Free social media listening tools: A successful social media strategy stems from a comprehensive understanding of your audience. What they care about and discuss online is crucial to producing resonating content. Keeping your brand, competitors, and industry topics in mind, many social listening tools help assess and monitor conversations. Being part of these discussions enables you to collect useful insights, make informed marketing decisions, and keep your content relatable.
Through this blog, you’ll learn about the top free social media listening tools that you should think of using. Fortunately, these tools will help you gain useful insights and optimize your social media approach.
What are social media listening tools?
Social Media listening tools monitor and assess digital conversations related to businesses. These apps or software are built to help brands keep track of keywords, hashtags, mentions, and other related information. Nowadays, such tools are being used by businesses to gather data from social media platforms to understand how consumers identify and experience their business.
Such tools enable you to assess key metrics and information that can influence your business decisions and ensure growth. For example, social media listening software can track online conversations to highlight emerging trends and the most used hashtags in your industry. By leveraging this information provided by such software, you can create marketing campaigns that match your audience’s interests, ensuring brand relevance and appeal.
Top 15 free social media listening tools in 2025
1.SparkToro
SparkToro is one of the best free social listening tools for audience research and helps you receive a deep understanding of your ideal consumer. It reveals which social platforms your target audience interacts with most, the keywords they look for, the podcasts they listen to, and the online groups they participate in.
Simply enter a site or keyword relatable to your audience, and SparkToro gives insights that are more than just basic social listening. It provides a wider view of your audience’s behaviors and preferences, resulting in you refining your social media strategies and increasing your overall marketing approach.
2. AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is amongst the best free social media listening tools that help users identify the questions people are asking about your offerings, brand, or industry. For instance, if you sell acne treatment skincare, you can see the specific queries your potential clients are searching for. This information lets you produce content that directly responds to their concerns for building trust and engagement.
Although it doesn’t have advanced features, AnswerThePublic is a great option for beginners or those on a limited budget. This is an excellent way to integrate social listening into your marketing strategy without getting into unnecessary trouble.
3. Brandwatch
Brandwatch is recognized as a detailed social listening tool having social media management and influencer marketing features. While its plans aren’t clearly listed, it’s considered a premium option, combining three powerful tools into one package for much more convenience.
The social listening process on Brandwatch follows a four-step approach: collect conversations about industry trends, keywords, and brand mentions from across the web, categorize the data into certain groups such as complaints, feedback, and opinions, AI-drive specs to perform sentiment analysis on the data, and leverage the insights gained to optimize your marketing strategy. Although its user interface may present a slight learning curve at first, once you’re familiar with it, you’ll have a wealth of valuable data available to guide your strategy.
4. Sprout Social
Listening tools from Sprout Social provide deep insights into discussions that matter to your business. By using this tool, you can monitor brand-related conversations across several social channels and online sources so you stay informed in real time.
By analyzing huge amounts of data, Sprout helps brands uncover important trends, identify audience sentiment, and gauge reactions to products, campaigns, and industry topics. These details let you one step ahead of market shifts and explore lucrative opportunities to expand your business.
5. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is a powerful content research and monitoring tool for discovering trending topics and assessing popular content. It lets you track social media trends, monitor brand mentions, and stay tuned on major industry conversations.
With customizable notifications for certain keywords, topics, and brands, BuzzSumo guarantees you never miss important updates, becoming an essential tool for marketers and creators.
6. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is one of the renowned social listening tools free and keeps users updated on relatable online discussions by tracking specific keywords, topics, or brand names. It scans the search engine for new content and provides curated alerts based on your preferences. You can sort your results by language, region, and source. This ensures that you will receive only the most relevant updates at your chosen frequency.
7. Meltwater
Meltwater is an innovative media analytics app that helps turn online conversations into actionable insights. Monitoring chatters across online platforms, Meltwater helps businesses decode audience sentiment, understand emerging trends, and predict potential complexities.
With real-time monitoring and previous data analysis, Meltwater empowers brands to optimize their tactics, increase engagement, and stay ahead in a dynamic media landscape.
8. Exploding Topics
If you’re looking for a trend-spotting tool to stay ahead of the curve, look no further because Explosive Topics can do it all for you. It is a free social monitoring tool that can identify emerging topics before they become mainstream.
With this, you can identify emerging competitors and predict customer needs in advance. By assessing huge amounts of data, Exploding Topics gives insights into industry shifts so you have a competitive edge in market trends and innovation.
9. Exolyt
Exolyt is analytics software that helps unlock TikTok trends and audience emotion. On this social media listening tool, you can track mentions, assess engagement, and track specific accounts, hashtags, and videos for deep insights.
Having real-time information on trending sounds, effects, and influencers, Exolyt lets creators refine their strategies and stand out in the fast-moving world of TikTok.
10. X Pro
Premium social media management software X Pro streamlines real-time monitoring. It enables users to track ample conversations at the same time via customizable columns, making it easier to follow trending topics and breaking news.
Being able to organize posts from curated lists, X Pro helps you to focus on the most relatable chatters and stay updated more efficiently.
11. Mention
Mention is not one of the social media monitoring tools free for novices; in actuality, it’s a platform for social media managers having dedicated resources for detailed social listening. With this tool, you can set up notifications for specific keywords, unlock up to 2 years of previous data, and track mentions across a range of platforms, such as blogs, new websites, forums, and even radio and TV on higher-tier plans.
Despite being a paid software, it helps discover popular influencers, spot evolving trends, and compare brands to competitors. In essence, Mention offers more than what free tools usually provide.
12. Keyhole
This is an upgraded social listening tool for businesses looking to have valuable insight into their audience’s behavior and needs. It lets users track targeted hashtags, keywords, and influential individuals, giving you a clearer picture of your audience’s interests.
Through its predictive analytics, Keyhole forecasts trends and helps identify potential viral moments so you can plan and optimize your content strategy in real time.
13. HubSpot’s Social Media Management tool
Social Media Management software from HubSpot helps businesses get one step ahead by tracking major conversations in no time. Using customizable keyword monitoring, it emphasizes important interactions that may need immediate attention.
Automated email alerts ensure that sales teams never miss lucrative engagement opportunities, whereas AI-driven suggestions make decision-making easy and improve response strategies.
14. Brand24
A robust social listening tool that provides detailed monitoring is Brands24. The tool is powered by AI and provides real-time insights that are both actionable and reliable. You can use this social media monitoring tool for free to track the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
However, one of the significant downsides of Brand24 is its price. To unlock its advanced features, you’ll need to switch from the basic plan to either the Team or Pro plan. After that, it will become more suitable for businesses or agencies that can justify the cost.
15. Awario
Awario offers real-time insights on business and keyword mentions in all languages, making it an excellent choice for brands planning to expand worldwide. The app helps users spot key influencers and brand advocates driving conversations in their field. Awario also supports social selling by discovering potential leads, especially by tracking posts on X (formerly Twitter) where users are regularly seeking products like yours.
Benefits of social media listening tools
Social media monitoring free tools help users sort through large amounts of online conversations. Their purpose is to keep the user focused on what matters, saving them the need for non-stop manual searching. By assessing mentions, trends, and audience sentiment, these software provide useful insights that can increase your brand’s strategy in many ways.
1. Find rising trends
Social listening tools identify conversations around key topics and hashtags, as well as enable users to spot emerging trends in advance. This gives them the advantage of acting before their competitors, ensuring their brand stays one step ahead.
2. Track and protect brand image
These software capture brand mentions across social media channels, even when your handle isn’t tagged. This enables you to stumble upon potential reputation risks early and respond quickly using the right approach to maintain a positive brand image.
3. Receive insights into consumer preferences and challenges
Evaluating social media discussions can help you identify what your audience is interested in and what they express frustration about. With this, you will be able to better tailor your approach to address the needs and expectations.
4. Discover potential sales leads
Free social media monitoring tools help monitor conversations where people are seeking solutions you provide. By interacting at the right period with helpful suggestions, you can convert these discussions into lucrative sales opportunities.
Conclusion
To wrap up things, social listening tools are priceless for gaining insights into what your audience is discussing. These apps help you stay ahead of trends, manage your brand goodwill, and unlock new opportunities. However, leveraging these software, for sure, requires more than just tracking mentions. You need to mix them with direct consumer interactions and active community engagement to understand and meet your audience’s needs thoroughly. The free social media listening tools given above can provide useful, actionable information to help refine your marketing strategy and increase meaningful connections with your audience.
