Top social listening platforms for audience intelligence

Marketing departments across all industries have caught on to a crucial insight — social media use creates a vast reservoir of vital data on consumer behavior. Last year, the average person spent over 151 minutes on social media daily — your target audience included. That’s a ton of data your brand can access with social media listening platforms. 

From a business perspective, platforms like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook are popular not for their ability to interact with consumers, but for the goldmine of insights into consumer behavior, preferences, and trends. 

Leveraging social media listening tools and audience intelligence can be a game-changer for brands aiming to carve a niche in the competitive market. Imagine a fashion brand on the hunt for influencers to collaborate with — social media listening can pinpoint potential influencers who resonate well with the brand's target audience, paving the way for successful partnerships.

What is social media listening?

Social media listening is the process of scrutinizing the posts, comments, and conversations occurring on social platforms. This strategy often involves tracking specific keywords associated with a brand, product, or even a competitor, along with keeping an eye on trending topics. 

Brands use these tools to better understand consumer sentiments, which they can apply to improve marketing, sales, customer support, and product strategies.

What’s the benefit of using social listening tools?

Social media listening tools serve as a beacon, guiding you to a deeper understanding of audience affinities. This helps your marketers create more personalized communications in a variety of circumstances: 

• Identifying and mitigating potential brand crises at an early stage
• Streamlining the process of responding to customer comments and queries
• Fostering a more engaged and satisfied customer base

Social media listening tools are handy when used with audience intelligence tools. These intelligence tools use social data to segment consumers based on specific demographic, technographic, and online behavioral data. 

Combine social media listening and audience intelligence tools to achieve several key outcomes, including: 

• A stronger understanding of the behavior and interests of different audience segments 
• Increased brand health through expanded audience awareness and targeted engagement campaigns
• Successful prevention and management of potential brand crises
• Identification of key online figures that resonate with your audience segments for brand ambassador and influencer campaigns 

For instance, we utilized our Audiense Insights platform during the pandemic to gauge how UK Netflix user behavior and content preferences changed during the lockdown. By replicating this process with your branded content, you can identify and tailor the most effective messaging styles for each audience segment. 

Top 7 social listening tools in 2023

With social media listening and monitoring now an ingrained part of marketing, tons of companies are jumping in to fill the need with leading-edge tools — over 230 companies, according to G2. Here’s a handful of the top tools available to better understand your social media audience and gather valuable insights for smarter marketing decisions. 

1) Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a complete social media management platform offering diverse tools to help you efficiently manage all social media endeavors. Here are the core features that set Agorapulse apart:

• Schedule and publish posts on multiple social media platforms in advance for consistent posting and time-saving.
• A unified social inbox to manage and respond to messages, comments, and mentions from various platforms in one place.
• Social media listening to monitor and track brand-relevant conversations, hashtags, and keywords for sentiment analysis and trend identification.
• Comprehensive analytics and reporting features to gauge social media performance and engagement.

2) Brand24 

Brand24 provides social media monitoring and analytics tools to track and analyze your brand mentions across a diverse range of online sources, including social media, news, and blogs. Here are some of the central features of Brand24:

• AI-powered access to real-time mentions across 25 million online sources for enhanced brand awareness and engagement monitoring.
• Advanced sentiment analysis capabilities to segment mentions into positive, negative, or neutral categories.
• Brand awareness tracking and quantification to gauge presence, reach, and engagement.
• PR coverage measurement and reporting to evaluate marketing efforts and discern the impact of mentions on brand reputation.

3) Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a prominent player in social listening and digital consumer intelligence, offering a suite of features for consumer intelligence, social media management, and more. Here are some of the key features of the Brandwatch platform:

• Access to a massive dataset consisting of historical and real-time consumer interactions across social and web platforms.
• Sentiment analysis and demographic data to provide key consumer and market insights.
• AI and machine learning features that speed up data retrieval, analysis, and segmentation.
•  Alerts and live reports that make it easy to share information and act in real time.

4) BuzzSumo 

BuzzSumo offers a range of tools to help you uncover engaging content, pinpoint outreach opportunities, and monitor brand mentions. Here are some key features of BuzzSumo:

• A content ideas generator to help you find highly shared, linked, and commented niches or topics.
• Monitoring capabilities to track brand mentions, backlinks, and social media engagement.
• A massive index of social and web engagement data to help you identify trends in audience behavior and preferences.
• Influencer identification to help you locate key industry influencers, foster relationships, and amplify content.

5) Meltwater 

Meltwater is another brand offering a suite of social media listening and consumer intelligence tools for enterprises, SMBs, and agencies. Here are some key features of the Meltwater suite:

• Extensive media monitoring by capturing content from top global news outlets and journalist accounts
• Cross-platform conversation, hashtag, and keyword analysis for brand mention tracking, sentiment analysis, and trend identification
• Social media management tools to quickly capitalize on insights and drive effective audience engagement
• A sales intelligence engine to arm reps with key information on the background and behavior of ideal customers

6) Pulsar

Pulsar Platform is a combined social listening and audience intelligence brand that helps users gain insights into their target audience. Pulsar has three key tools focused on different aspects of audience intelligence:

• Pulsar TRAC: An audience intelligence platform that listens to, monitors, and segments consumers across all social and web platforms
• Pulsar CORE: A tool for owned channel analytics to assess performance across your social and web accounts.
• Pulsar TRENDS: A Google-Trends-like tool that provides current and historical data on popular social and news media topics.

Pulsar integrates with other leading intelligence tools like Audiense, so businesses can more easily pass segmentation data between Insights and TRAC. 

7) Reputation.com

Primarily a reputation experience management (RXM) platform, Reputation helps businesses develop, promote, and maintain an online image that aligns with their brand. It also includes the following features: 

• A review booster to monitor, request, and respond to reviews across Google, Facebook, and review platforms
• Competitive intelligence to gauge brand position relative to competitors and the rest of the industry
•  Social media listening and management tools to understand and capitalize on customer sentiments
• A customer insights tool that uses natural language processing to identify customer feedback sentiment.

Optimize social listening data with audience intelligence

With the social media usage trend showing no sign of reversal, brands must delve deeper than just analyzing follows, likes, and comments. Use audience intelligence tools alongside your social media listening platforms to group users by common interests, behaviors, and tech habits for more targeted marketing.

A combined social listening and audience intelligence approach offers a more nuanced understanding of customers, giving you the material to create truly customer-centric content and messaging. 

Enrich your social listening data with Audiense Insights 

Audiense stands out as a pivotal tool in this domain, offering features like Insights and SOPRISM that enhance social listening on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. By combining your current social media listening tool with Audiense and SOPRISM, you now have an updated approach for generating value-rich insights from your audience. 

Key takeaways

Meltwater, Brandwatch, Agorapulse, and other social media listening platforms have revolutionized how brands perceive and interact with potential and existing customers on social media. 

However, deeper analysis needs to complement these insights to craft truly personalized marketing campaigns. This is where Audiense fits perfectly into your brand strategy — offering tools that enrich platform-specific social media listening data with audience intelligence to unlock a new dimension of understanding and engagement.

To explore the full potential of blending social media listening with audience intelligence, sign up for Audiense Insights for free today.