Social listening is an essential tool for any business or organisation looking to understand how their brand is perceived online, as well as to find new eads and paying customers. It allows you to track mentions of your brand, products, and competitors, as well as monitor sentiment and engagement.
With the rise of social media, there are now many social listening tools available, many of them free. In this blog post, we will take a look at the top free social listening tools available in 2023, and how you can use them to gain valuable insights into your brand's online presence, find leads, paying customers and much more.
So, let's dive in and discover the best free social listening tools of 2023!
1. MentionFunnel
MentionFunnel is a social listening tool that will help you easily find leads who mention your keywords on social media and let you engage with them directly. Currently it supports Reddit, Twitter and Hacker News, but there are plans to add support for other platforms in the future.
The free tier allows you to track up to 3 keywords and there aren't any artificial limits on the number of mentions you can receive.
For Reddit you can limit mentions to specific subreddits, and with Twitter you can use advanced search queries to get the most relevant results.
Unlike other tools in list you can also directly reply to people without leaving the app. It is also possible to filter all mentions by sentiment, platform and type of post. On the free plan you will receive a daily report about how many of your keywords were mentioned.
2. F5Bot
F5Bot is a free social listening tool that sends email alerts when your selected keywords are mentioned on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. It it completely free, but has a daily limit of 50 mentions in 24 hours for standard users and 1000 hits for power users.
It can be used for tracking mentions of your brand, monitoring competitors, and keeping up with industry news and trends on these platforms.
3. Google Alerts
Google Alerts is a user-friendly social listening tool that detects and notifies users when there is new content matching their search terms. With it, users can easily identify new content, stay on top of industry trends, track conversations about their brand, and gather information about their competitors.
The platform automatically sends email notifications when a search result matches the specified keywords. A big benefit of Google Alerts is that it works for the entire internet and not just specific platforms, but many have reported that it's currently in a broken state.
4. Owler
Owler is not a dedicated social listening tool, but it can still provide some valuable insights to help companies establish a robust foundation for social media monitoring.
The free plan allows you to follow up to 5 companies and up to 3 competitors. Once set up you will get daily updates of your competitors based on multiple online sources, including social media. It also specializes in providing accurate, real-time community-driven business information, which can help you stay informed about the latest industry news and alerts.
With Owler, you can also get detailed profiles of your competitors, track changes in funding, leadership, and acquisitions.
5. Surfkey
Surfkey is a free social listening tool that allows you to scan Reddit for any mention of your keywords in posts, comments, usernames or URLs. You will receive notifications to your email, Slack or Discord, or use their webhooks to built a custom solution.
It allows you to use literal search to match whole keywords as well as scoping results by subreddits. Notifications are only sent daily or hourly and not in real-time.
