The 2025 Sprout Social Index reveals that the most important KPIs for measuring social media success include engagement, audience growth and social interactions. Although tracking social media engagement can be hectic, likes, comments and shares are essential for every brand. Monitoring social interactions and engagement can help you to discover new growth opportunities. And, that is why you need social media monitoring tools to take some of the weight off your back.
Social media monitoring tools enable you to track brand mentions, post comments and direct messages on all your social channels. Replying to comments and brand mentions might seem easy. However, several messages are likely to slip through the cracks as your social media presence grows. Maybe you have multiple social media platforms and it is hard to respond everywhere in a timely manner.
Perhaps, your social media followers have rapidly grown and your messages and customer queries are piling up. You could also be held by a thread and respond to every direct message, comment and tag but, miss the organic brand mentions. With the right social media monitoring tools, you can easily collate all your social media conversations under one roof.
This article explores the best social media monitoring tools for 2025, analyzing their key features and performance claims.
What are Social Media Monitoring Tools?
Social media monitoring tools enable you to track and analyze online conversations about your brand, competitors or niche. These tools vary in sophistication, from basic keyword-tracking apps to advanced AI-enabled platforms. They offer real insights, sentiment analysis and comprehensive trend tracking across various social platforms.
Regardless of the tool that you use, it will significantly reduce your workload, with a clear view of public perception and emerging trends. That allows you to focus on more strategic decision-making and relationship-building with your audience.
Key Features of Social Media Monitoring Tools
The features of social media monitoring tools vary from one application to another. However, there are essential elements common to every tool. Here’s what you can do with social media monitoring tools;
- Monitor mentions: An ideal tool can identify and analyze when and how your brand or products are mentioned across social platforms.
- Track competitors: Understand what competitors are doing and the public responds to those actions.
- Discover trends: Stay updated on trending topics to engage with your audience on what’s relevant.
- Generate reports: Share comprehensive data on audience sentiment, media coverage, brand visibility and reputation.
- Boost customer engagement: Respond promptly to customer feedback. Showing care and enhancing relationships.
The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools
Although our list of the best social media monitoring tools may not be exhaustive, we have put in significant efforts in research and consultations with paying customers to arrive at tools making waves in 2025 and beyond. The tools are not in any particular order of popularity or ranking to give you the freedom of choosing the ideal tool that best aligns with your social media needs.
- Sprinklr Social
Sprinklr social offers an in-depth understanding of your audience through advanced monitoring and listening capabilities. It empowers you to explore the needs and interests of your audience, leveraging unstructured social conversations to drive strategic, data-enabled decisions.
This tool enables you to get access to real-time insights for competitive benchmarking, crisis management and making sure that you stay on top of your niche. Besides, it leverages advanced AI to analyze unstructured data across more than 30 digital platforms. That ensures access to cross-channel insights that keep you ahead of the competition.
Key Features
Unlocking customer and competitor insights: Analyze real-time customer conversations and explore sentiments about your brand and competitors easily. Dig deeper to understand the underlying forces behind changes in key performance metrics.
Protect your brand reputation: Get immediate alerts on increased brand mentions, engagement levels and negative sentiments. That proactive monitoring enabled effective crisis management to protect the public image of your brand.
Identify emerging trends: Stay ahead by connecting with your audience through AI-generated themes. The tool helps you to initiate relevant conversations that resonate with existing and potential customers.
Extensive channel coverage: Expand your social media monitoring to cover 10+ social and review platforms. That ensures no critical insight goes unnoticed, regardless of where the conversation is taking place.
Sprinklr is one of the top-rated social media monitoring tools with enhanced AI capabilities. It can triage incoming messages and also, leverages logo detection to enable you discover opportunities for user-generated content (UGC). The advanced AI processes data from a wide range of sources including social media, messaging apps, news, blogs and review platforms to ensure actionable insights.
- Sprout Social
Sprout social gives you plenty of features to track important interactions and act on them. The platform keeps track of comments, mentions and keywords across multiple social media channels including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and X. The ability to streamline all your interactions into a single platform can save you lots of time and effort.
This social media monitoring tool ensures that you do not miss any noteworthy mentions or let customer service concerns go without being answered. For example, its Smart Inbox provides real-time, up-to-date list of all your social interactions. That includes communications between leads, followers and clients.
Sprout social also doubles up as an ideal social listening tool.
Key Features
Collaborative inbox: Enables you and your team to reply to mentions and call-outs without leaving the platform. It also speeds up response times, allowing your team to offer a consistent customer experience.
Robust analytics and reporting: Customizable reports, track key performance metrics and visualize data to measure the impact of your social media efforts. Helps you to make data driven decisions.
AI-driven sentiment analysis: This tool uses AI to analyze sentiment in social posts and comments, offering real-time information on how customers feel about their brand, products or campaigns.
Social listening: Sprout Social’s listening tools enable users to monitor brand mentions, track industry trends and collect customer insights across social media.
Unified inbox: Enables you to manage all your social media messages in one platform, streamlining interactions and prioritizing responses.
Apart from the key features highlighted above, sprout social also provides custom inbox views, message tagging and case management, mobile inbox push notifications and engagement reporting.
- Buffer
Buffer is marketed as one of the best social media monitoring tools for creators and small business owners. Going for $6 monthly per channel, all the paid plans have 14-day free trial. Buffer also has a free plan but, it does not support monitoring features. It supports a wide range of platforms including Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, x, YouTube, Pinterest, Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky.
This social media management tool can help you to schedule posts, analyze performance, store ideas, create reports and engage with your audience from one unified platform. Besides, it also boasts ease of use, with an intuitive and user-friendly design. It is recommended for creators and small business owners who are just getting started with social media monitoring.
Key Features
Scheduling and reporting: You can schedule posts in advance for multiple social channels for timely and consistent content delivery. The platform integrates with various tools and services to streamline workflows and ensure easier content creation and publication.
Analytics and reporting: Buffer tracks engagement metrics such as clicks, comments, shares and favorites, offering insights into audience engagement. You can also view, track and repurpose top-performing posts. The tool analyzes data to give you insights into what works best, including types of posts, optimal posting times and engaging audience.
Content management: Use the platform to build a library of content ideas. You can also create templates for posts and customize language, images, links and hashtags for every social channel.
Social listening and engagement: Monitor social media conversations, track mentions of your brand and identify relevant conversations. The platform’s AI assistant can help you to draft and refine social media posts, generate ideas and repurpose content.
- Hootsuite
Hootsuite transforms social feeds into actionable insights, so you can listen effectively to what people are saying about your brand, competitors and industry. You can monitor mentions, keywords and hashtags to discover your audience’s feelings, needs and thoughts. This tool is designed to elevate your social monitoring and listening strategy, making it an ideal platform for boosting engagement and refining your social media presence.
Key Features
Customizable streams: Create tailored streams to monitor specific keywords, mentions and hashtags. This feature enables you to listen actively to sentiments about your brand and niche, ensuring a customer-centric strategy that drives sales and engagement.
Reputation management: Promptly identify and respond to negative sentiments with dedicated feeds. Protect and boost your brand reputation by addressing customer concerns directly from a single dashboard.
Improved engagement: jump into relevant conversations across various social media platform. Respond to, save and like public comments to portray your brand as a market leader.
ReviewTrackers integration: Enables you to manage and respond to reviews across more than 50 popular sites. The tool simplifies handling online reviews, allowing you to share positive feedback and manage review profiles based on user and location.
Advanced social listening: take a deep dive into social media conversations. Search keywords and topics and, apply filters such as date, location and demographics to generate rich insights about brand perception and, discover brand advocates.
- Agorapulse
Agorapulse is also another top-rated social media monitoring tool designed to provide brands with detailed insights into their online presence and industry dynamics. It offers the capability to monitor conversations across social platforms, news sites and blogs, allowing you to fine-tune your strategies based on real-time data and trends. This tool is mainly ideal for those looking to boost their competitive edge through comprehensive social listening.
Key Features
Comprehensive monitoring: Create actionable searches to monitor mentions across social channels, news websites and blogs. That can help you to understand how your brand is perceived and what people are saying about your competitors.
Sentiment analysis and brand health: Track and analyze changes in mention volumes, engagement and sentiment over time. It enables you to understand positive, negative and neutral public sentiments.
Industry insights: Use hashtag and keyword searches to discover current and upcoming trends relevant to your niche, ensuring your content stays ahead of the curve.
Competitive analysis: create tailored searches to keep an eye on competitors, offering valuable insights into their activities and uncovering opportunities for differentiation.
Agorapulse is a robust social media monitoring tool for businesses looking to harness the power of social listening to boost marketing and engagement. With features such as sentiment analysis, competitive and industry insights and, influencer recognition, this tool enables you to stay informed and reactive to the social media web.
The Bottom Line
Although there are still other social media monitoring tools to choose from, the ones highlighted herein are top picks to elevate your social game. They can help you to uncover valuable insights from conversations across social networks, monitor brand sentiment and stay ahead of the competition. Nonetheless, the choice of an ideal social media monitoring tool will mainly depend on your objectives and budget.