The 7 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools in 2025 (+ Why Monitoring Is Critical)

No one likes to be left on ‘seen’ — not your friends, not your partner, and definitely not your social media community.

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking your brand mentions, post comments, and direct messages (DMs) on all major social media channels.

Sounds simple, right? Reply to every comment, DM, and brand mention you receive. But messages start slipping through the cracks as your social media presence expands.

• Maybe you’re on many social media channels, and it’s hard to respond everywhere promptly
• Maybe your social followers have ballooned rapidly (yay!), and the number of messages and customer queries you receive is piling by the minute
• Maybe you’re held by a thread and respond to every DM, comment, and direct tag, but miss the organic brand mentions (where you’re not directly tagged)

Enter: Social media monitoring tools. These are tools that collate all your social media conversations under one roof. In this article, I’ll share a list of the seven best ones.

But before that, let’s tackle some common FAQs:

• Why is social media monitoring essential for your social media strategy?
• What’s the difference between social media monitoring and social listening?
• Do you need a social media monitoring software when you’re able to track everything manually?

4 benefits of social media monitoring

What’s the harm in post and ghost? Social media monitoring is often an overlooked part of a social strategy. After all, if you’re posting consistently, is it really a problem?

Here’s the thing: Social media is a two-way street. It’s a place to build a community of people who might benefit from your product or service. Posting without interacting with your followers is like treating social media as a billboard on a highway.

Social media monitoring upholds the sentiment and potential of social media as a whole — communicating with people and forming strong connections. But even beyond this, social media monitoring has plenty of benefits to contribute to the success of your marketing strategies:

1. It helps you understand customer sentiment

Social media analytics are great, but data isn’t everything. Social media monitoring tools help you gain qualitative feedback about your product or service and understand what people actually feel about your social media content.

For example, skincare influencer Aishwarya Kandpal shared how Solved Labs could improve their packaging experience using her Instagram Stories. She also shared how her community had the same complaints from the brand. 

The above is a great example of how social media monitoring can help you capture useful customer feedback about your products or services from actual buyers. (It’s not clear if the brand ever responded to Aishwarya, though their packaging has not changed since she shared the feedback).

2. It protects your reputation

Brand reputation is a fickle thing: One piece of misinformation or misunderstanding and your image could take a knock. Social media monitoring could come to the rescue here — it helps you spot negative comments, complaints, and crises early on and nip them in the bud.

For example, the curly hair care brand Fix My Curls faced a scam when a marketplace sold low-quality dupes of their products. When customer complaints rolled in, the brand jumped in with the armor of social media monitoring to educate customers on spotting a fake product. By reacting to the news on time and providing a new, real product if a customer received a dupe, Fix My Curls preserved its brand reputation.

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Reputation management is a crucial aspect of running a business. Social media monitoring helps you avert a crisis on time and understand consumer sentiment.

3. It helps you improve customer service

Social media is becoming many people’s go-to medium to voice complaints and concerns: 79% of customers even expect brands to respond to a complaint (made using social media) within 24 hours.

How do you stay on top of these conversations and ensure customer satisfaction? Social media monitoring. It ensures you don’t miss any brand mentions and answer all customer questions quickly.

Social media monitoring tools can be particularly helpful for customer service. They collect all social interactions related to your brand in one place, so you can address every query without missing a beat or drowning in notifications.

At Buffer, a subset of our customer advocacy team keeps a close eye on all our social channels, ready to jump in if a Buffer user is experiencing issues (or even just wants to express how much they enjoy Buffer) — whether they tag us or not! It’s a powerful way to make sure all our customers feel seen and heard (and get help ASAP if they need it!).

4. It provides content ideas

When you monitor audience sentiment using social media monitoring, you’re gaining a deeper understanding of your target audience.

For instance, there may be a topic that gets many comments because your followers have tons of follow-up questions. Maybe it’s time to start a social media series on the subject. Perhaps you identify emerging trends where people’s opinions on a common industry topic are shifting — which encourages you to take a stance on the matter.

All of this wouldn’t be possible without social media monitoring.

Social media monitoring vs. social media listening

Social media monitoring is often used interchangeably with social listening. And while they are related, they aren’t the same thing.

• Social media monitoring is reactive. It’s the act of responding to online conversations about your brand.
• Social listening is proactive. It’s the process of uncovering insights and changes in your industry by keeping a pulse on online conversations.

What’s common? Social media monitoring and social listening both involve listening to your audience. However, in social media monitoring, you focus on what your target audience is saying about your brand. In social listening, you zoom out and analyze online conversations based on broader themes in your industry as a whole.

For example, let’s say you work in the publishing industry and sell e-readers.

• When you act on specific feedback or complaints about your e-reader — like slowness, bugs, appearance options, etc. — you’re practicing social media monitoring. You saw online conversations about your product and implemented customer feedback.
• When you monitor conversations about e-readers as a whole — like Amazon refusing to let you own books on Kindle, you’re practicing social listening. You saw social media conversations beyond your own brand and product and understood the current audience sentiment as a whole. The next step is determining where your product fits in, and how to participate in the discussion in a way that is true to your brand.

If you’re just getting started with your social efforts, begin with social media monitoring. It’s easier to get started with it and it’s also more important. Once you get the hang of monitoring, start embedding social listening, too.

Many social listening tools also include social media monitoring features. If you’re looking for a software that combines the two processes, check out our social listening tools list.

Do you need social media monitoring tools?

You can do social monitoring manually in the beginning — especially when you’re a social media manager with a tight budget. But as your social media presence grows, you’ll want deeper insights. And that’s when social media monitoring tools become essential.

Here are five reasons you might want to opt for a tool over manual social media monitoring.

• You might miss a few mentions — especially the ones you’re not tagged in. If you’re managing multiple channels, you may miss a few notifications here and there. And tracking mentions where your brand handle is not tagged isn’t easy or straightforward on most social media platforms.
• You’ll struggle to scale your social media efforts. It’s easy to respond to all comments, DMs, and mentions when you’re just starting out. But as you scale your marketing strategies, social media monitoring will become incredibly time-consuming — especially if you’re the solo social media manager of your brand. Social media monitoring tools centralize all social media conversations in one place — making the activity much faster.
• You won’t get real-time crisis alerts. Social media monitoring tools often provide real-time alerts — making crisis management smoother. Manually, you can’t track conversations about your brand 24/7.
• You’ll miss out on valuable insights. Social media monitoring tools don’t just provide a centralized dashboard — many also mark negative sentiment comments and share custom reports. You don’t gain these qualitative social media metrics analysis manually.
• You won’t be able to spot trends. Social media monitoring software often have trend tracking features — helping you spot a keyword frequently used in your DMs, a repetitive question from customers, or a common feedback. There are also ways to analyze when your brand mentions spikes and when they fall (especially if you’re in a seasonal business). Doing all of this manually is time-consuming and prone to error.

Manual social monitoring is definitely possible, but it’s limited in scalability and efficiency. Social monitoring tools automate the tedious tasks and save you tons of hours.

If you’re on a tight budget, invest in an all-in-one social media management tool that can help you not only track mentions, but also schedule posts, create reports, save ideas, and analyze social media performance. You’ll find a few of them in the social monitoring tools list in the next section.

7 best social media monitoring tools for creators and marketers

There are mainly three types of monitoring tools:

• Dedicated social monitoring tools: These tools can track brand mentions, respond to them, and analyze conversations (only brand-centric) on various social media platforms. Using these tools, you can’t identify larger industry trends or do any other social media management tasks.
• Social listening tools that also have monitoring features: These tools are great for both social listening and social media monitoring. They have a feature set for both — you can monitor conversations about your brands and identify emerging trends in your niche. But they don’t have social media management features.
• Social media management tools: Some social media management platforms have social listening and monitoring features, too. You can do all social media management tasks using these tools — scheduling posts, monitoring relevant conversations, tracking mentions, and analyzing social media performance. The only downside here is that the listening and monitoring features often aren’t as strong as dedicated tools. Or if they are, the tool’s heavy on the pocket.

In the list below, you’ll find a mix of all the above tools — there should be one that fits your budget and needs!

1. Buffer

Best social media monitoring tool for creators and small business owners

Price: $6/month/channel. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Supported platforms: Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X, YouTube

Buffer is a social media management tool — it can help you schedule posts, store ideas, analyze performance, create reports, and engage with your audience. All from one tab.

My favorite thing? How easy it is to use. When you log in and start exploring, everything just clicks — the design is intuitive and user-friendly. You can hit the ground running with no learning curve.

When it comes to engagement features, Buffer helps you:

• Respond to comments on your Facebook and Instagram accounts
• Highlight comments with a question or negative sentiment
• Respond fast using keyboard hotkeys and smart emojis

Buffer is perfect for creators and small business owners who are just getting started with their social media monitoring efforts. It’s best to pair Buffer with a dedicated social listening or monitoring tool as you scale. Buffer has a free plan, but it doesn’t include the monitoring features.

Get started with a free trial of Buffer. 

2. Verlynk

Best social media monitoring tool for filtering your conversations

Price: Free plan available for three social media channels. Paid plans begin at $9.99/month. All paid plans have a 30-day free trial.

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X, YouTube

Verlynk is another social media management tool that can help you do a host of things — such as scheduling posts, maintaining a content calendar, and monitoring your analytics.

Its monitoring tool is called “Unified Inbox” because it helps you collect conversations from all your social media accounts in one place. You can also create canned responses for frequently asked questions.

My favorite feature is the ability to filter all your comments, messages, and mentions. Verlynk allows you to apply filters based on the social channels, audience sentiment, message type, timeline, and conversation status.

These customizable filters are great for:

• Conducting a qualitative analysis of a specific time, social channels, sentiment, etc.
• Assigning different team members different types of messages to track their performance and capitalize on their strengths
• Tag conversations that need follow-ups or responses without letting them slip through the cracks
• Slice and dice the social media data from your messages to spot patterns

You can also set up real-time alerts for the supported social channels if you wish to. Overall, Verlynk is best for use cases where you get a large number of messages: Think social media agencies or companies that are present on a large number of social channels.

Sign up for Verlynk.

3. Eclincher

Best social media monitoring tool for brick-and-mortar businesses

Price: Plans start at $149/month. Paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok

Eclincher is an excellent social monitoring tool for businesses that have a physical location, thanks to its local SEO features. It has AI-powered insights to boost your local search rankings, keep your business details accurate across social platforms, and help you implement your social media strategy.

Along with the traditional unified inbox features, Eclicnher also offers geo-location-based listening to help you understand your customers better.

Its AI features also help you conduct a sentiment analysis by marking comments as positive, negative, or neutral. You can even monitor how audience sentiment has evolved over time.

It’s a great tool, but since Eclincher can help you manage social and local SEO, the price tag reflects it. But if you are considering having a social and local SEO strategy, Eclincher is a good way to combine both.

Schedule a demo with Eclincher.

4. Octolens

Best social media monitoring tool for B2B SaaS brands

Price: Plans start at $59/month. All paid plans have a 7-day free trial.

Supported platforms: Bluesky, Dev, Github, HackerNews, LinkedIn, Reddit, Stack Overflow, X, YouTube

Octolens is a great brand monitoring tool for B2B SaaS companies. It’s a social media tracker that tracks not only your brand mentions but also your competitors' mentions to conduct a competitive analysis.

Its AI feature filters for relevant conversations so you never miss any critical discussion related to your business. You can also set up getting real-time alerts on Slack, email, and Webhook.

Octolens is best for B2B SaaS businesses because it tracks the relevant channels and publications in the industry, such as HackerNews and GitHub. It even monitors newsletters for brand mentions.

Start a free trial of Octolens.

5. YouScan

Best social media monitoring tool for image monitoring

Price: Plans start at $299/month, billed annually.

Supported platforms: Not specified

YouScan is a well-known listening tool that also has excellent social monitoring capabilities. Its standout feature is its AI-powered image recognition. This means you can track not only mentions when someone mentions/tags your brand name, but also spot your logo in images on the internet.

This means you can collect much more relevant conversations about your business in social media posts — even if your brand name isn’t included within the post. You can also detect any counterfeits or negative visual mentions.

YouScan doesn’t have the traditional inbox management features to help you respond to your audience directly, though. It’s better as an add-on to your social management software or a dedicated monitoring tool. It’s also expensive, but powerful if spotting your brand out in the wild is critical.

Request a demo of YouScan.

6. Mention

Best social media monitoring tool for monitoring your brand across the web

Price: Plans start at $49/month. All paid plans have a 14-day free trial.

Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X

Mention is one of the most comprehensive monitoring software on this list. You’ll get the most out of its potential when you also use it for social listening.

When tracking mentions, it doesn’t just scan the key metrics and social conversations, but also media coverage from multiple networks across the globe — like news sites, blogs, forums, and review websites. In the U.S. and Canada, it even performs sentiment analysis on radio and television.

If you need a complete 360-degree view of how your brand is perceived online, Mention can help you monitor conversations across the web. I also love its “word cloud” to classify your brand mentions online as positive, negative, or neutral.

Start a free trial of Mention.

7. Talkwalker

Best social media monitoring tool for enterprise companies

Price: Not publicly available

Supported platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, Vimeo, Pinterest, Twitch, Reddit, Disqus, and more

Talkwalker is an enterprise social media monitoring tool that combines the power of social listening, monitoring, and benchmarking in one software. You get valuable insights about your brand reputation and your audience from over 150 million sources across 239 countries. If your brand has a global audience, Talkwalker can pull them all together.

My favorite feature is its Blue Silk GPT, which helps you predict future trending topics, spot your logo in any media form (whether that’s images, videos, or GIFs), and conduct sentiment analysis. Its robust capabilities will not only help you practice social media monitoring (and listening!) at a higher level, but also save you loads of time.

Hootsuite has acquired Talkwalker, and the former’s enterprise plan includes social media management features along with Talkwalker’s monitoring capabilities. It is a good option to make the deal slightly more cost-effective. If you’re looking at alternatives, Brandwatch and Brand24 are also worth considering.

Book a demo with Talkwalker.

Social media monitoring tools are your ears on the internet

Social media monitoring is all about being a watchdog for brand mentions, comments, and messages. Picking the right tool can save you time and help you become more efficient: You don’t spend time manually responding to each comment on multiple platforms and also get neat valuable insights you would’ve missed otherwise.

It’s advisable to look for a monitoring tool that doubles as a social media management software or a social listening tool. This way, you get the most value for money and don’t replace your stack of social notifications with a stack of social tools.

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