If you’re wondering where you can find this magical, wonderful martech tool, or, if you’ve heard of social listening but you’re wondering which ones you should actually use, I’ve gone through and evaluated three of the most prominent social listening tools on the market today. If you’re not already using it, you’re obsolete.

By truly hearing what people want, social listening is a tool that can help launch your company above the competition.

It has transformed advertising from a business where brands speak at people, to one where brands start meaningful, valuable conversations - creating lasting connections with people on the other side of every ad. On top of that, social listening puts humanity back into social media marketing. When your brand blows up negatively, you need the tools to be able to react. Marketers don’t have time to fail slowly anymore - three hours is a social media lifetime. And instead of taking more than three months, if your brand is in crisis, you know right away. This combination provides a clearer view of the impact of your various marketing efforts. Social listening layers the most basic aspect of marketing - storytelling - on top of more traditional, numerical metrics. It helps monitor your own brand presence, your image, your share of voice, competitor insights, industry trends and other key phrases essential to your product. Brands everywhere are now able to be a fly on the wall to the constant stream of conversation flooding across news outlets, blogs, social platforms and more. Social listening is a 20th-century marketer’s dream. Not that long ago, marketers would spend their days (and their dollars) fine-tuning focus groups and making educated guesses on where their target audience might be found. We all know that a brand isn’t what you say it is - it’s what the people buying your brand say it is. Marketers have historically struggled to tap into what consumers think of their brands.

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