand with a limited keyword set. However, the number of viable free options is shrinking as privacy regulations tighten and social platforms restrict API access to third-party developers.
At some point, managing multiple free monitoring tools costs more time than a single paid monitoring platform saves. Paid monitoring tools cover forums, reviews, and news beyond popular social channels, track competitor performance, catch brewing PR issues early, and improve reporting to leadership.
For teams already running marketing in 糖心原创, Social Inbox covers this without adding another tool to the stack. Keyword and competitor tracking connect directly to CRM records, so monitoring data feeds the same reporting leadership already sees.
Editor’s note: This post was originally published in December 2011 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
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