Social media listening tools for brand monitoring

Ultimate comparison
Social media listening tools for brand monitoring

We at Awario use our app to keep a close eye on our competitors, and we picked the most prominent of them (and Google Alerts) to compare to our platform.

General comparison

We’ve settled on testing and comparing Awario to the following social media monitoring tools: BrandMentions, Brand24, and Google Alerts.

They occupy more or less the same niche. All of them have a similar set of functions and the same target audience. But still some tools are deprived of features that may be crucial for some users.

This comparison will help you find software that fits you the best. So let’s kick off with the general overview table.

Awario
Awario
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brand24
Brand24
Google Alerts
Google Alerts
In-app interactions
(likes, replies, shares, etc.)
Sentiment analysis
Language filter
Sales prospecting
Slack integration
Tutorials
Mobile app
Email notifications
Free trial
Location filter Country, state, city Country Country Country

Awario is a social listening tool that analyzes online data gathered from other people’s profiles. It gathers data based on the keywords you provide: they can be your brand name and social media handles, niche-related words, the names of key persons, and so on.

Awario dashboard
Key features:
  • Track the growth in the number of your mentions and their collective reach
  • Sort mentions by positive, negative, and neutral with sentiment analysis
  • Identify top influencers by social network
  • Compare several alerts
  • Analyze progress with Awario’s analytics

Its main strength is powerful and detailed social analytics. Awario breaks down social media monitoring data by a number of metrics:

  • Mention growth
  • Reach
  • Sentiment
  • Languages and locations of the mentions
  • Gender and age of the authors
  • The online source of the mentions
  • The most used words and phrases for the found conversations

Convenient reports are based on use-cases. Awario offers three types of reports:

  • Mention Statistics report shows all the analytics around one alert, i.e. one set of keywords you wish to monitor.
  • Alert Comparison report allows you to benchmark several brands against each other which lets you, for example, compare your brand with your competitors, or compare the reputation of two different products you sell.
  • Influencers report ranks the most prominent voices that mentioned your keywords for each source to help you with influencer marketing.

The social media listening tool is designed to be truly all-purpose. It supports multiple platforms and lets you analyze data from a number of Internet sources including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Vimeo, blogs, news sites, forums, and the rest of the web. Awario can go back as far as 10 years ago to find relevant mentions and you get access to historical data without additional payments.

The special Boolean search mode enables you to and find only the exact social media data you need. All in all, the tool gives you every feature to get as much relevant social media listening data as possible.

With BrandMentions social media monitoring solution, you can set up alerts and monitor multiple sources in real time. The solution also provides an opportunity to measure the success of your marketing campaigns and to analyze competitors’ strategies.

BrandMentions
Key features:
  • Social measurement — measures campaigns, brands, and products for quantitative metrics such as conversation volume, and brand’s share of voice
  • Influencer identification — shows who is talking about the brand along with their influence across social communities
  • Sentiment analysis — determines whether brand mentions are positive, negative, or neutral.
  • Social reporting — provides custom reports and dashboards to measure social activity and engagement

BrandMentions is a great option for agencies that run multiple clients. The unlimited number of projects in the Enterprise/Agency plan allows aggregating a comprehensive list of relevant mentions in real-time mode.

The dashboard displays data in an easily consumable format helping to look at the big picture. The customizable reports allow building a detailed stats overview of social media activity.

White-label reports, Boolean search, and real-time monitoring are available in agency-fitting plans, which reduces the solution opportunities for small businesses.

The social media tool enables you to gather, analyze, and visualize data with no special training required.

Brand 24
Key features:
  • A Discussion Volume chart, showing the dynamic changes in the number of social media mentions and interactions
  • Filter for the actual list of mentions: you can turn on/off any sources or sort the social media posts using multiple in-built filters
  • An influencer score for each social media author, but you can also go to Analytics panel to see the posts with the biggest number of interactions, and the ones by the most popular authors
  • The Quotes panel displays the most emotionally charged social media comments and conversations (highlighting the common positive and negative words for your convenience)

Brand24 seems to have the most flexible notification settings: you can set notifications to be sent in real-time, everyone, six or twelve hours, daily, weekly, etc. You can also set a specific number of results over which notifications will be sent, or a percent change in mentions volume to get a ‘Storm’ notification. There’s also a mobile app and Slack integration.

While being a very handy aggregator, Brand24 doesn’t enable you to comment/reply to any posts, or to interact with authors in-app, so you can only track and analyze the results, or click on any mention to get to the original post page and reply from your profile in the browser.

If you need to know what is said about your online reputation, probably you have already heard of Google Alerts.

Google Alert

Whenever someone mentions the subject of the notice you entered, or rather the query, the service sends notifications and alerts to your e-mail address. You receive all the web pages that contain your keyword. This way you can stay up to date on your favorite topics or be notified when your brand is mentioned on the net (brand monitoring).

It is important to specify that the information is retrieved from websites, blogs, and searches within the Google network. Social media, forums, and the deep web are not considered.

You have the possibility to set the following search parameters:

  • Frequency of receiving alerts
  • Types of sites you want to use as a source
  • Search language
  • Research region
  • Amount of results (only the best or all)

Remind that the application is usable only if you have a Google account. Once registered, connect to the official website home page and start setting up the various search queries.

Which tool to choose?

To summarize, each of the social listening tools has its advantages which make it the best fit for a certain type of business.

Awario

Meets the needs of solopreneurs, small businesses, and mid-size companies. It has a reasonable price for the number of data it offers. With the Leads module, Awario is gaining popularity among agencies and larger companies.

BrandMentions

Is aimed at entrepreneurs, medium-sized organizations and agencies. Its subscription plans have way fewer mentions compared to Awario. However, unlike other tools it offers image monitoring.

Brand24

Suits those looking for simple free solutions with their complimentary tools or a robust social listening and analytics service for Enterprise-level companies (with paid plans).

Google Alerts

Is best for individuals or companies which are okay with real-time data from the web, news, and blog sources.

Pricing options

I don’t think there is no point in considering Google Alerts in these tables. It’s free and has an unlimited amount of mentions and keywords.

Other tools have a flexible pricing model, which is the same for all. They offer a free trial to test the ins-and-outs of the product. After the trial expires, there are three to four pricing options.

Awario
Awario
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brand24
Brand24
Mentions/mo 30K 10K 2K
Alerts 3 3 3
Keywords Unlimited 15 3
Boolean search
Influencers
Reports
Historical data Unlimited 6 months 1 month
Real-time mention search
Customer support
Data export
White-labelling
Users 1 2 1
Account manager
Pricing $39/mo $99/mo $59/mo
Awario
Awario
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brand24
Brand24
Mentions/mo 300K 50K 25K
Alerts 15 10 12
Keywords Unlimited 50 12
Boolean search
Influencers
Reports
Historical data Unlimited 1 year 12 month
Real-time mention search
Customer support
Data export
White-labelling
Users 10 10 Unlimited
Account manager
Pricing $119/mo $299/mo $179/mo
Awario
Awario
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brandmention
Brand24
Brand24
Mentions/mo 1M 150K 100K
Alerts 100 Unlimited 25
Keywords Unlimited Unlimited 25
Boolean search
Influencers
Reports
Historical data Unlimited 10 year 12 month
Real-time mention search
Customer support
Data export
White-labelling
Users Unlimited 20 Unlimited
Account manager
Pricing $399/mo $499/mo $299/mo

Brand24 also offers Team plan that stands between Individual and Pro plans. In the Team plan, you won’t be able to find influencers, get reports and white-label them. You can monitor less alerts and get fewer mentions. Though the plan provides far wider analytics and the Boolean search feature.

To clear things up a bit, here are the stats on the number of mentions each company offers for $1:

  • Awario offers 769 mentions for $1 in Starter plan
  • BrandMentions offers 101 mentions for $1
  • Brand24 offers 33 mentions for $1

There are 2 521 mentions for $1 in Awario’s Pro plan, 167 in BrandMentions’s plan, and 139 mentions for $1 in Brand24.

You’ll get 2 506 mentions for $1 in Awario’s Enterprise plan while Brand24 offers 334. BrandMentions’s enterprise/agency plan gives you 300 for $1.

How to choose a social listening tool?

Even with the handy tables and comparisons, choosing a social listening software for brand monitoring is not easy. Here are some steps to consider before you invest in a service.

1. Decide on your objectives

Identify the most important aspects that suit your needs: are you interested in tracking your own social channels or do you want to keep track of what’s being said about you elsewhere?

Is your goal to primarily track your online reputation and handle social customer requests or do you want to conduct comprehensive social listening research on your audience, market, and competitors?

Maybe your aim is measuring the success of a campaign you’ve launched or it could be finding brand influencers. There can be a hundred reasons for investing in social monitoring, you just need to find your own and get started from there.

2. Establish your budget

Anticipate how much resources, including time and money, you are willing to invest in the monitoring process. It is always important to assess whether the sum of money you are willing to pay is directly proportional with your needs and the services you expect from the monitoring tool.

3. Investigate what customer support each tool provides

In most cases, the success of your social media monitoring relies on the training and guidance provided by the support team once you’ve purchased the tool.

In order to be able to measure your ROI successfully, it is vital to know how to make the most of the tool and how to take advantage of all its features.

4. Make sure you check thoroughly the services that each tool offers

Depending on your objectives, the quality of all sorts of different features can sway your decision entirely.

Things like data coverage (which media platforms does the tool crawl, how many languages, locations, etc.), whether it provides sentiment analysis, its approach to SPAM and duplicates and plenty of other criteria can vary wildly between each solution.

5. Test and compare

Snoop around for demos and free trials to get a better insight into each tool and explore its ease of use.

Always be open to trying other tools, as even though your current social media monitoring tool might satisfy your needs, it isn’t necessarily the best one on the market.

Final thoughts

The fact that 72% of American citizens use at least one social media platform shows that there’s a great chance that people are talking about your business online.

Scanning all the social platforms manually is a monkey job, so why not delegate it to the app? The table above shows that Awario is the best value for its money. It offers such perks as Boolean search, unlimited historical data, in-house crawlers that scan 13 billion pages daily, etc. for the same price (or even lower) as competitors.