Top Tools for Social Media Listening

By Insight Platforms

• article

• Social Media Listening/Intelligence
• Artificial Intelligence
• Sentiment Analysis
• Text Analytics
• Influencer Analytics
• Audience/Consumer Segmentation
• Machine Learning
• Visual Analytics
• Dashboards

Understanding sentiments and online interactions around your brands, hot topics and niche areas has always been crucial. Social intelligence platforms are essential for brand tracking, competitor analysis, crisis management, trend monitoring, and audience profiling.

Learn more about social listening in our explainer:

There’s also no ranking implied by the order. For a complete list of all social media listeinng platforms, browse the directory here.

YouScan

YouScan is an AI-powered social media listening platform with industry-leading image recognition capabilities. It reveals consumer opinions and helps manage brand reputation across 500,000 media sources, processing 500 million data points daily. The platform is designed to uncover consumer opinions, track sentiment, and support brand reputation management in real-time.

Its Visual Insights feature goes beyond logo detection to identify objects, scenes, and demographic cues in images, offering a richer view of how products are used and perceived in everyday contexts. From brand tracking and crisis response to competitor benchmarking, market research and influencer discovery, YouScan supports a broad range of use cases.

Watch YouScan in action:

Pulsar

Pulsar is an audience intelligence platform that blends AI, human analysis, and a wide range of data sources to reveal how people engage with topics, brands, and cultural trends. Pulsar focuses on understanding communities — how different groups discuss the same subject, and how narratives shift across platforms. It draws from social media, news, search data, and first-party sources to build a multidimensional view of the conversation.

Designed for both marketing and communications teams, Pulsar supports a range of use cases, including audience segmentation, trend forecasting, media planning, and campaign analysis. Its language detection, sentiment analysis, and visualisation tools are robust, with industry-specific AI models.

Talkwalker (with discover.ai)

Talkwalker is a consumer intelligence platform that covers social listening, media monitoring, social benchmarking, audience insights, customer feedback analytics, and social content ratings. It tracks conversations across 30 social networks and more than 150 million websites — including videos, images, and podcasts.

From brand health to emerging trends, Talkwalker helps teams spot issues early, measure campaign impact, and uncover growth opportunities.

The company acquired discover.ai to strengthen its position in the space. discover.ai blends machine learning with human analysis to extract insights from text and visuals across sources like internal documents, brand websites, expert blogs, online magazines, communities and forums.

Converseon

Converseon is a decision intelligence platform that leverages AI and natural language processing (NLP) to transform unstructured conversational data into predictive and strategic insights. Designed to support strategic decision-making, it helps organisations understand emerging trends, measure sentiment, and anticipate market movements.

At the core of its offering is Conversus.AI, a SaaS platform for model governance and NLP management. This is supported by a suite of tools, Conversus Connect, NLP and PRISM, each serving a distinct purpose, from secure data integration and analysis to outcome-driven reporting.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is a social suite that combines consumer intelligence, social media management, influencer marketing and media monitoring into a single AI-powered platform. It enables deep research, brand monitoring, content creation, and consumer engagement across all major social media channels.

The platform gives users access to a large archive of consumer opinion, enriched by proprietary and generative AI to help spot trends early. A collaborative content calendar supports end-to-end campaign planning, while unified inboxes streamline community management. With smart alerts across 100 million sources, Brandwatch also helps protect brand reputation in real-time.

Pi Datametrics

Pi Datametrics is a search intelligence platform designed to help businesses optimise their SEO strategies and drive organic growth. It combines advanced software, data analytics, and expert insights to provide a comprehensive view of the search landscape. The platform enables users to identify commercial opportunities and risks, monitor share of voice, and track performance across various search engine results page (SERP) features, including AI Overviews.

Pi Datametrics allows for in-depth analysis of keyword performance and competitor activity over time. Its integration capabilities, such as Pi Sync and API access, facilitate seamless connection with business intelligence platforms, enabling teams to visualise search data within their existing workflows.

Audiense

Audiense is an audience intelligence platform designed to support audience strategies and marketing decisions through digital consumer insights. It enables marketers to segment audiences based on demographics, interests and behaviours, and connects social data with existing tech stacks to support more tailored targeting and activation.

The platform’s data foundation has been strengthened by recent acquisitions, including Soprism, Affinio and Tweetbinder, which have expanded its data sources and integration capabilities. Audiense also offers tools for influencer and sponsorship identification, media planning and content development.

Meltwater

Meltwater is a consumer intelligence platform that blends AI, data science and market research to turn unstructured online data into actionable insights. It provides real-time analysis across global data sources, helping organisations track consumer sentiment, monitor media coverage and uncover trends as they emerge.

Its suite includes tools for media intelligence and relations, social listening and analytics, social media management, consumer and sales intelligence, influencer marketing, data and API integration, as well as its own AI. Additional features such as real-time alerts, publishing, reporting, and API integration support a wide range of use cases, from brand monitoring to strategic planning.

Emplifi (previously Socialbakers)

Emplifi is a social media management platform that combines social marketing, commerce, and customer care. It includes tools for publishing, content management, social listening, influencer collaboration, user-generated content and community engagement, enabling brands to connect with audiences across all digital touchpoints.

The platform uses AI for sentiment detection, content optimisation, automating responses and more, helping teams work more efficiently and at scale. Its Unified Analytics feature brings together data from social media, customer interactions and voice-of-the-customer sources to provide a 360° view of brand performance and customer experience.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is an AI-powered customer experience management platform designed to help front-office teams deliver an enhanced customer experience. It offers four product suites — Sprinklr Service, Social, Insights, and Marketing — which support publishing, engagement, social listening, advertising, analytics and more, across over 30 digital channels, enabling brands to deliver consistent experiences at scale.

The platform’s AI capabilities power sentiment analysis, automation and real-time decision-making. A standout feature is its Digital Twin technology, which provides intelligent, autonomous versions of your brand or team that can drive conversations, execute tasks, and streamline workflows.

Quid

Quid is an AI-powered consumer and market intelligence platform that analyses large volumes of structured and unstructured data to surface meaningful insights. Drawing from millions of datasets daily — including social, search, market and internal sources — it identifies real-time patterns, emerging trends and shifts in consumer sentiment.

The platform includes a suite of tools — Quid Monitor, Predict, Compete, Connect and Discover — designed to track conversations, forecast trends, benchmark competitors, and uncover opportunities for innovation. Its visualisation and modelling features help users explore complex data relationships and better understand the market landscape. Quid’s own AI agent, Q, uses prompt-based queries to deliver fast, practical insights from custom-built market models.

Synthesio

Synthesio by Ipsos is an AI-powered consumer intelligence platform that combines real-time social listening with advanced analytics to help brands understand and act on online conversations. It provides insights into consumer sentiment, emerging trends, and market dynamics.

The platform offers a suite of tools, such as: Social Listening Dashboards, to analyse what consumers are saying in real-time; Topic Modelling, a trend discovery engine; Beam, a real-time social media command centre. One of its key capabilities is the Signals GenAI feature, a proprietary generative AI platform app, which transforms real-time consumer signals into actionable insights within 60 seconds.

Nichefire

Nichefire is a predictive cultural trends intelligence platform that uses AI to help brands decode cultural insights and anticipate market shifts. It synthesises data from diverse sources, including social media, blogs, search traffic, news, and influencers, to provide a comprehensive view of culture, encompassing both fast-emerging and long-term cultural trends.

The platform’s approach to cultural listening enables brands to get a deep understanding of cultural shifts, market dynamics, and current and future consumer behaviour.

Onclusive Social (previously Digimind)

Onclusive Social is a media intelligence and social listening platform that delivers real-time insights into customer sentiment, competitive performance, and market trends. The platform offers a suite of solutions, including brand reputation management, competitive intelligence, consumer insights, influencer identification, trend tracking, and campaign analysis.

With access to over 25 social media channels and more than 800 million online sources, Onclusive Social allows users to research, collect, analyse, and report on data all within a single platform. It also provides two years of historical data access to better understand market shifts. Its AI Sense feature combines AI with human expertise, enabling users to automate tasks such as smart tagging, sentiment analysis, and visual listening, streamlining the process of extracting actionable insights.

This is just an abridged list of top tools for social media listening. There are many more platforms available. This is simply a starting point. For more information, tools, and resources, take a look at the Social Media Listening/Intelligence category page.

Author