I’ve been doing social listening a lot, as part of my marketing strateg for my various products.
One thing I’ve seen is that a lot of people don’t understand the differences between a tool like F5Bot and Mentionkit, or Mentionkit and Meltwater.
I’m going to go over different types of social listening tools and categorizing them. Hopefully this should clear up confusion between different types of tools and which one should you pick for your brand.
Tier 1: The alerting tools
These tools are free/cheap and do one thing only - alert you for keyword mentions.
That’s it.
No dashboard, no APIs, no webhooks/Zapier connection, etc. Just a simple email alert. Sometimes a Slack alert.
This tools are usually used by budget constraints marketers, but they aren’t very useful for reliable social listening workflows.
You’d usually end up with a email inbox full of email alerts with no way of knowing which ones are relevant for plugging your product.
These tools had their time in the sun but are nowaways overshadowed by better social listening tools with AI relevance, auto-tagging, dashboard to view mentions, better filters, etc.
Tools in this category are:
- F5Bot - The original Reddit keyword alert tool. Free to use but very very basic otherwise.
- Google Alerts - The free social-listening-tool-before-social-listening-was-a-thing. I’d categorize this next to useless but this is here for brevity’s sake.
- Syften - Another basic keyword alert tool. This one supports a lot more platforms and is generally a more competent tool that the others in this category.
- Kwatch - Another basic keyword alert tool. Easier to use than Syften, but the pricing is horrible. For this price I’d expect a much better tool.
Tier 2: Actual social listening tools
These tools are a step above the simple alert tools.
They have a entire workflow build around them. These tools are generally used for finding leads and relevant convos to plug your product in.
Some of the features these tools have:
- A dashboard to view your mentions
- Teammate management and other stuff you get with a fully featured SaaS
- AI relevance to help you pinpoint which mentions are worth your time
They are not free, but also not expensive either. Most tools in this category are from $40 to $150 per month.
Here are some examples of tools in this category:
- Mentionkit. This is us. We like to think of ourselves as the best man-in-the-middle option for brands, with a very affordable price tag.
- Awario. This is a decent social listening tool and has been around for some time.
- Redreach. Not a strict social listening tool, more like a leads finder for Reddit.
- Ocolens. This tool started off in tier 2 but now has nearly departed this category and is in the tier 3.
Tier 3: Social listening tools for bigger brands
Tools in this category are similar to tier 2, except these are almost always made for larger brands.
They are also made for different workflows. Bigger brands aren’t that focused on lead generation, they care about brand reputation much more.
That’s why tier 3 tools have 3 things:
- Less keywords, but much more coverage. They will track everything, from random blogs to news websites.
- Heavy focus on sentiment analysis. The bigger brands will have 10,000+ mentions coming in for their brand in a single month. They need to get a bird’s eye view on how their brand is viewed
- Enterprisey features. Advanced user management, SSO and related stuff, crazy levels of filtering and reporting
- Pricey. These tools are absurdly expensive, generally starting from $200 usd per month but can easily go beyong $1000 per month.
Some of the tools in this category are:
- Brand24. A very well known social listening tool for bigger brands.
- Meltwater
- Hootsuite Talkwalker
There are a few others in this category, they are all pricey though, and only fit for bigger, well-known brands.
Conclusion
I hope this article clears up confusion around social listening tools.
If you’re looking for a nice all-in-one social listening tool with a affordable price tag, Mentionkit is the one!
