Last Updated on February 28, 2023
Having customers who mention your business’s name during online conversations is bliss! But not all conversations about your business can be positive, right? You can use one of these seven free social listening tools to know what’s on your customer’s mind.
Having a booming business is all the entrepreneur’s dream (mine, too!). If you are here with an online start-up business, you want your business to be the talk of the town. But how do you know whether people are really talking about your business? What is their impression of the items you sell? What are their thoughts on your beloved company, and how frequently are they mentioning your services?
So, you need a good social listening tool, don’t you? Because there is no way you can find and analyze all these conversations manually! (You can try if you are a crazy person. But spoiler alert, you will not succeed.)
Lo and behold, here is a relevant list called the free social listening tools 2023! I worked really hard on making this list, so you better pay attention.
What is a Social Listening Tool?
Some of you might be scratching your head because you have never heard of social listening tools. So, what is this thing called a social listening tool?
A social listening tool is a digital system to monitor and analyze your brand-related discussions online. We can also call it a social media listening tool because it bases on social media conversations. But it also seems to work with other platforms like forums, blogs, websites, etc.
A social media listening tool’s work process requires relevant keywords. It finds out posts and comments containing those keywords and collects data to analyze. This process helps you understand how popular or unpopular your brand is.
How do Social Listening Tools Work?
Even your favorite cereals must go through a complete process to fill your breakfast bowl. Isn’t it evident that your essential software has to do the same to give you proper output?
Social listening tools conduct text mining from the internet based on your search preference. You just have to specify the keywords; this tool will dig all over the internet to find all the texts mentioning those keywords. This tool uses the traditional data mining technique to analyze the information it collects.
This strategic tool goes through several steps; data identifying and retrieving, summarizing and sorting data, identifying attributes (like concepts, patterns, etc.), analyzing information, and visualizing output.
Why is Social Listening Important?
Social listening is similar to market research or surveys. Like physical market research or surveys, social listening extracts information about customers’ opinions and demands.
Sometimes customers’ opinions do not reach the business owners properly. If a product is bad or needs improvement, a customer has to reach out the brand to complain personally. This task sounds like a total hassle, so most customer avoids doing it. So, the business owners fail to properly understand the problem with their products.
If they can learn what their customers say about their products, they can make improvements in no time. Social listening helps business owners achieve that.
7 Best Free Social Listening Tools in 2023
Social listening is not a new concept. Many businesses found success by learning customer opinions through social listening.
But still, many people fail to choose the right social listening software. If you are one of them, the following list of free social listening tools will help you.
Read Also: Free Social Media Marketing Tools
1-Mention
Right off the bat, we have ‘Mention,’ which is one of the most talked about free social listening tools in 2023. This software is a social listening-cum-monitoring tool. It monitors and analyzes your online reputation based on specific keywords and brand name mentions in online posts, blogs, and comments.
You can control the relevancy of the result. The internet can have millions of mentions related to your business, but this software will track and showcase the relevant and trendy ones.
How It Works
The basic work setup on Mention is like most other free social listening tools, but it also has monitoring functions in it.
- Mention is a multi-lingual software. It can track and analyze posts and comments written in various languages (up to 42 languages).
- It also gives you the freedom to rule out irrelevant content.
- You also get a competitive analysis tool. So you can compare your online reputation and performance with your competitors.
- It also has functions for team collaborations, progress tracking, crisis management, etc., to help you work with a team to perform well online, measure progress in your reputation, and handle any issues like online uproar, customer dissatisfaction, etc.
2-Followerwonk
Dear Twitter user friends, pay attention to this one because Followerwonk is one of the best Twitter-biased social listening tools in 2023. The developers came together to build a Twitter analytic tool called Followerwonk.
Followorks is a free social listening tool that specializes in analyzing Twitter discussions. Is it hard to keep up with the countless trendy Twitter discussions relevant to your business? Then Followerwonk can give you a hand. Followerwonk can hunt down relevant Twitter posts, point out variables like brand influencers, increase post reach, and analyze followers’ behavior on your command.
How It Works
Followerwonk works in three stages; find, analyze, and optimize.
- Followerwonk goes through countless Twitter bios to establish connections with everyone. It also tracks overlaps in different accounts and finds out rising Twitter influencers.
- This social media analyzer gathers information like location, bio, follow preferences, etc., from your followers’ accounts and analyzes them to understand public preferences. Based on these analytics, you can strategize to stand out more than your competitors.
- Followerwonk helps you upgrade your Twitter performance and optimizes your reach. This tool tells you what your followers want and helps you make steps to fulfill their preferences.
3-Answer The public
Even a kid knows that organic website clicks matter more than paid marketing. to bring more organic clicks, you have to understand what your target visitors are searching for online and strategize accordingly.
The best way to study relevant Google searches is to use the Answer The Public website. Answer The Public is a free SEO tool for keyword research. You can input the right keywords and find related Google questions asked by the public.
This technique is a good way to analyze what the public is saying or asking about your website and take the necessary steps to upscale your business.
How It Works
Answer The Public is a simple website. It has a search bar on top of the website that you can use to find the most popular web searches and questions related to your business or website.
- The search bar has three sections; one for keyword input, one for country setup, and another one for language setup.
- You just have to input relevant keywords and select country and language.
- Answer The Public will then find and show you all the Google searches related to the keyword you provided.
This way, you will know the popular Google inquiries related to your business, current trends, and customer demands.
4-TweetDeck
TweetDeck started as a separate app, but Twitter later bought this software and added it to the Twitter interface.
Twitter is the best place to find gossip and discussions. You can find tweets about your company if someone uses your Twitter handle. But what if someone posts something without using your Twitter handle? You can simply seek help from TweetDeck.
TweetDeck monitors multiple accounts simultaneously, tracks and sorts posts, and helps you increase community engagement. It helped track posts related to your business even when your Twitter handle wasn’t used.
How It Works
TweetDeck uses several types of streams for its activities. Some of the notable streams are the notification stream, mention stream, inbox stream, etc. What we need for social listening is a custom stream.
- You can use the brand search stream to find and gather tweets related to your business or website. If a user tweets without your Twitter handle but the discussion is relevant to your business, the brand search stream can still track that tweet effortlessly.
- You can add a custom stream by simply typing keywords on the search bar.
- Adding the results to the TweetDeck dashboard makes the stream more accessible.
5-Social Mention
Social Mention is a real-time social listening tool that lets you search and analyze brand name mentions. This tool collects content from all over the internet and creates a single stream of information.
Social Mention tracks what people say about your brand and analyzes that result to help you understand your popularity, setbacks, and customer demands.
This free social listening tool does all of its work in real-time. BrandMentions, a high-functioning brand monitoring tool, introduced Social Mention to the world.
How It Works
Social Mention has several use cases. It helps you understand your online reputation in many ways.
- This tool notifies you whenever someone posts anything mentioning your brand name.
- It collects data from those said posts, analyzes them, and provides detailed customer insight.
- This social search tool works on almost every social media platform.
- This tool can help maintain your brand’s reputation by monitoring your online engagement 24/7.
6-Google Alerts
Many of you have already heard of Google Alerts. Google Alerts, a notification service from Google, helps its users by sending email notifications on various online activities. If you set an alert for an activity, Google will email you every time that specific activity occurs.
But how can Google Alerts help you in social listening? You can set alerts about mentions, posts, and comments regarding your brand. Google Alerts will tell you whenever someone posts or comments about your brand.
How It Works
To conduct social listening with Google Alerts, you have to set up an alert.
- You will land on a simple page with a single search box when you go to Google Alerts. Fill up the box with a topic you want to get alerted on.
- Go to show options to change settings like notification frequency, website type, language, location, etc.
- After finishing the process by clicking the “Create Alert” button, Google starts sending you notifications whenever a new post or comment is related to the alert topic.
- You can directly visit that post or comment from your alert.
- You can also edit or delete your alert later if you want.
7-Twilert
So, you have learned about Google Alerts. But have you heard about Twilert? Don’t worry; it is nothing complicated. Twilert is simply the Google Alerts system for Twitter.
Twilert is a professional monitoring tool for Twitter that sends email alerts for every mention of your brand on Twitter posts. You can use your business or brand name, related hashtags, or any type of relevant keywords to get alerts via email. Twilert notifies you every time there is a new tweet with your hashtags or keywords.
How It Works
Twilert’s working style is almost identical to Google Alerts. But Twilert works exclusively for Twitter.
- To get alerts from Twilert, you have to go to Twilert, provide your email ID, input specific keywords, and set up the time to get an alert.
- Once you set up an alert, Twilert starts working automatically.
- Twilert works 24/7 in search of any mention of the specified keyword.
- Every time it discovers a new mention of that keyword, it sends you an email at the specified time.
Social Listening Tools Related FAQs
What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Social listening points out your brand mentions and tells you how well-received your brand or product is., but social monitoring only points out your brand mentions.
How can social media listening increase customer advocacy?
The business owners take the customer’s demand more seriously when they directly learn the public opinion on their products. This way, social media listening becomes crucial for customer advocacy.
What is social listening process?
Social listening process is a collection of activities like checking out conversations and mentions related to your brand, analyzing and understanding your customers’ thoughts, studying your competitors, etc.
Is there any limitations to social listening?
The main limitations of social media listening are lack or context, access restrictions to certain websites, lack of comprehensive insight, etc.
What does social media sentiment analysis mean?
Social media sentiment analysis refers to understanding the customer’s sentimental perception of a product.
Final Thoughts
Social media listening is crucial for understanding customers’ opinions on a product, current trends, customer demands, etc. this process is also important for understanding the difference between your and your competitor’s popularity.
This activity helps you get leads, adjust product quality to demands, and convert leads to customers. Social listening looks like a very simple job, but looks can be deceiving. You need an absolute expert tool to do this time-consuming job.
So, I created the free social listening tool 2023 list. Get suitable social media listening software, and let it do all the hard work.
