Think of what you can do if you know exactly what draws your customers in—their needs, values, and purchasing habits. While we can’t read minds, we can get remarkably close by tuning into social media conversations. Free social media listening tools allow you to track what’s being said about your brand, products, and key topics, helping you tap directly into audience insights. Social listening enables you to gather intel directly from your target market.
That said, the quality of the conversation you’d get relies on your chosen tool. Below are five free social listening platforms that keep you informed and give you a competitive edge. I created this article to provide a thorough, straightforward guide on effectively using free social listening tools.
Top 5 Free-to-Use Social Media Listening Tools
Google Alerts
Why choose Google Alerts?
Although many listening tools may offer more advanced features, Google Alerts remains popular because it’s simple to use, costs nothing, and is a key part of Google’s suite of services. This free service allows you to track specific search terms and receive results directly in your Gmail at your preferred frequency. You can customize your alerts based on sources, the number of results you want to see, preferred languages, and more.
Google Alerts functions primarily as a keyword monitoring tool; its main limitation is that it doesn’t track social media posts. This might seem surprising for an article focused on social media listening tools, but Google Alerts still provides valuable insights.
Google Alerts is an excellent tool for brand monitoring. You can only understand the pulse of the masses by looking at what they’re saying—whether it’s positive feedback or complaints. This is especially crucial when it comes to negative reviews, which can rapidly become a PR crisis. According to Search Engine Land, the difference between a 4-star and a 3-star rating is a drop in consumer trust by 67%.
Google Alerts can also listen to your competitors. You’ll receive notifications whenever a third party mentions them. Understanding why they’re being celebrated or getting flak can help you adjust your marketing strategies to have an edge over them.
Say your niche is selling romance books; you can do specific searches for a competitor like The Ripped Bodice, an independent bookstore that only sells romance books, and see what they’ve been up to:
You can also do a #booktok search to see what readers are recommending or asking for:
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Talkwalker (Free Social Media Search)
Why choose Talkwalker?
Talkwalker by Hootsuite’s Free Social Media Search is a no-cost social listening tool that can analyze conversations in 186 languages across major social networks. Enter your brand, product, campaign, or hashtag, and it will show who has discussed it over the past week.
Here’s a snapshot of the insights you can gain with Talkwalker’s Free Social Media Search, using #booktok as an example.
Key Metrics: Access data on result count, engagement levels, sentiment, and potential reach for specific topics.
From October 24 to 30, BookTok had 4.7K results and 91.7K engagements, peaking at 277 mentions on October 27. Sentiment is mostly positive, with the hashtag’s potential reach estimated at 238.1 million.
Top Themes: Discover the most popular terms, phrases, hashtags, and emojis used in discussions about the topic.
Related topics for #booktok include #bookstagram, #authorsoftiktok, #bookboost, #BooksMakeGreatGifts, and #WritingCommunity.
By hovering over a specific hashtag, you’ll see results related to that tag.
I also adjusted the theme type and looked up the top emojis for BookTok.
Influencers: Discover the top ten most engaging individuals discussing your topic.
For #BookTok, the most active authors based on the week’s search are primarily on X, which dominates media share at 87.3%.
Demographics: Identify key demographics like gender, age, language, interests, and occupations discussing your keyword.
Interestingly, 55.6% of social media users engaging with the hashtag are male, while 44.4% are female. You can also see the percentage of non-binary users. Top languages show English dominating at 87.7%.
Results: Browse all the results related to your search and find the most relevant ones for your marketing plans.
In this case, one of the top discussions comes from Readers Archive, which shared a YouTube video on October 26. The video received nearly 11K likes, over 255K views, and 69 comments.
So, where can you apply these insights? You can evaluate brand health and consumer sentiment using AI-powered sentiment analysis to gauge how your audience feels. Additionally, this free social media tracker helps measure brand awareness by analyzing the total volume of your mentions.
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Twitter/X Advanced Search
Why choose Twitter/X advanced search?
Despite its controversies, X remains a popular social network. According to Statista, Twitter.com had 6.2 billion visits worldwide in December 2023. Twitter’s Advanced Search allows you to find specific tweets based on various criteria. It is divided into five categories: words, accounts, filters, engagement, and dates. Each category includes specific usage rules, making them essentially self-explanatory.
Finding posts on X using hashtags is an effective way to monitor user conversations. You can also select your preferred language for search results. Click ‘Advanced Search’ and scroll to the ‘Language’ section, which offers 34 languages. For example, I chose Spanish.
Resulting in these top posts:
To maximize Twitter Advanced Search, identify the most popular tweets on your chosen topic. Instead of relying on the “Top tweets,” this method allows you to define your own criteria for what qualifies as a popular post.
To do this, go to the Twitter search box, type your search term, and add the operator min_retweets: (number) or min_faves: (number) to filter the results. For example, search for booktok min_retweets:100 OR min_faves:100. This will display tweets that mention “booktok” with at least 100 retweets or 100 favorites.
This is the Media result mentioning BookTok using the specified parameters:
Let’s open one:
@grlyteengrl’s tweet about BookTok received 1.5K hearts (favorites). The comments reveal mixed sentiments among users. One commenter expresses frustration, while another questions the significance of the trend if it encourages people to enjoy reading again. Another user feels ambivalent, appreciating that platforms like TikTok attract new readers but disliking the label “TikTok authors” for esteemed authors.
You can gather valuable insights from this search result to shape your marketing strategy through social listening. For instance, the tweet’s 1.5K hearts indicate significant interest in the topic. This highlights a promising opportunity for content creation or engagement in your marketing efforts.
The diverse sentiments in the comments (anger, curiosity, ambivalence) reveal different audience perspectives. These insights can help you tailor effectively your messaging to address these sentiments.
To address angry users, create content that acknowledges their concerns about reading and literary recognition today. For supportive comments, highlight the positive impact of social media on reading culture by sharing stories of how platforms like TikTok help readers rediscover books.
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Boardreader
Why choose BoardReader?
BoardReader is a dedicated forum search engine that emphasizes business content. It focuses on industry news and trends, product reviews and comparisons, marketing and sales advice, customer service tips, and technical support. It indexes over 300 million posts from thousands of forums worldwide.
BoardReader provides a centralized platform to understand a specific topic comprehensively. Unlike general search engines that index all web content, BoardReader focuses exclusively on forums and message boards. This specialization gives you results directly from community discussions.
Here are the results for searching “booktok” on the first pass. The results come from well-known online forums such as Fan Forum, Something Awful, ResetEra, and Lipstick Alley, all of which have large user bases and active communities.
There are numerous online forums which can make finding relevant or niche communities challenging. BoardReader helps discover these communities by highlighting pertinent forum threads. It also allows users to customize their searches. You can choose between posts or threads, specify the date, language, and domain, and sort the results by relevance or freshness.
For this second search, I selected ‘thread ‘ as the type, set the date to the last three months, and chose French as the language. I sorted the results by freshness. BoardReader returned five references to BookTok from various French-speaking forums.
BoardReader filters out external noise from news articles, blogs, and images, offering a clearer view on user-generated discussions.
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AnswerThePublic
Why choose AnswerThePublic?
Successful content requires understanding what people are genuinely asking and providing answers to those questions. This is where AnswerThePublic excels. It uses Google autocomplete data to uncover popular questions and phrases related to any keyword, offering insights into your audience’s thoughts and interests.
AnswerThePublic goes beyond Google; it also supports keyword and content idea research for Bing, YouTube, Amazon, TikTok, and Instagram. This helps you to target the right topics across the platforms your audience frequents, ensuring your content reaches them where they’re most active online.
For my initial search, this social listening tool generated 3,659 results, conveniently organized into various categories and displaying key metrics upfront.
Focusing on question-based results, the tool allows filtering by modifiers such as why, who, which, are, when, where, how, will, and what. These questions are ranked with indicators like ‘high,’ ‘average,’ and ‘low’ search volume, making it easier to identify trending topics.
AnswerThePublic now supports Instagram searches and provides targeted results. A #booktok search on Instagram returned 325 results, offering insights on hashtag usage, post counts, and search volumes.
Instagram results also display users engaging with the hashtag, including details such as usernames, account verification status, and privacy settings. This information helps refine your approach by identifying influential or relevant users within the community.
This social listening tool reveals what people are searching for, helping you generate content ideas while providing keyword research data, including term popularity and cost-per-click estimates for ads. Neil Patel of NP Digital manages AnswerThePublic, endorsing it as a powerful tool for keyword discovery and research.
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Social listening vs. social monitoring: key differences
Social listening differs from social monitoring, as both have distinct objectives and strategies.
Social listening “listens” to online discussions about your brand and industry. Social listening tools track how customers interact, including with competitors, on social media. They monitor all conversations about your domain, even if your brand isn’t specifically mentioned. One benefit of social listening is using the extracted insights to refine your marketing strategies, set goals, and benchmark activities.
McDonald’s effectively utilized social media listening during its “Grimace’s Birthday” campaign, celebrating its iconic mascot. The campaign sparked the “Grimace shake trend” on TikTok, where users created horror-inspired videos. McDonald’s engaged by responding with a witty meme, gaining roughly half a million likes and showcasing its trend-awareness.
On the flip side, social monitoring ‘reads the room.’ Social monitoring tools track brand mentions across various online platforms. The main goal is to identify every mention of your brand, product, or service and respond in a way that adds value to the commenter. One advantage of social monitoring is that it acts as an extension of customer support within social media.
A notable example of social monitoring involves 100 Thieves and Crocs. 100 Thieves, a lifestyle and gaming brand, mentioned Crocs on X without tagging them. However, Crocs likely used social media monitoring to detect the mention and respond quickly.
| Aspect | Social listening | Social monitoring | Significance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Micro vs. Macro | Analyzes overall sentiments and trends regarding the brand | Focuses on specific brand mentions | Provides context for shaping strategies and messaging |
| Reactive vs. Proactive | Proactively identifies trends for strategic planning | Reacts to immediate mentions and tags | Helps address issues early and optimize offers |
| Tactical vs. Analytical | Offers deep insights into engagement patterns | Centralizes mentions for direct responses | Informs decision-making and goal-setting |
Maximize the value of free social media listening tools
Free tools offer an attractive entry point into social listening, but they often have limitations that restrict deeper data analysis on social media. The two key restrictions are:
Here are social listening strategies to maximize your free tools effectively:
Ethical considerations and best practices in social listening
Just because these tools are free doesn’t mean you can use them without adhering to proper guidelines.
Navigate the gray area of consent
While much social media data is publicly accessible, the ethical implications of using it for commercial purposes are complex. Evaluate how the context of a post influences implied consent—a casual tweet differs from a detailed review. Understand the distinction between users who actively share content and those who only engage in public discussions. Finally, always adhere to platform-specific privacy settings.
Practice transparency and accountability
Be open about your social listening practices and the use of collected data. Develop clear policies outlining how you gather, store, and utilize social media information. If you encounter sensitive information, adopt responsible disclosure practices to minimize harm.
Protect vulnerable groups
Be mindful of how social listening can impact vulnerable groups, such as minors and marginalized communities. Collaborate with ethics and social science experts to establish guidelines for managing sensitive information. Additionally, provide anonymous reporting channels for individuals to raise concerns about potential data misuse.
Make the most of social listening
Online conversations shape brand perceptions more than ever. Free tools provide a valuable starting point for brands looking to understand their audience, monitor competitors, and identify trends. While these tools have limitations, learning to maximize their potential can elevate your strategy.
If you’re ready to enhance your social listening approach, I can help customize solutions tailored to your needs. Feel free to reach out through my Contact Page.
