Social media is the forum where audiences and customers share their passions, likes, dislikes, and everything in between. As a brand, why wouldn’t you want to tap into that intelligence?

People now spend over two hours daily on social media — it’s a gold mine for marketers who rely on social listening tools as a core data source.

The right platform can help you sift through the noise, find valuable insights, and stay ahead of trends.

This guide highlights the 11 best social media monitoring tools for 2026, from enterprise-level analytics powerhouses to specific listening software.

What are social media monitoring tools, and why do they matter?

Social media monitoring tools are software platforms that track and analyze online conversations about your brand, competitors, and industry across social networks. Many tools also cover mentions on news sites, blogs, forums, and other online sources.

Social media has become the go-to place for understanding how real people perceive your brand. Using a monitoring tool gives you access to unfiltered opinions about your brand, products, or services.

What social monitoring tools do

Social media monitoring tools go beyond basic keyword alerts by providing context and sentiment analysis — not just what people are saying, but how they feel and why.

A tool like Brandwatch Social Media Management scans over 500 million posts per day to surface the conversations that matter. Your tool can analyze sentiment, recurring topics, and trends to provide actionable insights in real time.

You can also stay ahead of your competitors and spot upcoming trends, while social listening provides a window into competitors’ mentions and consumer perception.

Why social monitoring matters

Consistently listening to your audience's praises and complaints keeps your social media strategy customer-focused and informs your broader marketing approach.

You’ll discover which features people love, which messages resonate, and where your brand might be falling short, allowing you to continuously refine your approach based on real audience feedback.

These sorts of insights are essential if you’re to stay ahead of the competition and understand your audience in minute detail.

How to choose the right social media monitoring tool?

Before we look at the 11 best social media monitoring tools out there, it’s worth considering what you need the software for. Here are the key factors to consider when choosing the right tool for you:

Features versus needs

What do you need, and what would be a “nice to have”? Make a list of must-have features (for example, language support, Boolean search filters, CRM integration) that align with your use case. This could be real-time alerts for every mention, deep historical data analysis, advanced analytics (sentiment, trends, image recognition), or just basic mention tracking. Then, find a tool that suits those needs.

Ease of use and collaboration

Consider who will use the tool. If you have a large team or multiple clients, look for user-friendly dashboards and collaboration features. An intuitive interface with clear visuals can save time and encourage your team to actually use the insights.

Scalability and budget

Where’s this tool going to sit in your workflow five years from now? Will you outgrow it, or do you need something that will expand with your development? Can you afford a complete suite now, or is it best to find a tool that offers add-ons when you need them later?

Match the tool to your organization’s size and budget. Enterprise-level social media management platforms, such as Brandwatch, offer expansive data coverage and customization options. Smaller businesses or solo users might prioritize affordable plans or even free tools.

Many platforms offer trials and demos — take advantage of these to test if the tool fits your workflow before committing.

The 11 best social media monitoring tools for 2026

Now you’ve had time to consider what you need, it’s time to dive into the 11 best social media monitoring tools available for 2026. Some of these tools offer simple monitoring, while others provide a full social media management suite to ensure you’re on top of your game.

1. Brandwatch

Brandwatch provides a comprehensive Social Media Management suite that includes social listening, publishing, AI-driven analytics, and extensive data coverage.

Launched way back in 2007, Brandwatch has evolved alongside social media and offers one of the most robust datasets on the market. It analyzes hundreds of millions of social media posts in real time and pulls the data into highly customizable, shareable dashboards.

The platform’s advanced AI (called Iris) automatically detects patterns and significant insights in your data, surfacing valuable findings you might have missed.

Users can slice data by demographics, sentiment, topics, and more to answer complex business questions.

What’s more, a tool like Image Insights gives users richer access to social media data by analyzing images for brand mentions and logos.

Brandwatch social media monitoring features

  • Unmatched coverage and historical data: Brandwatch tracks conversations across more than 100 million sources (social networks, blogs, forums, news, reviews) with years of historical data readily available.
  • Powerful analytics and AI insights: Iris AI finds patterns and anomalies automatically, helping you uncover insights (like emerging themes or sentiment shifts) without manual analysis. This data is condensed into customizable dashboards built with personalization in mind.
  • Enterprise collaboration and integrations: Brandwatch is designed for organizations of various sizes, with features like team permissions, alerts, and integration into workflows. Brandwatch integrates with PR tools and offers an open API, allowing you to seamlessly integrate social intelligence into other business systems.

Want to know more about how Brandwatch can help you monitor progress on social media platforms? Book a demo today and test the tool for yourself.

2. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a social media management and scheduling tool that features built-in social listening capabilities. While listening isn’t Agorapulse’s main focus, it provides monitoring for the major social media platforms, enough to keep on top of direct mentions and conversations around your profiles.

Like Brandwatch, Agorapulse has a unified social inbox that pulls all your comments, mentions, direct messages, and ad comments into one place.

For listening beyond your own account notifications, Agorapulse allows you to set up saved searches or tracking for specific keywords and hashtags on platforms like X and Instagram.

Agorapulse social media monitoring features

  • All-in-one tool: Agorapulse combines publishing, engagement, and listening in one dashboard. For daily social media work, you can schedule content, then switch to the listening tab to see what people are saying.
  • Basic listening capabilities: While not as advanced in listening as dedicated tools, Agorapulse covers the essentials, so you can monitor what’s going on. You can track keywords, spot when your brand is mentioned (even if not tagged), and quickly jump into conversations.

3. Sprinklr

Sprinklr weaves social listening into its wider customer experience management (CXM) platform. In doing so, it can perform social media monitoring alongside publishing, customer service, advertising, and more. 

The Sprinklr Insights (listening) module utilizes AI-powered analytics and extensive data sources beyond traditional social media platforms (including messaging apps, review sites, and blogs), enabling the detection of sentiment, emotions, and trends.

Sprinklr also offers customizable dashboards and streams to monitor brand health or campaign performance in real time.

Sprinklr social media monitoring features

  • Wide social channel coverage: Sprinklr captures conversations from multiple channels beyond standard social networks, including blogs, news, and forums, and funnels them into one place.
  • Customizable and scalable: Users can tailor dashboards with specific widgets and data visualizations to focus on the social media metrics that matter most. The trade-off is complexity: Sprinklr has a steep learning curve and requires an investment of time (and budget) to fully leverage.

4. Mention

Mention is a media monitoring tool that alerts you whenever your keywords are mentioned online. It’s used by startups, small businesses, and PR practitioners who need to track brand mentions with minimal effort.

You can monitor social media and respond to mentions directly from the platform, turning it into a basic social engagement dashboard. It also offers sentiment tagging (positive/neutral/negative) and basic analytics, such as mention counts over time and influencer identification.

Mention social media monitoring features

  • Real-time alerts: Mention delivers instant notifications, which are crucial for time-sensitive situations like PR issues or catching a potential lead.
  • Basic integrated engagement: Users can take action on mentions within the platform. If your social accounts are connected, you can monitor activity and then reply or assign the mention to a teammate without switching apps.

5. Brand24

Brand24 is a social media monitoring tool designed for businesses of all sizes to quickly gauge their online presence. Track posts and mentions on Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, and other social media platforms, as well as blogs, news sites, forums, podcasts, reviews, and more.

The platform provides a clear dashboard with metrics like mention volume over time, sentiment breakdown, and an “Influence Score” to highlight which mentions or authors have high impact.

You can also use it to conduct basic market research by monitoring a product category or industry term to see wider trends.

Brand24 social media monitoring features

  • Social insights: Users have access to sentiment analysis, top trending hashtags or topics, and an influence score to spot key influencers.
  • Alerting and notifications: The platform offers handy alerts, so you don’t have to constantly watch the dashboard. This way, you stay informed of important changes in conversations without babysitting the app.

6. Keyhole

Keyhole specializes in campaign monitoring and hashtag tracking. It provides live dashboards for hashtags and keywords, showing metrics like the number of posts, impressions, reach, top posts, and influential users. 

Keyhole also offers influencer analytics and trend reporting, which can be useful when monitoring social media. It can help forecast which topics or tags might go viral based on current momentum, giving you a predictive edge.

Keyhole social media monitoring features

  • Hashtag and campaign tracking: Users can track branded hashtags in real time to gauge campaign success from day one.
  • Influencer identification: The platform identifies key influencers and top posts for your tracked terms. If you’re monitoring a topic or campaign, Keyhole can surface the accounts driving the conversation.

7. Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers a social listening module that enables you to track conversations across major social networks, as well as blogs and forums. It comes as part of a wider package that includes scheduling, engagement, analytics, and listening.

Sprout has a smart inbox like Brandwatch, which aggregates all your incoming messages, comments, and mentions across profiles into one feed.

For listening, Sprout provides a range of query builders and templates to set up searches without needing advanced skills.

Sprout social media monitoring features

  • Unified platform: Managing and monitoring multiple social profiles is relatively simple in a unified platform for publishing, engagement, and listening.
  • Reporting tools: Beyond just monitoring mentions, Sprout offers analytics and listening insights. The reports produced enable users to present monitoring data to execs or clients.

8. Talkwalker

Talkwalker uses AI to monitor social media and glean analytics from social activity and websites. It emphasizes visual listening, where users can recognize logos and objects within images and videos posted online, and catch brand mentions even when your name isn’t explicitly mentioned in text.

Talkwalker is often used for advanced applications like market research, consumer insights, and brand reputation monitoring on a global scale.

Talkwater social media monitoring features

  • Large multi-source monitoring: Talkwalker looks beyond core social media sites to monitor brand mentions and images from across the internet, in much the same way as CisionOne media monitoring.
  • AI: Talkwalker uses AI-driven sentiment and theme analysis in its social monitoring suite. You can visualize data through world maps with hotspots of conversation, and analyze how different topics cluster together in your mentions.

9. Awario

Awario helps gauge social media performance through its Boolean search capabilities and software that monitors keywords. Users can create very specific filters and cut through noise to focus on relevant mentions.

Awario Leads is a tool that seeks to find posts where people ask for recommendations or express a need. It then alerts you if those posts match your business, so you can reach out. This is a useful way to monitor social media that isn’t available in all tools.

Awario social media monitoring features

  • Search filters: The Boolean search in Awario lets users create highly tailored listening queries. If you love precision in your searches, Awario gives you that control.
  • Lead generation feature: Awario Leads automatically scans for posts where someone is asking for a product recommendation or complaining about a pain point that your product solves. This proactive approach turns listening data into direct sales opportunities.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening platform that monitors text mentions across social media and the web, but its flagship feature is Visual Insights. Like Brandwatch and Talkwater, YouScan can analyze images in social media posts to detect logos, objects, and scenes. 

Beyond image insights, YouScan offers all the standard listening features, including keyword tracking, sentiment analysis, time-trend charts, top influencers, and a dashboard for comprehensive analysis. It supports multiple languages and sources and includes spam filtering to reduce noise from bots or irrelevant mentions.

YouScan social media monitoring features

  • Visual listening: Use visual analytics to identify your brand’s logo, products, or relevant scenes within images posted online. Few tools outside the top-tier ones, like Brandwatch, offer this level of image recognition.
  • Consumer insights: By combining what social media users say (text mentions) with what they show (images), YouScan gives a holistic understanding of consumer behavior and preferences.

11. Meltwater

Meltwater blends traditional media monitoring (news, press, broadcast) with social media tracking. You can see how a story trends in the press alongside what’s happening on X, Facebook, TikTok, and other platforms, all in one tool.

While Meltwater’s social listening capabilities are solid, its core strength lies in its wider media coverage. It may be too large for many users’ needs, so it’s worth carefully considering which tools within the suite you’ll find most useful.

Meltwater social media monitoring features

  • Media and social coverage: Meltwater monitors social networks alongside news sites, blogs, forums, and more. Like Brandwatch, if a story is making headlines, Meltwater will catch it alongside social chatter.
  • Enterprise reliability: Opportunity to scale alongside your business, with software built to handle high volumes of data and users.

Begin your social listening journey today

Social media monitoring is all about listening in on conversations and understanding what people feel and why they feel that way. Brands that do it well can swiftly gain a competitive advantage.

But the only way to do it properly is to use a social media monitoring tool.

We’ve detailed the highlights from 11 of the best solutions currently available on the market. This includes Brandwatch Social Media Management, which, combined with Consumer Intelligence, offers an expansive suite of tools to suit your brand.

The next step is to start listening. Book a demo with Brandwatch and see how you can revolutionize your social monitoring efforts today.