Best B2B social listening tools (2026): where buyers complain in public, and how to answer them
B2B social listening tools watch public posts on Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, and similar sites for keywords you choose: your category, a competitor's name, or the words people use when they have the problem you solve. For sales, a post asking for a tool recommendation or complaining about a competitor is the most direct buying signal there is, because the buyer wrote it themselves.
Below are the keyword listeners built for B2B, the brand monitoring suites, the signal platforms that act on mentions, and the build-your-own options OneGTM uses, with what each vendor publishes about price. This page covers other people's posts. For analytics on your own LinkedIn posts, see LinkedIn analytics tools. For the wider set of triggers, see buying signal tools.
Key takeaways
- Octolens and Syften are built for B2B keyword listening on Reddit, Hacker News, and X, from about $30 to $160 a month.
- F5Bot is free for Reddit, Hacker News, and Lobsters alerts.
- Brand24 and Mention are brand monitoring suites, priced for marketing teams.
- Most posts come from a username with no email. Reply in the thread, and save sequences for LinkedIn posts.
- A fit check matters more than the listener. Most keyword hits are hobbyists, students, and vendors.
Keyword listening built for B2B
These watch developer and founder communities where B2B buyers ask for recommendations, and alert you in Slack, email, or by webhook. Cheap, fast to set up, and good at Reddit and Hacker News.
Octolens
Our pick for B2B teams
Social listening for B2B and developer brands across Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News, GitHub, Stack Overflow, YouTube, Bluesky, and review sites, with AI relevance filtering. Scale adds podcasts, newsletters, news, and the web.
Best for: B2B teams that want one listener across developer and founder communities
Pricing: Pro $159/month (15,000 mentions, 10 keywords) and Scale $499/month (50,000 mentions, 40 keywords), billed annually. Enterprise custom. 7-day free trial.
Syften
Keyword monitor for Reddit, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, GitHub, Product Hunt, Stack Exchange, forums, Slack communities, Bluesky, and the web, with AI filtering, Slack alerts, an API, and webhooks.
Best for: Cheap, wide community coverage with an API
Pricing: Entry $29.95/month; Standard $49.95/month; PRO $119.95/month. X monitoring +$40/month and YouTube +$20/month on Standard and PRO.
F5Bot
Emails you when your keywords appear on Reddit, Hacker News, or Lobsters. No dashboard, no AI, and very little setup.
Best for: Free alerts on Reddit and Hacker News
Pricing: Free plan. Paid Silver $12.99/month and Gold $49.99/month.
Brand monitoring suites
Built for marketing and PR teams tracking a brand across social, news, and the web, with sentiment and reporting. Good coverage, priced per keyword and mention volume.
Brand24
Media monitoring across Facebook, Instagram, X, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, news, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and reviews, with sentiment analysis and alerts.
Best for: Marketing teams tracking brand and competitor mentions everywhere
Pricing: Individual $199, Team $299, Pro $399, Business $599 per month billed annually ($249, $349, $499, $699 monthly). Enterprise from $1,499/month.
Mention
Media monitoring and social listening with sentiment analysis and competitive tracking. Historical data and API access are paid add-ons.
Best for: PR and marketing teams that want listening and reporting in one tool
Pricing: Custom pricing; the plan price was not shown on the pricing page when we checked. Annual billing gives two months free.
Signal platforms that act on mentions
These treat social activity as one signal among many, tie it to a person and an account, and push it toward outreach.
Common Room
Signal platform that combines social and community engagement with website visits, product usage, and third-party intent, resolves it to people and accounts, and routes it to reps.
Best for: Companies with an active community and a budget for a full signal platform
Pricing: Essential $2,500/month billed annually. Advanced and Enterprise custom.
Gojiberry
AI agents that watch buying and social signals, such as people engaging with competitors, following your company, or active in your space, then run outreach to them.
Best for: Small teams that want LinkedIn social signals turned into outreach
Pricing: Pro $99/month with 2 AI agents and up to 1,800 prospects contacted a month. Custom plans for teams of 3 or more.
Build your own listening feed
When you want the raw posts in your own database, with your own fit rules and routing, pull them through scrapers and APIs. This is how OneGTM builds listening lanes.
Apify Reddit scrapers
Scraping platform with ready-made actors that search Reddit posts and comments by keyword or subreddit and return full text, author, score, and dates. Pay per result.
Best for: Pulling Reddit threads on a schedule into your own database
Pricing: Reddit Scraper Lite from $3.40 per 1,000 results, lower on higher Apify plans. Apify free plan includes $5 of usage a month; Starter $19/month.
treg
OneGTM uses this
Pay-per-call catalog of thousands of data endpoints, including Reddit, X, TikTok, and LinkedIn post search and engager scraping from several providers, with measured success rates shown before you call.
Best for: One-off or niche social searches without a subscription
Pricing: No subscription. You pay per call, with the price shown before each call and no markup. $1.00 free to start. Reddit keyword search from about $0.001 to $0.002 per call.
Deepline
OneGTM uses this
GTM data platform where scheduled plays pull posts, run a fit check with a model, find the person, and route them. Its providers include Hacker News and Bluesky, and it runs the LinkedIn engager plays we use alongside listening.
Best for: Turning social posts into scored, routed leads
Pricing: Pay as you go at $0.10 per credit with no platform fee.
Hacker News Search API
Algolia's public search API for Hacker News. Search stories and comments by keyword and date with no key. Useful for launches, shutdowns, and Ask HN threads in your category.
Best for: Free, structured Hacker News search
Pricing: Free.
Prices are from each vendor's site as of October 2026 and change often, so check before you buy. This is an opinionated list, not a paid ranking. Some links are referral links that may earn us a credit; that never changes what you pay or who makes the list.
B2B social listening tools compared
| Tool | Best for | Starting price |
|---|---|---|
| Octolens | B2B teams that want one listener across developer and founder communities | Pro $159/month billed annually |
| Syften | Cheap, wide community coverage with an API | From $29.95/month |
| F5Bot | Free alerts on Reddit and Hacker News | Free; paid from $12.99/month |
| Brand24 | Marketing teams tracking brand and competitor mentions everywhere | From $199/month billed annually |
| Mention | PR and marketing teams that want listening and reporting in one tool | Custom pricing |
| Common Room | Companies with an active community and a budget for a full signal platform | $2,500/month billed annually |
| Gojiberry | Small teams that want LinkedIn social signals turned into outreach | Pro $99/month |
| Apify Reddit scrapers | Pulling Reddit threads on a schedule into your own database | From $3.40 per 1,000 results |
| treg (OneGTM uses) | One-off or niche social searches without a subscription | Pay per call; $1 free |
| Deepline (OneGTM uses) | Turning social posts into scored, routed leads | $0.10/credit, no platform fee |
| Hacker News Search API | Free, structured Hacker News search | Free |
Starting prices as published by each vendor in October 2026.
What to listen for
Listening on your brand name is the least useful setup for sales. People who already know your name will find you. The posts worth catching are from people who have the problem and have not picked a tool yet.
Write keywords in the words a buyer uses for the pain. Your website copy is the wrong source. Then add competitor names, because a public complaint about a competitor is a buyer telling you they might switch.
- Recommendation requests: "alternative to", "anyone using", "what do you use for".
- Competitor names, especially next to words like pricing, outage, support, or cancel.
- The problem in plain words, such as "spreadsheet hell" or "manual data entry".
- Launch and shutdown threads in your category on Hacker News and Product Hunt.
- Your category name, to see who is new to it.
Most posts come with a username and nothing else
On Reddit, X, Hacker News, and Bluesky you usually get a handle and no way to find a work email. In a listening lane we ran, those handle-only posts were the majority of the feed and also the sharpest posts in it. Join those conversations in the thread. Do not try to sequence them.
LinkedIn is the exception. A LinkedIn post gives you the person's profile, which you can enrich to a work email and reach through a LinkedIn sequencer or cold email. Expect that slice to be small. The posts you cannot answer are still worth keeping: they are buyers describing the problem in their own words, which is the best copy research you can get.
When to get help with social listening
Setting up a keyword alert takes ten minutes. The work is choosing keywords that catch buyers, filtering out everyone who is not one, and routing the rest to the right reply without spamming communities.
OneGTM builds listening lanes on Apify, treg, and Deepline: pull the posts, run the fit check, draft replies for a person to approve in Slack, and push LinkedIn posts into HeyReach and Instantly. You own the data and the workflows.
- Your alerts are full of noise and nobody reads them.
- Buyers ask for recommendations in your category and you find out a week later.
- You want competitor complaints turned into outreach.
- You want buyer language from Reddit and Hacker News in your outbound copy.
B2B social listening FAQ
What are the best B2B social listening tools?
How much do B2B social listening tools cost?
Is there a free social listening tool for Reddit and Hacker News?
How is social listening different from LinkedIn analytics?
Can I add people from Reddit to a cold email sequence?
What keywords should a B2B company monitor?
Does social listening work for B2B sales?
Buyers asking for your category in public and nobody answering?
Get a social listening review
Tell me what you're building. I reply the same day.
Pick a time
Nothing works? Write team@getaob.com and I'll find one.
Book a timeGrid not loading? Open the booking page
Systems we've built for
- Antimetal
- SuperDial
- Rubie
- Enata
- Coastal Recruiting
Rather do it the old way? team@getaob.com LinkedIn
How to use social listening in outbound
Here is the play. Pull keyword hits daily from a listener or your own scrapers into one table. Run each post through a fit check with a model that asks one question: does this person need what we sell? Drop hobbyists, students, researchers, vendors, and recruiters. On an error, mark the post unknown so an outage does not wipe the list.
For the posts that pass, a model drafts a short public reply and a short DM in your voice, and each one lands as a card in a Slack channel for a person to send or skip. Handle-only posts get a helpful reply in the thread that answers the question first. LinkedIn posts go to HeyReach with a message that references the post, and to Instantly once you have a verified email. Keep every post, answered or not, as a copy corpus.