Cool Tabs Social Listening vs SmartMetrics

Cool Tabs Social Listening is a web tool for tracking hashtags, mentions and keywords on X and Instagram. It measures campaign reach, evolution and participation in real time, with alerts for activity spikes, sentiment changes and mentions by influential accounts. Natural language processing with custom dictionaries, IBM Watson Analytics sentiment analysis and automatic categorization help organize the monitored material. It can geolocate up to 40% of X content for territorial analysis, and reports can be exported to PDF or Excel. Instagram hashtag monitoring includes content from the last 24 hours onward. X monitoring is on demand, costs extra and is limited to 10,000 posts per month. Plans are $49 a month for Stone, $199 a month for Gold and $499 a month for Diamond, with increasing profile and monthly-item limits. A free 7-day trial is available, but there is no free plan.

SmartMetrics provides Instagram account and hashtag analytics for brands and agencies through web access and an API. Account reports visualize more than 30 measures across accounts, posts, and stories, including audience demographics and geography, engagement, reach, and impressions. Hashtag tracking covers daily post updates, performance, sentiment, top posts, and related hashtags. The service also tracks brand mentions in real time and lets users respond from one place. Reports can be exported as PDF or CSV, charts as images, and shared through a secret link. Agency tools include scheduled and white-label reports, shared online reports, goals, and smart alerts. Its documented API uses key-based authentication over HTTPS; account analytics require authorization through Facebook. Plans start at $9 a month for up to three accounts, with hashtags counting toward the profile limit. A 14-day trial does not require a credit card, but the account is put on hold afterward unless the user subscribes.