How to use an AI social media assistant to amplify your team’s impact

Social media managers are pulled in many directions, handling everything from a busy inbox and customer care to multiple campaigns running simultaneously. With so much tactical work on their plate, it’s hard to find time for big-picture strategy or creative ideas.

An AI social media assistant enhances a social media team’s impact by handling repetitive, time-consuming tasks, freeing up space for more strategic work—a need most consumers also recognize. According to the Q4 2025 Sprout Social Pulse Survey, 65% of global social users say they’re comfortable with brands using AI such as chatbots or other tools to help employees refine their responses and deliver faster customer service on social.

Agentic AI can further help social teams improve performance by using multi-step reasoning to support strategic work. It can help teams manage campaigns easily by coordinating and completing complex workflows, and it can also glean social intelligence from millions of data points to support the overall brand. All, while working in the background.

In this article, we’ll deep-dive into the role and benefits of an AI social media assistant in an organization. Plus, you’ll see how the Sprout social team uses AI in its daily operations.

Understanding the role of an AI social media assistant

When AI takes care of the tedious tasks, you reclaim time and mental bandwidth to focus on high-impact work that drives growth and innovation. That’s the true role of AI—a dependable digital teammate operating behind the scenes to streamline workflows and elevate efficiency.

AI improves your social media strategy by amplifying the personal touch. It enables you to engage more meaningfully with your audience while handling repetitive tasks that keep operations running smoothly.

This means more time for you to craft personalized content, build stronger connections with your audience and achieve the best results during peak seasons like the end-of-year holiday rush.

The holidays are also the time when relevant, relatable interactions are key to boosting brand loyalty and sales opportunities. According to Sprout’s Q4 2025 Pulse Survey, 73% of all social users will likely use social to contact a brand during the holiday season. They are most likely to contact brands on social via DMs this holiday season (49%), followed by comment sections (27%).

An agentic AI assistant acts as an extension of your team. It can support the execution of multi-step workflows and plan campaign sequences. Plus, it can mine billions of key data points across audience behavior, industry trends and competitors through social listening to provide crucial insights useful not only to social teams but also R&D, sales and marketing.

This AI-powered, behind-the-scenes support enables brands to overcome bandwidth challenges and drive broader business impact, all while maintaining a strategic edge.

Key areas where you can use AI and an agentic AI social media assistant

Let’s dive into the key areas AI and an agentic AI social media assistant can support your social media efforts.

Social listening and trendspotting

Social listening involves understanding what’s being said about your brand, products or industry across social channels. With AI, this becomes even more efficient and insightful.

For example, with Sprout Social’s Listening features, you can track conversations around key topics and trends without needing technical expertise. Features like Queries by AI Assist generate effective keyword suggestions for Listening topics, helping you capture the right audience insights.

And, Spike Alerts notify your team of sudden changes in engagement or sentiment, allowing for proactive responses during critical moments.

Similarly, Summarize by AI Assist helps you condense large datasets into clear, actionable summaries so you can quickly identify important trends.

Sprout’s agentic AI, Trellis, takes the capabilities of AI even further, acting as an assistant in the background to gather and deliver the insights your team needs, faster. It enables you to deep dive into trend analysis and learnings from your Social Listening data. You’re able to:

• Detect trends: Assess industry news, trends and potential disruptions
• Monitor your brand: Understand your brand’s overall status and perception all while monitoring for any changes in conversations
• Analyze competitors: Track and get insights for competitor activities and understand their market presence
• Use market research: Quicker and less expensive than traditional routes by using millions of data points to better understand a new market, industry, product category or audience.

You can get all these insights using a simple, conversational question. For instance, if you need to identify the top three conversational trends around a competitor’s new product, you can input that query into Trellis in a conversational form, such as, “What are the top 3 trends around ‘Competitor A’s’ new product?”

This combination of AI tools and an agentic AI assistant ensures you’re always ahead of market trends, able to respond quickly and refine your strategy based on real-time insights.

Performance analysis and content strategy

No social media strategy is complete without proper performance analytics and reporting. In fact, per the Social Media Productivity Report, 63% of marketers agree that manual tasks prevent them from focusing on high-impact work.

Instead of manually sifting through complex metrics, use AI tools to identify patterns, track performance and highlight key trends, all within minutes. This streamlined approach saves valuable time and ensures your reports are data-driven and actionable. It also enables you to focus on more strategic initiatives while keeping stakeholders informed of your progress in a clear, concise manner.

Targeted performance analysis also helps with strengthening content strategy, a task AI social media assistants can help with. For example, Trellis, our agentic AI, has a built-in ChatGPT Integration that enables you to optimize your content strategy directly within ChatGPT’s interface.

This way, you can use rich data to shape a strategy that resonates with your ICP without switching between tools to research, plan and execute your ideas.

Media monitoring

AI makes it easier for social teams to keep up with the news by doing the heavy lifting. Instead of teams spending hours scanning headlines or browsing multiple sites for relevant news, AI tools can automatically track news stories from around the world and pick out the ones that matter most to you. These tools spot mentions of your brand, competitors or key topics and also identify whether the coverage is positive or negative. They can also summarize long articles and highlight trends in real time, so you can react quickly without getting buried in information.

An example of such a media monitoring agentic AI tool is NewsWhip by Sprout Social. The tool continuously monitors news sources for brand mentions and emerging signals in real time. This enables you to have a proactive marketing approach, taking into consideration all events relevant to your brand and industry.

Content creation

According to The Social Media Productivity Report, 30% of social media marketers still handle content creation and approvals manually, which limits their ability to focus on high-impact work. AI can be a valuable ally on this front.

While AI may not always produce final, ready-to-publish content, it’s an excellent tool for jumpstarting the creative process. It can help brainstorm ideas, draft captions, suggest hashtags and also tailor copy for different audiences or platforms. AI support is especially valuable during busy periods and campaign peaks to maintain a consistent posting cadence. It helps you fill content gaps and stay on brand without sacrificing quality or authenticity.

Content curation

Curating relevant, high-quality content for your audience is time-consuming and requires sifting through countless articles, posts and media. This is another area where an AI social media assistant can help social media teams quickly identify trending topics, gather industry-relevant content and even suggest pieces that align with your audience’s interests.

And since AI tools can analyze vast amounts of data from multiple sources, including news outlets, to surface valuable content worth sharing, they help you maintain an active and relevant social presence during peak seasons.

Optimizing content schedules

Even the most compelling social content may go unnoticed if it’s not posted at the right time. You should post when your audience is most active to boost engagement and drive better campaign results.

AI tools can help determine these optimal times for you to schedule content. For example, Sprout’s Optimal Send Times feature simplifies scheduling by analyzing your audience’s behavior patterns and past engagement data. It recommends the best times to post, ensuring you connect with your audience when they’re most likely to interact.

This automation ensures your content consistently aligns with peak engagement periods, maximizing the impact of every post.

Message intent and classification

AI-powered sentiment analysis, combined with direct messaging, significantly aids social customer care teams in managing their inbox. It classifies and labels messages, making prioritizing responses easier and helping you differentiate between customer care requests and marketing engagements.

Sprout’s message classification capability automatically sorts incoming messages based on their content, enabling teams to identify what requires immediate attention.

Sprout’s message intent capability further analyzes the purpose behind each message. It tells you whether it’s a support request, feedback or a general inquiry—enabling teams to respond more efficiently and effectively. This streamlines customer care and ensures that no important interactions are overlooked.

How Sprout’s social media team uses AI and an AI social media assistant

Here’s a breakdown of how Sprout’s social media team uses AI to maintain a consistent and strategic brand presence, freeing up time to focus on other creative, high-impact work.

Use case #1: Content ideation

Content ideation is a critical part of any social media team’s role as it drives the topics, themes and messages that engage audiences and support brand goals. Yet generating fresh, relevant ideas consistently can be a major challenge and even the best teams often face creative blocks.

The Sprout Social team uses AI to make content ideation easier and more fun. By looking at audience interests, trending topics and what competitors are doing, AI suggests new ideas, captions and hashtags. In doing so, it helps our social team stay on top of what really resonates without feeling overwhelmed.

Plus, Sprout’s AI Assist tool not only speeds up the brainstorming process but also ensures content remains engaging, relevant and aligned with the overall strategy.

Autumn Benitez, Sprout’s Social Media Specialist, says, “All social media managers know that crafting the *perfect* caption can take forever, trying to make them clever, on-brand and scroll-stopping. AI Assist helps me speed that process up with its suggestions, without sacrificing quality, keeping the content pipeline flowing, especially during peak campaign season.”

“Here’s a recent LinkedIn post where I used AI Assist to spruce up the caption,” she shares.

Takeaway: AI makes content ideation faster and less stressful for social teams. By suggesting ideas, captions and hashtags based on trends and audience interests, it helps create content that truly connects.

Use case #2: Content planning

Social media teams plan content by organizing ideas into a structured calendar that outlines what to post, when to post it and on which networks. Having AI act as an assistant to help with these operational efforts gives back time to the team.

Sprout’s AI helps our social team optimize their posting by analyzing audience engagement data to recommend the best times to share content. It also streamlines scheduling with a centralized social calendar, which enables Sprout’s social team to plan, queue and publish posts across multiple networks more efficiently.

Takeaway: AI tools help streamline content planning by organizing posts, filling calendar gaps and recommending optimal publish times. This enables social teams to maintain a consistent, strategic brand presence while focusing on higher-level creative work.

Use case #3: Social listening

Sprout’s AI functionality helps our social team by automatically monitoring social conversations, keywords and brand mentions across networks quickly. AI helps them gauge audience sentiment and also track competitor activity without manually searching.

Benitez says, “Keeping up with every brand mention and tracking ebbs and flows of engagement is a full-time job, on top of your full-time job. AI Assist helps me cut through the noise, flagging the conversations that matter so I can respond quickly and adjust our strategy in real time, especially during major events. It’s like having my best friend at work keeping me in the loop on everything happening in the social world.”

The AI analyzes what people are saying—and how they’re saying it—to surface insights that show your team exactly where the opportunities are. For example, the team used AI-powered social listening to create high-impact content that tapped directly into audience interest around the London Fashion Week.

Takeaway: Having AI functionality enables Sprout’s social team to respond quickly, refine messaging and stay aligned with audience needs. This helps them remain proactive rather than reactive in online conversations.

Use case #4: Trend tracking

Trend tracking helps social media teams stay ahead of the curve. Sprout uses our new agentic AI assistant, Trellis, to continuously track emerging topics, hashtags and viral content, helping identify what’s gaining traction.

Unlike basic social media monitoring, AI tools can analyze the context, engagement patterns and momentum behind each trend to identify which ones are likely to gain traction. And this insight is what enables Sprout’s social team to quickly adapt their content strategy, craft timely posts and engage audiences with relevant, on-trend content that aligns with Sprout’s brand voice.

For instance, the team used trend tracking to create timely posts about the Love Island Reunion.

“I’ve been experimenting with Trellis to quickly pinpoint the “what” and “why” for major trending moments from our Listening topics. It makes it easy to see what caused spikes in conversation or mentions of a specific hashtag, giving me the bigger picture much faster than digging through the listening topic manually,” Benitez says.

“I plan to keep using it to pull the why for data more efficiently, which saves me time and gives me more bandwidth to plan and create the posts about the topic,” she adds.

Takeaway: With an AI social media assistant automating trend tracking, social teams can act quickly on emerging opportunities and stay relevant in real time. This helps them create content that resonates with audiences and maximizes engagement.

Create an AI governance strategy for your team

The role of an assistant is to support the team, not replace it. Turning AI or agentic AI into your social media assistant is no different. While traditional AI helps with executional tasks, agentic AI can take things further. It can autonomously analyze data, identify opportunities and suggest next steps.

To maximize these benefits, it’s essential to set clear guidelines and processes that define how AI will collaborate with your team. Here are some actionable steps to help you create a successful AI assistant strategy.

Decide what AI will help with and what humans will own

Social teams perform at their best when they have an assistant working quietly behind the scenes, taking on tasks that don’t require a human touch. Before adopting AI, clearly define which responsibilities it will manage versus those that require a human touch. Traditional AI excels at tasks like scheduling, content ideation and initial data analysis, while agentic AI is more advanced. It can automatically identify trends, prioritize opportunities and suggest actionable strategies to optimize your social campaigns.

High-level strategy, personal interactions and final approvals should remain human-driven, though. However, combining this insight with agentic AI’s autonomous capabilities creates a more efficient, proactive and strategy-focused workflow that ensures a seamless partnership that maximizes productivity and impact.

Implement a pilot program

A pilot approach provides valuable insights and confidence before fully integrating the AI Agent into your broader social media strategy. To begin, consider a small-scale pilot implementation to see how an AI Agent or AI social media assistant fits into your existing workflow.

Select specific tasks for the AI to manage, such as content curation, message classification or social listening, and run the program over a defined period. This helps you see how the AI performs in real-world scenarios, revealing both strengths and limitations so you can pinpoint areas for improvement.

Test functionality ahead of your busy seasons

Preparation is key, especially when using AI to support busy seasons. Before peak periods arrive, test the functionality of your AI tools to ensure they can handle increased demands. For example, use the agentic AI assistant to analyze social listening trends during a mock campaign. With agentic AI, you can also experiment with its autonomous decision-making capabilities during slower periods, such as letting it prioritize posts, suggest optimizations or monitor brand mentions, so your team becomes comfortable with its full potential.

This proactive testing helps identify any issues early and ensures you can leverage the AI effectively when real-time pressures are at their highest.

Monitor AI performance

Once AI is integrated into your strategy, you should continue to monitor its impact on your team, especially during the testing phase.

Regularly review how well AI assists you in areas like content accuracy, data analysis and engagement. Track metrics to assess its effectiveness and make adjustments as needed. This ensures that AI remains an asset rather than a set-it-and-forget-it tool.

Find the right AI social media tool

Finding the right AI social media tool requires research and a deep understanding of your specific needs. Look for a platform that aligns with your goals, offers the required functionality and integrates smoothly with your existing systems. The right tool should enhance your strategy, making your social media workflow more efficient and allowing more time for personalized activities.

Tools like Sprout Social offer AI-powered capabilities that do this and more to help social teams stay organized, proactive and consistently engaged with their audiences.

Use an AI social media assistant for a stronger, smarter social team

An AI social media assistant acts as a silent partner in the background, helping social teams stay proactive, creative and impactful. It enables teams to transform the way they manage their social presence. Instead of getting bogged down in repetitive tasks, they can use AI to uncover trends, surface audience insights and streamline content creation and planning. This not only improves efficiency but also enables smarter, more data-driven decisions that align with broader marketing objectives.

See how Sprout’s AI functionality and AI assistant can empower your social teams. Try Sprout Social for free.

 

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7 best employee advocacy platforms and tools to drive growth

Most businesses know their employees are their biggest asset, but did you know they’re also your strongest marketers?

Employee advocacy enables employees to share smart, quality content with their social networks. But, getting there takes more than a well-crafted email encouraging your team to share branded content on their social networks. Employee advocacy tools streamline the process of transforming your employees into brand ambassadors.

These tools don’t just make it convenient to organize posts—the best ones elevate your overall employee advocacy strategy so you produce and promote content that your workforce will be proud to share with their connections. And get results that fuel your brand awareness and social strategy.

In this list, we’ll break down the top employee advocacy platforms (including ours, of course) and how they’re different from the standard tools you might come across.

1. Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social

Sprout Social offers one of the best employee advocacy tools (previously called Bambu) that helps you amplify employees’ voices to drive real business results.

From enabling employees to quickly share posts to equipping them with industry-leading content, Sprout helps brands turn employees into thought leaders and expand the reach of your brand story.

With our social media management platform, your team executes seamlessly across tactics to maximize your reach and engagement. Plus, social media integration with Salesforce enables your sales team with the functionality to share content with prospects and build a profile that attracts key customers.

Together these solutions offer three distinct benefits that will help scale your strategy and expand your social presence:

Identify and distribute content that resonates most

Employee advocacy is more than just curation—you need to know what content is resonating with employees and how their connections are engaging with it.

Our analytics capabilities help you uncover which content is driving the most engagement and, in turn, inform future content strategy. For example, Medallia, an enterprise customer experience platform, used Sprout to hone in on relevant metrics that informed them how to use content more effectively to better engage their customers in different industries. Plus our automated content distribution enables their internal team to curate and deliver relevant content to employees across the globe to share within their networks. The result was a 48.6% year-over-year (YoY) increase in engagements with Sprout.

Increase employee participation with curated, personalized content

According to Sprout’s Employee Advocacy Report, 72% of engaged users post about their company if the content is written for them. Sprout’s pre-approved message ideas give your employees a starting point that helps them stay on-brand, while having the freedom to edit their voice and choose their preferred social network.

Employees can also customize their feeds by following topics relevant to their roles and suggest content for others to share. This encourages adoption by creating a tailored experience for employees.

West Monroe, a digital services firm, was able to use these capabilities alongside executive support to scale their employee advocacy program to 400 active users and 10,863 shares in the first six months.

Increase social ROI

Per The 2022 Sprout Social Index™, more than 1,000 marketers revealed employee advocacy helped them drive more qualified leads, establish thought leadership and create new networking opportunities.

Advertising success platform Simpli.fi used Sprout to leverage employee networks for these very reasons. “Our potential reach from the sales department alone is at almost a million unique users because everyone has such large networks online,” noted Spencer Traverm, Director of Content at Simplifi.

With Sprout’s employee advocacy program, the company was able to align its brand transformation with a new social media strategy and overcome resource limitations, earning them almost $90,000 in estimated earned media value.

Sprout is suitable for businesses of all sizes—enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses—that have built a social presence and are continuing to invest in social media marketing. It’s also great for all industries including regulated industries like healthcare.

Looking for the best social media tools for your team’s success?

Our resources below are excellent guides to help you make this critical decision, covering every key area of social technology:

• Discover the best social media management tools
• Explore the best social media analytics tools
• See the best social media marketing tools
• Explore the best social media scheduling tools
• Find the best social listening tools
• Discover the best social media monitoring tools

 

If you’ve just started building your social presence, alternative all-in-one platforms include:

• Sociabble
• ClearView Social
• Hootsuite Amplify
• PostBeyond
• Oktopost

2. EveryoneSocial

EveryoneSocial is a social media employee advocacy tool that solely focuses on employee advocacy. Its freemium model makes it an employee advocacy platform for businesses looking for a low-cost or even no-cost introduction to employee advocacy.

The freemium model also opens doors for small businesses or startups that want to test advocacy without making a substantial initial investment.

A central feature of EveryoneSocial is its content hub. This digital space aggregates all the content your company wishes to disseminate through its employees. From the latest blog post to an important company announcement, everything is organized and accessible in one place, so it’s easy for employees to find shareable content.

EveryoneSocial also has social selling features. The tool integrates with sales tools like Salesforce and HubSpot to empower sales teams to build their personal brands and track leads at the same time.

3. Haiilo

Haiilo is an employee communications platform that includes advocacy features but primarily focuses on creating an internal community.

The platform offers a centralized space for employees to share experiences and achievements and connect their social media channels, which simplifies content sharing.

What makes Haillo’s features different from other platforms is its comms and advocacy analytics. The tool analyzes comms across any employee segment and notifies you about critical developments.

These insights give you data to calculate your advocacy ROI.

Find your most influential employees with this analysis and push them toward the forefront. Plus, set up automated reports to ensure you’re up-to-date with the latest trends and insights in your internal community.

Haillo’s gamification features help employees see how well they’re driving engagement and traffic compared to their colleagues. Make employee advocacy fun with leaderboards and offer perks to encourage active participation.

4. Firstup

Previously known as Dynamic Signal, Firstup, amplifies your brand’s voice through advocacy and offers internal collaboration and communication with a robust employee experience ecosystem.

Firstup specifically uses the platform to connect with job candidates. Employees can get in touch with candidates, promote relevant listings and maintain brand consistency at the same time.

What really makes Firstup different, though, is how it’s available in 30 different languages. This makes it a perfect fit for global teams that want to position their employees as ambassadors in different regions.

Firstup also lets site administrators draft multiple versions of a social post and randomly distribute them among employees for sharing. You can tailor these posts to globally distribute your brand’s message and make sure it’s locally relevant and sensitive to cultural nuances.

Firstup is a good choice for companies that want to encourage their global teams to promote their brand’s message. This is a great way to get everyone talking about your company’s mission and values, all while connecting with potential customers and candidates on a local level.

5. GaggleAMP

GaggleAMP is an employee advocacy platform designed to engage employees in promoting their company’s content across social media channels. It offers flexibility by allowing administrators to create various “engagements” beyond simple sharing, like liking, commenting or participating in discussions on social media, aiding companies to achieve diverse advocacy goals.

GaggleAMP helps build a structured approach to employee advocacy that encourages active participation and makes it simpler to track effectiveness. With GaggleAMP, administrators can provide employees with a library of pre-approved content and clear prompts on how to engage with it. This makes it easier for employees to support the brand without having to do extra work.

The tool also provides detailed analytics, enabling companies to measure the reach and impact of these engagements and identify which activities resonate most with their audience.

6. Sociabble

Sociabble is a tool that helps employees support and engage with their company’s employee advocacy program. Its content calendar helps organize posts, ensuring that timely and relevant content is available, which encourages consistent participation without overloading employees.

Sociabble is best known for supporting a data-driven approach to understanding the impact of employee advocacy on brand awareness and reach. Detailed analytics provide insights into engagement metrics, showing companies how often content is shared, which platforms drive the most reach, and which employees are the most active advocates.

The platform also integrates well with communication tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Yammer, allowing employees to share content without leaving their familiar workflows. Sociabble’s features, such as leaderboards and point systems, help incentivize engagement and make advocacy more engaging.

7. DSMN8

DSMN8 is an employee advocacy tool that focuses on making it easy for employees to share company content to enhance brand visibility and engagement through employees’ networks.

Companies can choose and share a variety of content types, from articles to videos, in a content library format directly to employees. This library simplifies the sharing process, giving employees access to a ready-made collection of relevant, on-brand material. The tool also offers a mobile-friendly interface, which is convenient for employees on the go and encourages broader engagement.

DSMN8’s analytics features enable companies to track the reach and impact of shared content, providing insights into engagement levels and identifying top advocates within the organization.

With gamification elements like leaderboards and recognition, DSMN8 helps foster a culture of advocacy by motivating employees to participate. Also, the tool can be changed to match a company’s brand and communication goals, helping make advocacy efforts more cohesive and measurable.

Amplify your social presence with employee advocacy

People trust other people more than they do companies. It’s a natural tendency for us to trust our peers, friends and people we admire more so than faceless corporate entities.

This makes employees your most valuable brand ambassadors. Employee advocacy platforms empower employees to share your brand’s message in their unique, authentic voice. They make it effortless for employees to share content and extend your brand’s reach far beyond what you could achieve alone.

Amplify your brand presence while staying connected to your overall social strategy with Employee Advocacy by Sprout Social. With its robust analytics, you’re never in the dark about your program’s performance and your team is always equipped with the insights they need to iterate and improve.

Ready to turn your employees into your biggest supporters? Learn more how Sprout’s advocacy features will help you.

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Best social media management tools for businesses in 2025

Social media marketing is more than just posting content and hoping for engagements. It’s maintaining an active presence and building a strong brand community. And it’s monitoring conversations to identify and mitigate risks to your brand reputation. That’s why you need powerful social media management tools to help you do all of this more efficiently.

With the right tools, social media management becomes much easier. You can use it to accomplish everything in one central location, from scheduling posts to analyzing your performance. It empowers you to stay on top of tasks with collaboration capabilities for team members and Spike Alerts.

Need help choosing the best performing social media tools for your business?

These resources guide you through selecting the right platform depending on your need:

• Explore the best social media analytics tools
• See the best social media marketing tools
• Identify the best social media scheduling tools
• Find the best social listening tools
• Review the best social media monitoring tools
• Select the best employee advocacy tools

Now, back to rounding up the top social media management tools in the market to help you decide on the best option for your team. Let’s review the options.

What is a social media management tool?

A social media management tool is a software solution that lets you manage all aspects of your social media in one place. This means you can efficiently perform multiple social media tasks without having to switch to a different network. This includes capabilities related to creating, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing, engaging, and collaborating.

Most social media management tools enable you to manage more than one social media profile across several social networks. As such, they play a vital role in executing your social media marketing strategy social media marketing strategy.

Best social media management tools to consider

The best social media management tool for you depends on what you need. Factors like the size of your operation and the social networks you use will influence this decision.

Agencies may need a tool that lets them manage multiple social media profiles for their clients. Meanwhile, small teams may look for something with robust collaboration capabilities. Others may only need a tool to help manage a specific social media platform. On the other hand, some may want to focus on automating their publishing.

Based on these unique needs, we’ve handpicked some of the best social media management tools to consider.

1. Sprout Social
2. Zoho Social
3. HubSpot
4. Sendible
5. Pallyy
6. SocialBee
7. SocialPilot
8. Buffer
9. Keyhole
10. Sprinklr
11. eClincher
12. Tailwind
13. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)
14. Preview
15. Iconoquare
16. Hootsuite
17. Coschedule
18. MeetEdgar
19. Later

Best social media management tools overall

1. Sprout Social

Can’t blame us for giving ourselves the top spot, right?

We’re proud to position Sprout Social as the leading choice. Sprout Social is an all-in-one social media management tool to manage all aspects of your social media strategy.

Sprout offers offers premier partnerships and integrations with all the major social networks. This includes Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and YouTube. So you can work across your entire presence in a single dashboard.

Plus, you can also manage reviews from sources like Google My Business, Trustpilot and Facebook. It even lets you create shoppable posts integrated with Facebook Shops and Shopify catalogs.

Sprout’s Employee Advocacy tool gives it an added advantage over other social media management tools. This lets you create a curated feed of content for your employees to share across their social networks. So you can take your employee advocacy efforts up a notch and amplify your brand reach.

Features:

• Social media publishing, scheduling, monitoring, analytics, reporting and more in one easy-to-use dashboard
• ViralPost feature to publish your content when your followers are most likely to engage
• Smart Inbox that compiles all your incoming messages from different social media platforms
• Hashtag tracking to identify the most popular and relevant hashtags to boost visibility
• Custom URL tracking to get a more in-depth insight into how your posts are performing in terms of referral traffic and conversions
• AI-powered Social Listening solutions allowing you to track social conversations around your brand, topics, keywords and themes for additional competitive intelligence

Need help making the choice for your next platform investment?

These resources deliver the best, most authoritative information, guiding you through the selection of optimal social media tools by functional area:

• Explore the best social media analytics tools
• See the best social media marketing tools
• Identify the best social media scheduling tools
• Find the best social listening tools
• Review the best social media monitoring tools

2. Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a tool that boasts features “built for every social media feed.” The platform allows you to start discussions, share reports, create team roles and encourage feedback. This makes it easy to get everyone on board with your updates, strategies and performance insights.

In addition to scheduling, the platform has its own optimized timing features similar to Sprout. You can customize your content for each network and schedule them to go out at the right time.

The platform’s Inbox keeps track of all your conversations in one place. So you don’t have to switch between multiple platforms to manage your customer interactions.

Features:

• An instant integration with the Zoho CRM and the ability to monitor customer interactions
• Social listening dashboards to track brand reviews, social mentions and branded keywords
• Ability to collaborate with teammates within the platform via chat, audio and video calls

3. HubSpot

HubSpot is a leading customer platform with powerful social media management features. Its centralized social inbox lets you keep track of all your social interactions in one place. You can further gain contextual information on these conversations with a CRM integration. That way, you have the insights to enhance and personalize the customer experience.

The platform helps you organize your efforts by tagging marketing assets and content. So you can associate your posts with specific campaigns and measure their effectiveness.

Additionally, it comes with all the essential features you need in a social media management software solution. This includes tools for publishing and scheduling as well as keyword monitoring and social media reporting.

Features:

• Keyword monitoring streams to identify important interactions and prioritize the right conversations
• AI-powered social media post generator to simplify publishing
• Best time to post suggestions to optimize scheduling

Social media management tools for agencies

4. Sendible

Sendible has done a great job of niching down for agencies and large brands. It offers client dashboards and automated client reporting features for agency users. Collaboration tools and user management capabilities make the platform ideal for multiple users.

Additionally, it offers a number of helpful integrations to make social media management as easy as possible for users.

Features:

• An all-in-one dashboard that makes it easy to see your overall social media performance at a glance
• Collaboration tools that allow your team to create content and then send it to the client or team leader for approval
• Presentation-ready reports to showcase social media ROI to clients
• A mobile app that lets you monitor and manage your social media accounts on-the-go

5. Pallyy

Pallyy is a unique social media management tool specifically targeted at agencies. This software helps agencies plan and schedule clients’ social media posts all in one place. The platform features a Kanban-style workflow and a visual planner where you can plan your grids. Additionally, you can easily access media files from the media and folders library.

Features:

• Integration with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Pinterest and TikTok
• Visual planners make it easy to prepare content across platforms and grids, especially when aesthetics is a priority
• Folders to better organize your media files
• Shareable content calendars where clients can leave comments and approve posts

6. SocialBee

SocialBee is a versatile social media management tool designed to help agencies efficiently manage multiple client accounts with ease. Known for its scheduling capabilities, it stands out by offering a variety of content categorization options and advanced automation features, making it ideal for agencies that handle diverse social media campaigns. Agencies can streamline social media management processes and scale their operations with SocialBee’s comprehensive suite of features, without compromising on quality.

Features:

• Customizable content categories to organize and schedule different types of posts for clients
• Approval workflows that allow collaboration with clients before publishing, ensuring alignment with their goals
• recycle high-performing content to maintain consistent posting without needing new material
• Manage multiple client accounts and collaborate with your team through task assignments and shared content
• Detailed analytics and custom reports to track campaign performance and share insights with clients

Social media management tools for small teams

7. SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a straightforward social media management solution for those just starting out. It provides all the essential publishing and scheduling features that you need in a social media tool. The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant. This helps you generate engaging captions based on the latest trends and audience preferences.

SocialPilot offers in-depth analytics reports to guide better strategies. The content performance and audience insights help you understand what people are engaging with. You can analyze growth patterns to continue creating great content.

Features:

• Integration with several major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
• Ability to customize and optimize posts for multiple social networks in a single composer
• Bulk scheduling for up to 500 posts to help you save time

8. Buffer

Buffer is another social media management tool that’s ideal for small businesses and startups. It offers a completely free plan for your first three social media channels. This makes it the perfect option for setting up your Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

The platform simplifies content creation with an AI Assistant that generates new ideas. It even lets you store ideas so you can build on them later. A direct integration with Canva, DropBox and OneDrive makes it much easier to import content to edit and share on social.

Features:

• Social media publishing tools that allow you to easily schedule out all the social media content you’ve created for each channel
• A social media engagement dashboard that lets you respond to all mentions or messages online in one place
• Analytics and reporting to give you a bird’s eye view of how your social media efforts are performing
• Landing page builder to create a customized experience

9. Keyhole

Keyhole is unique from most of the tools on this list in that it’s an influencer tracking and marketing software as well. It performs in-depth analytics to help you vet and compare influencers. The profile analytics help you zero in on influencers who manage to drive authentic engagements.

After your campaign goes live, the tool measures the performance of each influencer and their impact on your campaign goals.

Features:

• Automated social media reports that are shareable and presentation-ready within seconds
• Several reporting features, including brand reporting, campaign reporting, hashtag reporting and influencer reporting

10. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform with features to manage your socials. It supports your essential social publishing needs with an editorial calendar and a digital asset manager. The engagement dashboard lets you view comments, mentions and messages in one place.

A unique Sprinklr feature is the user-generated content (UGC) management capabilities. You can use it to organize content from fans and repost them to amplify brand reach.

Features:

• Sprinklr AI to speed up content generation
• Custom approval workflows to streamline team collaboration
• Customer service and consumer intelligence integrations for a unified customer experience management

11. eClincher

eClincher markets itself as a social media management platform that highlights a commitment to 24/7 customer support. Like most tools on this list, eClincher features a cross-network social publishing tool. It comes with a visual calendar, a dedicated messaging inbox and a publishing queue. Plus, it features brand monitoring across social, news, blogs and more, complete with sentiment analysis.

Features:

• Provides 24/7 customer support for its users so they can “strategize, optimize and measure ROI”
• Team collaboration with drafts, comments, notifications, tagging and assigning messages

Social media management tools for dedicated platforms

12. Tailwind

Tailwind started out as a tool to address a hole in the market for Pinterest scheduling. So it initially focused on automating Pinterest marketing for brands. It has since expanded to cover Instagram and Facebook. But the platform continues to stand out when it comes to managing Pinterest.

The visual calendar helps you plan and organize all your social media posts in one place. You can apply filters to view only your Pins to see how your Page would look. The platform then auto-publishes these Pins to catch your audience when they’re most responsive.

Features:

• Post ideas to make sure you always have Pinterest content in the pipeline
• Automatic personalized designs to create on-brand posts every time
• Hashtag finder to discover popular and hyper-relevant hashtags to boost your engagement

13. X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck)

X Pro (formerly Tweetdeck) is an X-owned management tool to monitor conversations on the platform. It gives you real-time visibility to monitor multiple timelines on a single screen. So you can easily jump in on the right conversations and engage with your audience.

Since its rebranding to X Pro, the tool is now a part of X Premium subscription. As such, you can access plenty of premium features not available to regular users. This includes the ability to share longer content and download videos among many others.

Features:

• Ability to create longer posts to share in-depth information and messages
• A dedicated Highlights tab to showcase your best posts on your profile
• Reply boost so your responses show up more prominently

14. Preview

Preview is a mobile app that lets you visually plan out your Instagram feed. The tool is perfect for creating a feed that’s based on a specific Instagram feed aesthetic. You can upload as many photos and videos into the app so you can preview your feed before you publish.

Features:

• Upload photos, videos and carousels to the Preview app to get an idea of what it would look like live on Instagram
• Schedule your content right within the Preview app so it’ll publish when you’re ready
• Plan out Reels and Stories as well as your regular Instagram feed so you know how everything will fit together

15. Iconoquare

Iconosquare is a social media management tool originally designed for Instagram and Facebook and now integrates with TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest. It provides businesses in-depth analytics, content scheduling and performance tracking to optimize their social media marketing strategies. Iconosquare is particularly useful for companies looking to boost engagement, track audience growth and refine their social content with actionable insights for improved results.

Features:

• Detailed metrics on engagement, follower growth and content performance for Instagram and Facebook, and other social networks.
• Users can plan and schedule posts in advance, ensuring consistent and strategic content delivery.
• Comprehensive reports that allow users to evaluate the effectiveness of their social media efforts.
• Collaboration on content creation, approval and posting workflows, making it easier to manage social media efforts across departments or agencies.

Social media management tools for publishing

16. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media marketing tool with powerful publishing features. It comes with a visual calendar to plan out your content and easily fill gaps. If you ever run out of things to post, you can use the tool to generate an endless stream of content ideas. The tool even provides suggestions on the best time to post so you can schedule your posts for the highest engagement.

Check out our list of Hootsuite alternatives if you’re looking to take your social media management in a different direction.

Features:

• Publish and schedule social media posts on a variety of platforms
• Manage incoming messages and mentions and respond to them in a single inbox
• Monitor online conversations around your brand and industry to stay on top of trending topics

17. CoSchedule

CoSchedule began as a content marketing company and has since brought social media management and calendars into its fold. It helps you organize your social media publishing efforts with a social calendar to visualize your entire content plan. The Best Time Scheduler ensures that your posts go out when people are most likely to engage.

Features:

• Social Message Optimizer to craft powerful messages for your social posts
• AI Social Assistant to generate ideas and social messages instantly
• Predefined social sharing templates so you don’t have to create a publishing plan from scratch
• ReQueue automatically creates recurring social posts from your best content

18. MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar is a social media management tool that helps teams automatically curate their social media feeds. This is perfect for solopreneurs or businesses with small teams. Startups, where team members wear a lot of hats, will benefit from the features available with MeetEdgar.

Features:

• Repurpose content and give it new life by automatically republishing it at a later date
• Scheduling tools that let you set the optimal times for MeetEdgar to schedule your content
• Real-time content insights to see what performs best so you can optimize your strategy

19. Later

Later is a social media management tool that assists with publishing and content creation. You can organize your social content strategy with a visual planner and a media library. The Best Time to Post recommendations make sure that you’re reaching your audience at the right time on TikTok and Instagram.

Features:

• User-generated content discovery using tags and mentions
• Instagram Hashtag Suggestions tool to generate fresh and relevant hashtags
• Caption Writer tool to automatically craft powerful social media captions

How to select the best social media management tool for your business

When investing in a new tool for your business, you want something that adds value to your marketing tech stack. So it’s important to carefully weigh your options to ensure that you’re making the right choice. Here are some factors to help you narrow down the ideal social media management software for you.

Integration

The first thing to consider is whether it has a social media integration for the social networks you use. It should integrate with all the major networks so you can manage them all in one place.

Scheduling

Publishing is one of the most vital aspects of social media management, so you need a tool to simplify the process. Look for one that comes with features for scheduling social media posts and best time to post suggestions. Bulk scheduling capabilities are a plus if you have to schedule hundreds of posts each month.

Collaboration

Whether you work with a small team or with clients, you need a tool that supports seamless collaboration. Look for one that has a shared publishing calendar along with multi-user support and message approval workflows.

Social listening

A core aspect of social media management is being able to track and engage with relevant conversions. So you need a tool with social listening capabilities to monitor specific keywords and tags in addition to brand mentions.

AI capabilities

AI capabilities are increasingly becoming a necessity as social media marketing teams are asked to do more with less, AI marketing capabilities give you an added advantage. You can find social media tools that offer AI-powered features, especially when it comes to content creation. Being able to generate ideas and captions in an instant will help you speed up the process of creating new social posts.

Reporting

The easier it is to highlight your performance and KPIs, the better. Whether you’re reporting to clients or presenting data to stakeholders, in-depth social media reporting is a must-have.

Additionally, reporting can help highlight what’s working and what’s not in terms of your social presence. So make sure the tool can monitor the social metrics that matter most to your business.

Cost

Whether or not you can get by with totally free social media management software really depends on your business’s size and scope. For solo businesses and up-and-coming agencies, free or freemium tools might serve as a stepping stone toward paid ones.

But oftentimes, “you get what you pay for” rings true. That’s why it’s important to assess which features matter most to your business and what your non-negotiables are.

Take care to consider the overall cost of social media marketing when deciding on your budget for a social media tool.

Adaptability

Another major consideration is how well the tool can adapt to changes in your social media planning. Does it have a built-in editor in case you decide to create more visual content? Can you easily get hashtag suggestions in case you want to start adding more hashtags? Make sure it has all the capabilities you might possibly need so it can quickly adapt to your latest social media plan.

Scalability

One crucial factor is the ability to scale along with your needs. As your business grows and your social media presence expands, you’ll need a tool that can keep up. This is especially important when considering how to manage multiple social media accounts efficiently. Almost in line with the previous factor, scalability helps you ensure that the tool can support your business growth. At the bare minimum, it should offer the option to add more users and social profiles.

Manage social media like a pro

The best social media marketing tool helps you manage your social media like a pro. It streamlines publishing and allows you to manage all your social media interactions in one place. More importantly, it enables you to collaborate seamlessly with your team and clients.
After going through our list, take some time to weigh your options before you make the final move. And remember, you can get a first-hand look at Sprout’s automation, collaboration and reporting features with a free 30-day trial.

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Best social listening tools for your brand in 2025

An effective social media strategy depends on an in-depth understanding of your audience. Knowing what topics interest your audience helps you craft content and messages that resonate with them. To stay in tune, brands rely on social listening tools. These tools let you tap into the conversations that your audience is engaging in.

Social listening tools monitor and track social media conversations related to a specific brand or topic, giving you insights that inform your marketing decisions.

Learn how social listening fuels relevance, responsiveness and results—and explore the tools that help your team move from insight to impact.

Why are social listening tools important for your brand?

Social media listening tools help you find meaningful insights in millions of online conversations.

They cut out hours of manual digging, letting you focus on what matters—turning real audience opinions into strategy.

Here’s why social listening tools are so important as you grow your brand.

Spot emerging trends

Social listening platforms detect patterns in conversations around specific keywords and hashtags. This helps you identify when certain topics begin to gain traction. Being early to a trend or leveraging it in the right way helps your brand stay relevant and memorable. And it’s what your customers expect from you.

According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, 93% of consumers think it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture.

Social listening helps you do this by surfacing real-time shifts in conversations. As new discussions emerge and trends evolve, you can respond quickly and craft your messaging to meet the moment.

Understand customer interests and pain points

The Index also indicates that 90% of consumers use social media to stay updated on trends and cultural moments. This makes it a goldmine of audience data to inform your business strategies.

Social listening lets you tap into those signals.

Listening in on social media conversations helps you understand what topics people like to engage with and what inspires or frustrates them.

These insights fuel more relevant content, smarter product ideas and more empathetic customer care.

Understanding customers’ values and pain points makes you speak directly to what matters most.

Monitor and manage brand reputation

The Index reveals that how quickly a brand responds and how they engage are two of the most important factors that make brands stand out on social.

Social listening tools track every relevant brand mention, even if you are not tagged. That means you can identify and address conversations that could harm your brand reputation—amplify conversations that create positive sentiment.

Quick, thoughtful responses deliver the standout experience customers are looking for. It shows you’re paying attention and that their opinions matter.

Take Penn State Health, for example. By using Sprout Listening to track sentiment and conversations in real time, Penn State Health can now spot potential crises early. This enables them to proactively address patient concerns and shape content that builds trust with their community.

Identify sales opportunities

Social isn’t just about visibility. It also drives revenue.

In fact, there are more people who buy things on socials than you probably think. According to the Index, 81% of consumers say socials drive them to make spontaneous purchases multiple times a year.

Social listening platforms help you spot these revenue opportunities. They highlight relevant conversations from users that seek a solution you can provide.

So it’s important for your brand to engage in ways that feel timely, relevant and genuinely helpful. As The Index also highlights, 73% of buyers say they turn to a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond to their needs—so being present and adding real value can make all the difference.

Identifying high-intent conversations early allows you to engage at the right moment, offer useful solutions and optimize conversion tactics.

Keep an eye on the competition

Social listening isn’t just for your brand. It’s also a powerful form of social media competitive analysis.

When you track what audiences say about similar brands, you can see what’s hitting the mark and what’s missing it.

These insights help you benchmark your brand performance and identify gaps in the market. Spot negative feedback aimed at competitors and position your brand as the better alternative.

Before diving into the full list of best-in-class tools, you can get started with the industry leader right now.

Try Sprout for 30-days free

Best all-in-one social listening tools

Some tools provide deep listening for one specific platform or they specialize in certain functions.

Others offer cross-channel listening and a variety of functions, like sentiment analysis and trend predictions.

If your brand is present across multiple social networks, an all-in-one tool provides the breadth of coverage and capabilities you need to manage multiple conversations simultaneously.

Here are the best all-in-one tools to listen in on social.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social listening tools automatically sift through millions of data points, uncovering conversations and insights relevant to your brand. With powerful cross-platform integrations, it’s easy to track conversations across social networks, blogs, forums and news outlets so you never miss a beat.

At the trend level, Sprout helps you learn what’s gaining popularity in your industry—from rising product categories to cultural conversations. See how audiences feel about specific products, campaigns or topics to stay ahead of strategic or emotional shifts. Sprout surfaces the influencers and thought leaders driving those discussions, so you know who to engage with to expand your reach.

Sprout also highlights brand-specific conversations and indirect mentions, giving you a sharper, on-the-ground view of customer experiences and expectations. With custom alerts, you see potential brand crises early, giving you the time and context to respond thoughtfully—before things escalate.

And because Sprout combines social listening, social media management and analytics in one platform, you can move from insight to action in seconds within a unified solution.

Sprout’s AI capabilities further streamline your social listening efforts.

AI Assist automatically summarizes long Listening messages (800+ characters) giving you key takeaways to quickly zero in on essential insights.

Analyze by AI Assist goes one step further to take the guesswork out of social listening.

It analyzes trends in words, phrases, hashtags and even emojis. This clarity enables you to identify what’s gaining momentum and prioritize your efforts accordingly. With sentiment flagged automatically, teams stay agile and ahead.

Want to keep an eye on your competitors, too? Sprout’s competitive monitoring tools track what’s resonating or falling flat with rival brands. This helps you fine-tune your strategies to stay one step ahead.

Sprout offers a free trial to test out its publishing and analytics capabilities. The social listening tools are part of a custom-built plan for enterprise users.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Considering investing in other areas of your social media technology stack?

Choosing the right software is one of the most critical decisions for an effective social media team. Explore the resources below to ensure you select the best social media platform for every core social function:

• Check out our beginners guide to social media marketing tools
• Discover the best social media management tools
• Explore the best social media analytics tools
• Identify the best social media scheduling tools
• Review the best social media monitoring tools
• Select the best employee advocacy tools

 

Now, lets get back to some other options:

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch extracts valuable conversational insights from millions of sources. It analyzes both historical and real-time conversations to identify current trends and how they change over time.

Gain deeper clarity on your audience and market, so you know what’s trending and popular. You’ll be able to see the top topics they’re talking about and identify relevant brand mentions.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness and reach. It lets you track conversations from 25 million online sources to gather valuable consumer insights.

This gives you a better understanding of what people like or dislike, especially when it comes to your brand. You can even measure brand sentiment and quickly identify reputational risks.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive listening tool that specializes in content discovery and research. The platform lets you track trending topics and popular content to inspire you.

You can use the monitoring features to track mentions and industry trends across leading social networks. It lets you set up alerts for brands, topics and keywords to help you stay on top of the latest conversations.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole offers enterprise-grade social listening to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. It provides insights to identify who they are and get a better sense of what they like. You can use the platform to track specific hashtags and keywords as well as identify relevant influencers.

The volume predictions feature lets you anticipate when your posts are going viral, allowing you to come up with a game plan.

6. Meltwater

Meltwater helps you cut through the noise and uncover the conversational insights that matter to your brand. It provides you with a full picture by capturing historical data to help you research changes in trends over time.

The platform gives you a better understanding of your audience and allows you to analyze their sentiment. This helps you monitor mentions of your brand in real time and stay on top of upcoming crises to quell them on time.

While Meltwater provides historical data for trend research, brands looking for advanced, AI-powered analytics should see how Sprout Social and Meltwater stack up on core social listening features.

7. YouScan

YouScan is one of the top social listening tools that comes with image recognition capabilities. It gives you access to AI-powered visual insights to gain a better understanding of your buyer persona.

The platform identifies upcoming trends so you can align your marketing strategy accordingly. It tracks brand sentiment and consumer perceptions to show you how people feel about your brand. It even detects possible threats to your brand reputation in real time.

8. HubSpot Social Media Management Software

HubSpot’s social media management software lets you create custom keyword monitoring streams. This makes it easy to surface interactions that could turn critical and manage them on time.

You can also set up email alerts, allowing your sales team to follow up when prospects mention specific keywords. It even provides AI-generated recommended actions to speed up your analysis.

Social listening tools for Twitter (X)

X is a place where all the trending conversations take place. It’s where people go when they want to complain about a brand or discuss a trending topic. As such, Twitter listening can uncover valuable insights into your target market.

Here are social media listening tools that specifically focus on X.

9. X advanced search

X’s built-in advanced search tool is highly robust for listening in on relevant conversations. You can track conversations containing specific words, phrases and hashtags. It even lets you narrow your search by excluding certain words.

To get even more specific, look for posts from one specific account to another. The tool gives you plenty of additional filters to help you narrow your search by engagement, date range and so on.

10. X Pro (formerly TweetDeck)

X Pro is a paid tool that offers the same features as the formerly free TweetDeck. Pull up hundreds of conversations across the platform and display them in several columns.

This makes it easier to look out for posts around specific topics and news stories as they come in. X Pro even lets you pull up X posts from the dedicated lists you’ve created. This makes it easier to narrow down conversations from accounts that are most interesting to you.

11. Awario

Awario provides real-time insights on specific brand and keyword mentions in any language. This makes it a great social media listening software for brands that want to grow an international customer base. It even helps you identify top influencers and brand advocates leading the conversation.

Awario supports your social selling efforts with a feature that identifies hot leads. It tracks X posts and zeroes in on ones that are looking for a product similar to yours.

Social listening tools for TikTok

TikTok’s reach and influence are rapidly expanding. Now it’s the hub for all the latest social media trends and conversations. So being able to tap into the conversations happening on the network gives you leverage to stand apart.

Let’s take a look at a couple of TikTok tools to conduct social listening on the platform.

12. Exolyt

Exolyt gives you comprehensive insights into TikTok conversations and trends. You can use the tool to monitor what people are saying about your brand and how they feel about it.

It lets you track specific TikTok accounts, hashtags and videos to gather granular insights. Also, discover trending sounds, hashtags, effects and accounts to inform your content strategy.

13. All Ears

All Ears is an AI-powered social listening platform that focuses on voice and video conversations. It analyzes millions of TikTok videos to identify relevant brand or topic mentions.

The platform automatically transcribes these mentions, saving you hours of time having to comb through the noise. All Ears also provides relevant metrics like reach, PR value and net sentiment to streamline your listening analytics.

Free social listening tools

If you’re not ready to invest in a paid tool just yet, there are a few free social listening tools that come with basic listening capabilities.

14. Answer the Public

Answer the Public pulls up search volumes and trends for a given topic, brand or product.

It gives you a breakdown of the associated search terms. So it shows you what questions people are asking about it and what comparisons they’re making. This gives you a better understanding of their needs and pain points as well as their interests.

15. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another free option that lets you set up alerts for conversations taking place across the web. Use it to monitor specific keywords and topics or even brand names.

The tool lets you filter your results based on sources, language and region. Customize the frequency of alerts and choose to show only the best results.

Use Sprout Social’s platform to turn listening into action

Social listening data is powerful—but only if you know what to do with it.

Sprout highlights the trends that matter and helps you put them into action.

Its advanced capabilities like customizable Listening Topics and sentiment visualization empower teams to truly understand audience signals and respond strategically.

Build custom Listening Topics to track what matters

Sprout’s Listening Topics let you track signals that are relevant to your brand, industry or audience. Using the Query Builder, you can tailor topics around anything—from customer pain points to competitor mentions. You cut straight through the noise to find what matters to your brand.

Filter by platform, location, intent, emotion, product name and much more. Set alerts to flag conversational spikes or sentiment changes, making it easier to act fast and stay ahead.

Visualize sentiment and trends at scale

With Sprout, you no longer have to comb through endless messages to find out what’s going on. Sprout’s sentiment analysis and trend tracking give you a holistic view—and fast.

Sort audience feedback by emotion, keyword or campaign and turn thousands of data points into digestible dashboards and reports.

While these insights are powerful for fueling marketing strategies, they also help streamline workflows throughout the whole business.

Take James Hardie® as an example.

The clothing brand uses Sprout’s sentiment and trend analysis to identify themes and feed these insights to their sales, product and customer care teams.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams,” explains Senior Digital Marketing Manager Bridget Kulla.

“We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates, but brand advocates for our competition.”

Spot emerging opportunities before they trend

Most customers enjoy brands that keep up with trends—though according to the Index, almost a third agree that it’s only cool if you act on them within the first one or two days.

Ideally, you want to act on a trend before it explodes. But how?

Sprout’s real-time social listening surfaces emerging trends early, so teams can act before they go mainstream.

The platform flags fast-moving conversations the moment they start to gain momentum. This helps you seize trending moments or protect your brand before it’s too late.

Trek Bicycles taps into this capability to make smarter business decisions. They use Sprout’s Advanced Listening to unearth valuable business intelligence from social conversations to work out what’s about to trend in the industry.

“We’re trying to get more data inputs directly from consumers,” said Eric Rosch, Digital Marketing Manager. “What we are trying to do is make more informed decisions by being better listeners.”

Which social media listening tool is best for your business?

The best social media listening tool depends entirely on your business’s unique budget, required features and industry-specific goals. It’s about finding the perfect fit for your distinct needs, not a universal “best”.

So, when selecting a social media listening platform, consider the following critical factors:

Industry orientation

When selecting the best social listening tool, it’s critical to consider your industry’s unique aspects, as the most effective platform will directly address your sector’s distinct challenges and opportunities. For retail, this means a tool adept at monitoring product sentiment and consumer trends; for fintech, it necessitates robust reputation management and risk detection capabilities; and for hospitality, it requires strength in analyzing customer feedback and identifying emerging travel preferences.

Coverage

The platform should monitor all relevant social networks, forums, blogs, news sites and review platforms where your target audience may discuss your brand or industry.

Real-time capabilities

Look for features that deliver instant alerts for critical mentions or significant shifts in sentiment, allowing your team to react swiftly to opportunities or challenges.

Sentiment analysis accuracy

Evaluate the tool’s precision in determining the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral) of mentions, particularly across various languages, slang or nuanced contexts.

Customization and filtering

The ability to establish highly specific search queries and effectively filter out irrelevant data is crucial for focusing on actionable insights relevant to your business objectives.

Data visualization and reporting

An effective platform will present complex data in clear, digestible formats, offering customizable dashboards and comprehensive reports that can be easily shared with stakeholders.

Assess whether the platform integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM, customer service or other marketing software to ensure a unified view of your customer interactions and data.

Careful evaluation of these points will help you select a listening platform that not only enhances your market understanding but also empowers your team to make data-driven decisions and foster stronger brand connections. Many businesses find comprehensive capabilities in platforms like Sprout Social.

Listen, learn and grow on social

Social listening tools empower you to learn what makes your audience tick. They give you actionable insights to inform what content you create and how you engage with your audience.

But the challenge lies in finding a social listening platform that meets your unique needs. If you’re looking for a well-rounded tool that does everything, Sprout’s the answer you need. Try it free for 30 days to see if it’s the right match for your brand.

Start a free Sprout Social Trial

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