11 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools For 2025 (Pros And Cons)

Looking for the best social media monitoring tools? I’ve got you covered.

Social media monitoring tools track and analyze mentions of target keywords on social media. They let you see what people are saying about your brand, competitors, or important topics.

I recently tested, reviewed, and compared all the best social media monitoring tools on the market so that you don’t have to. 

In this post, I’ll show you what each of them can do, discuss their pros and cons, and tell you everything else you need to know to find the right solution for your needs.

The leading best social media monitoring tools compared

#1 – Brand24

Brand24 has been my favorite social media monitoring tool for years. And recently, they added a raft of incredible new AI features that have taken it to the next level.

It’s probably best described as a web monitoring tool as it doesn’t just track mentions on social media—it looks far beyond that, crawling 25 million online sources across the internet.

You can track mentions of any keyword, be that your brand name, a competitor, an industry topic, or anything else.

It pulls any mentions it finds into your feed in real-time so you can see who’s talking about what, and where. And you can set up customizable alerts to highlight the most important stuff.

Brand24 extracts insights from all those mentions, which you can compile into reports. That includes key metrics like mention volume, reach, brand awareness score, and AVE, all of which are useful for benchmarking brand awareness and measuring your PR performance.

One of the insights I particularly like is the AI-powered sentiment analysis. It automatically categorizes all mentions into positive, negative, and neutral categories, giving you an instant snapshot of public opinion. 

This is useful for gauging brand sentiment, but it can also be used to identify sales opportunities. For example, you could use it to find negative mentions of your competitors and chime in on those conversations to promote your products.

More recently, Brand24 rolled out its new AI Brand Assistant to help you make sense of all the data it collects—and I’m a huge fan.

It’s kind of like ChatGPT but equipped with data from your monitoring projects, so you can ask it questions about your projects and it can answer with context, pulling in data as needed and explaining what it means. Personally, I find this a lot easier than digging through reports.

I find it difficult to find anything to complain about with Brand24. But if I had to pick something, it’d be the price tag. It’s fairly expensive but you do get a lot for your money. 

Keep in mind also that Brand24 only tracks and analyzes mentions. While that’s the most important thing in a social media monitoring tool, a lot of the other options on this list also track more general analytics like content performance and channel growth.

Pros and cons

#2 – Social Status

Social Status doesn’t track brand or keyword mentions like Brand24 does—but it’s the best choice for general social media analytics and competitor monitoring. 

It’s also a lot more affordable with a great free plan and paid plans starting at less than ten bucks a month.

You can use Social Status to monitor your social profiles, ads, competitors, and influencers. Then, compile all of that social media data into customizable reports.

Profile analytics tell you everything you need to know about the profiles and pages you manage (across every social network). You can track and report on all the important performance metrics and KPIs, like post reach, impressions, engagements, community growth, and link clicks.

Ads analytics monitor your paid ad campaigns, offering insights into how much you’ve spent, how many people you’ve reached, how your ad clicks are converting, and much more, with dozens of metrics to evaluate your ad performance.

Influencer analytics is useful for brands who work with influencers and need to audit them pre-campaign or report on their performance. 

You can monitor any public influencer profile across multiple social networks, uncover their follower demographics (and track changes in this over time), see how their posts perform (with metrics like organic reach rate, impressions, taps back/forward, etc.), and more.

Finally, Social Status’ competitor analytics allow you to spy on your competitors and benchmark your performance against theirs. This is my favorite feature. 

Just enter a rival’s profile to instantly uncover useful insights. Then, if you want, directly compare your social performance (like your engagement rate, reaction sentiment, etc.) with theirs to see how you stack up.

I particularly like the Competitor Content Feed, which shows you all their posts alongside metrics like their interactions and engagement rate. You can sort them by any metric to quickly find their best-performing content, then feed that back into your strategy.

Overall, if you’re looking for comprehensive social media insights, then there’s no better option than Social Status. But if you want to monitor and analyze brand mentions specifically, you’ll need to look elsewhere.

Pros and cons

#3 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is perfect for social media marketers. Its Discovery tool is a game-changer—it monitors the web for top-performing content in your industry so you can share it on your social media accounts.

ContentStudio is designed to be an all-in-one solution for social media marketers, so there’s a lot you can do with it. 

For starters, you can monitor all your messages and comments from across multiple social networks in one unified team inbox, and reply to them in real-time.

I like how it lets you keep your team organized by setting up automations that categorize and assign conversations. The ‘saved replies’ feature is great for boosting efficiency too.

You can monitor and report on your social media performance through ContentStudio’s built-in analytics tool. It tracks all sorts of metrics to show you how your content is performing on each social media channel, as well as how fast your audience is growing. 

It can even monitor your competitors to keep track of their key performance indicators and analyze their content. And all of that data can be combined in custom, white-label reports.

And we haven’t even talked about my favorite feature yet—the Discover tool.

It monitors the web for industry-leading videos and articles to make it easy for you to curate and share content your audience will love. 

Just search for any topic or keyword, and it’ll populate a custom topic feed full of trending content that people are liking and sharing. 

You can then click on any piece of content for detailed insights. You’ll be able to see important metrics like engagements, sentiment, the number of influencers who have shared it, etc. Plus, content-specific metrics like readability level, word count, and more.

Powerful filters let you refine your search results and narrow them down based on things like when the content was first published, how many engagements it’s had, and so on.

I also like how the Discover tool also doubles up as a kind of influencer search engine. So aside from content, you can use it to find and analyze influential creator profiles in your industry. This comes in useful if you plan to partner with influencers as part of your social media strategy. 

There’s even more you can do with ContentStudio that we haven’t had time to cover, including scheduling social media content, generating post captions and images, etc.

The only thing it can’t do that you might want is track mentions as it doesn’t have any social listening capabilities.

Pros and cons

#4 – Vista Social

Vista Social is another all-in-one social media management tool that comes with a lot of features, including comprehensive analytics and basic social listening capabilities.

You can monitor and report on social media performance and build reports through Vista Social’s Analytics tool, which has all the insights and metrics you could ask for.

Meanwhile, the Engagement tool lets you monitor, reply to, and manage all your comments and messages from across your social profiles in one place.

That’s seamlessly integrated with the Listening tool. The way it works is you choose what keywords/phrases you want to monitor, and on which profiles. Then, Vista Social pulls conversations from those social profiles from your inbox into a separate feed. 

I like how you can filter them by sentiment to quickly find positive or negative conversations depending on what you’re looking for.

That said, it’s disappointing that Vista Social’s listening tool can only track mentions that appear in conversations on your connected accounts. It can’t monitor conversations that happen on social media outside of your connected profiles or on the wider web like Brand24 can.

There’s one more thing I want to mention about Vista Social before we move on. It’s the only social media monitoring tool I’ve tried that can also monitor the web for reviews about your brand. This will come in useful if one of your social media marketing aims is to manage your brand’s reputation.

It pulls in reviews from sites like Facebook, Google My Business, TripAdvisor, and more into a single stream inside your account so you can manage and respond to them from the same place you manage your socials. 

Pros and cons

#5 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a good choice if you’re focusing on Instagram and Facebook. It combines social media monitoring, analytics, publishing, and engagement tools in one platform.

One of my favorite features is the Mentions feed. It monitors Instagram for mentions of your brand and lets you know about any posts you’re tagged or mentioned in.

Everything is pulled into one easy-to-scan feed to make it easy to see what people are saying about you in real time.

I also love how easy it is to repost content you’re mentioned in. Just click on a post from the Mentions feed and hit Repost to save it to your media library for scheduling. This is a great way to showcase user-generated content (UGC) and highlight positive mentions from your community.

Aside from tracking mentions, Iconosquare’s Conversations tool also helps you stay on top of engagement by bringing all your Instagram and Facebook comments into one unified inbox. From there, you can respond directly without having to jump between platforms.

Then there’s the Listening feature, which lets you listen out for mentions of industry-specific hashtags, competitors, and relevant keywords, making it easier to spot emerging trends, analyze the competition, and find inspiration for your content strategy.

And all those valuable insights can be compiled into actionable reports. Plus, you can build your own custom analytics dashboard with over 100+ metrics and visualizations to choose from.

All in all, I was impressed by what Iconosquare had to offer. The only issue I have with it is that it doesn’t support a lot of social media platforms—only Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn. 

And of those, Instagram and Facebook are the only networks where you can track mentions and conversations.

Pros and cons

#6 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one tool with strong monitoring capabilities and a few unique features you won’t find elsewhere. 

It covers all the major platforms—Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and even Threads—making it a great choice for businesses that need broad coverage.

I like Agorapulse’s social media listening tool a lot. It’s similar to Brand24 in that it tracks brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags in real time not just in social media conversations, but also in articles and blog posts across the wider web.

So, you can see what people are saying about your business (or your competitors) and engage with important conversations as they happen.

It analyzes your mentions too and provides you with metrics and KPIs that allow you to better monitor things like brand awareness and sentiment.

I particularly like the sentiment score metric. It’s a score of between 1 and 100 score based on an automated sentiment analysis of all your mentions that tells you at a glance whether the overall perception of your brand is more positive or negative.

Aside from the social listening feature, Agorapulse also comes with all the other essentials you’d expect from all-in-one social media monitoring software. 

That includes a unified social inbox to monitor interactions, post creation & publishing tools, and comprehensive analytics & reporting to monitor performance and growth.

Now let’s talk about the unique features that set Agorapulse apart.

First, ad comment monitoring. If you’re running paid social media campaigns, you can track and respond to comments on your ads directly from Agorapulse—this is something a lot of other monitoring tools overlook.

Another is ROI monitoring. Agorapulse is the only tool I’ve tried that can track how your social media activities are impacting actual revenue goals. 

It merges its data with your Google Analytics data to measure how your social media post clicks convert to traffic, leads, and sales—and uses that to calculate return on investment. 

Social media managers and agencies that work with clients will find this invaluable as it allows you to demonstrate your worth to clients. It gives you something tangible to point to that connects to their business goals.

The only thing that might be an issue with Agorapulse is the cost. Its price tag reflects its high-quality feature set, so expect to pay more than you would with some of the other tools on this list.

Pros and cons

#7 – Awario

Awario is a great choice for brands interested in social selling thanks to its innovative Leads feed. It’s the only social media monitoring tool I’ve tried that can automatically pick out mentions that present sales opportunities.

With Awario, you can track and analyze mentions of your brand, your competitors, and important keywords.

It scans all major social media platforms—Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, and Reddit—along with blogs, forums, and other web sources.

Setting everything up is simple. Just create a project, enter your brand name, relevant keywords, and competitor names, and let the tool do the rest. 

It crawls over 13 billion web pages daily, pulling relevant mentions into a real-time feed. From there, you can filter results, sort them by sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral), and jump into conversations directly from the platform.

My favorite of Awario’s features is its Leads feed. Instead of just tracking brand mentions, it actively looks for potential sales opportunities by identifying conversations where people express dissatisfaction with competitors or state they’re searching for a product/service like yours. 

You can then jump into those conversations to engage with high-intent prospects and convert them to customers.

Another area where Awario shines is its flexible Boolean search operators. These allow you to fine-tune your monitoring queries with precision, ensuring you get the most relevant mentions while filtering out noise. This level of customization makes Awario particularly useful for businesses with precise tracking needs.

One more thing: Awario offers a solid mobile app, making it easy to stay on top of mentions while on the go. This is something you don’t get with a lot of other tools.

Pros and cons

#8 – Mention

Mention is a sophisticated social media monitoring tool with a lot of advanced features, like Boolean search. 

Businesses can use it to track brand and keyword mentions across the internet. It also gives you tools to analyze, report, and respond to these mentions.

One of Mention’s strengths is its flexibility. Users can create detailed keyword alerts using Boolean search operators and advanced filtering options, ensuring that only relevant conversations are monitored. 

You can even narrow down your monitoring projects to specific sources, countries, and languages. Supported social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit.

I like how Mention provides real-time updates, pulling new mentions into your feed as soon as they occur. Also impressive is how it can retrieve historical mentions from up to two years before you set up the project—this is something few other social media monitoring tools can do.

One more feature I want to give it credit for is Spike Alerts. If mention detects any sudden increase in mention volume, it lets you know about it immediately so you can capitalize on positive trends or address potential PR issues before it’s too late.

Beyond monitoring, Mention also comes with a few extra bells and whistles, including tools to help you create, schedule, and publish posts directly to various social media platforms. 

Pros and cons

#9 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an enterprise-grade social media monitoring tool that’s geared more toward larger businesses. It’s eye-wateringly expensive, but it might be worth it if you want the very best.

You can use Sprout’s AI-powered social listening tool to monitor everything from brand health to events, industry trends, competitors, campaigns, and beyond. There are pre-built templates for all of the above to help you set up your projects quickly.

It’s much more advanced than its competitors, with sophisticated features like granular sentiment analysis, customizable alerts, and AI-powered insights. I particularly like the smart categories feature, which allows you to filter conversations based on the people, places, and things being discussed.

Aside from social listening, Sprout offers a suite of tools to help you monitor and manage all areas of your brand’s social presence. That includes a powerful Smart Inbox that brings conversations from every network into one feed.

It also includes powerful publishing tools, in-depth analytics, influencer marketing tools, employee advocacy tools, and even a robust social CRM. It includes everything larger businesses need to manage their entire social media strategy end-to-end.

My biggest complaint about Sprout is its pricing structure. It’s not just that its base price is expensive (which it is—very expensive), but also that it makes you pay extra for important add-ons, including the social listening tool and premium analytics.

Also, you pay per user seat which makes it even more expensive for teams. Given the high starting price, I would have thought all plans would include unlimited user seats as standard but sadly that isn’t the case.

Pros and cons

#10 – SocialInsider

SocialInsider is a simple but powerful social media monitoring tool that covers all the basics. I like its user interface and found it to be easier to use than most.

It offers detailed analytics for all the main social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and X.

You can monitor all the essential performance metrics like post reach/impressions, engagement rate, follower growth, etc. plus AI-powered insight, audience demographics, competitive benchmarking, trend analysis, and more.

On top of that, SocialInsider also comes with an AI-powered listening tool for Instagram. This tracks hashtags, mentions, and influencers on the platform and analyzes them, then serves up insights in detailed reports.

I particularly like how SocialInsider offers not just sentiment analysis but also emotion analysis.

What does this mean? Well, like other social media analytics tools, SocialInsider categorizes conversations on Instagram about your brand as negative, neutral, or positive based on their context.

But it also takes it one step further, telling you the emotion of those conversations (i.e. joy, disgust, etc.). Graphs and charts show you your sentiment split and emotion split, as well as how that’s evolved over time.

Pros and cons

#11 – Talkwalker

Talkwalker is an advanced consumer intelligence platform with some of the most advanced social media monitoring and listening tools you’ll find anywhere. It’s geared towards serious users like PR professionals, and its feature set reflects that.

Talkwalker monitors all media for your brand mentions—not just social media, but also online, print, and broadcast media.

It even offers visual listening, which means it can find brand mentions in images, videos, and audio content—not just text.

It also has much more advanced features than you get with most other tools. One of my favorites is the advanced boolean catalog, which allows you to narrow down your monitoring searches to very specific conversations.

Other advanced features include custom alerts, sentiment analysis, share of voice, ROI tracking, etc.

Another feature I love is Talkwalker’s AI summaries. They help you to make sense of all the data it gathers by presenting you with short, digestible daily, weekly, or monthly summaries of your performance. 

Aside from monitoring your media coverage, Talkwalker’s influencer finder can also help with your PR efforts by enabling you to discover and analyze influential people in your industry and connect with them.

Unfortunately, Talkwalker isn’t clear about its plan prices on its website. It looks like you need to book a demo before they’ll give you a quote. Given this, I’d expect it to be more expensive than some of the other tools we’ve looked at.

Pros and cons

Final thoughts

So, which social media monitoring tool is the best?

There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. While Brand24 is my go-to, the right choice for you will depend on factors like the features you need and your budget.

Many of the tools in this list offer free trials, so I’d suggest trying a few out for yourself and seeing which one you like best.

Looking for more tools that can help you to grow your social media following? Check out my roundups of the best social media automation tools and contest apps. You might also find these social media statistics interesting.

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