# What Features to Look For in a Social Listening Tool
> Ten features, each with a five-minute test you run in the free trial -- plus our own product scored against the same list, including the one we fail.
- **Author**: Marxx
- **Published**: 2026-10-14
- **Category**: Creative strategy
- **URL**: https://marxx.ai/posts/social-listening-tool-features
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Every feature list for social listening tools is written by someone selling one. Including this one.
So rather than tell you what matters, here is a checklist where **every item has a test you run yourself inside the free trial** -- and then our own product scored against it, fails included, before we ask you for anything.
## The checklist
Print it. Run it during the trial, not after. Each test takes about five minutes and the fail conditions are deliberately blunt, because a feature you cannot verify is a brochure claim.
Two notes on using it. Do the tests **in this order** -- the first three disqualify tools fastest. And run every test with *your own data*, never the vendor's demo account, which has been curated to pass.
## Our own scorecard
Four passes, one outright fail, five we're telling you to verify rather than trust.
The fail is the important one. **Marxx is not a web-wide mention monitor.** If your job is catching every blog, forum and news mention of your brand name across the internet, Brand24 or Awario does that and we don't. We read reviews, app stores, Reddit and the comments on your running ads, and turn those into named audience segments. Different product, different purchase.
The five "test it" rows are items we don't publish a claim about. We'd rather say that than write "yes" next to a feature and let you discover the caveat in month two.
## The one test nobody runs
Here's the item worth the most and checked the least by Indian advertisers.
We tagged **13,176 ads from three Indian D2C brands by the language they speak. 22.0% are Hinglish** -- code-mixed Hindi and English, written in Latin script. That's how a very large share of your customers also write reviews and ad comments.
Now go and look at what the major vendors publish about it. Brand24's features page names no monitoring languages at all. Awario says "any language" and gives no list. Determ lists sources by channel, not by language. Of the tools we checked, only Sarvam -- which is Indic text-to-speech and ASR, not a listening tool -- actually names its eleven languages.
None of that means the tools can't handle Hinglish. It means **you cannot find out from their marketing**, which is exactly why the checklist exists. Paste twenty real code-mixed comments from your own page into the trial. If *"bhai delivery toh fast thi par box damaged aaya"* comes back neutral, the sentiment engine is not reading your customers.
## The features that sound important and mostly aren't
- **Influencer identification.** Usually a follower-count sort. You already know who matters in your category.
- **Share of voice.** Flattering in a deck, rarely changes a decision.
- **AI summaries.** Fine, but they summarise the mentions the tool already found -- they don't fix coverage gaps.
- **Sentiment scores at low volume.** Under a few hundred mentions a month, read them yourself. You'll be more accurate than the classifier.
## What no tool on the market does
WhatsApp. It's encrypted and private, and for a lot of Indian businesses that's where the real conversation happens -- the complaint, the referral, the reorder. No listening tool reaches it and none will.
Budget accordingly: whatever you buy covers the public fraction of your customer conversation.
## FAQ
**How many of the ten must a tool pass?** Depends on your job. For a local business, review coverage and verbatim export matter more than Boolean precision. For a national brand in a crisis-prone category, refresh rate is everything.
**Is a free trial long enough to run all this?** Yes -- the ten tests total under an hour. Most trials are seven days.
**What if the vendor won't let me test with my own data?** That is itself a result.
**Should I buy on features or on price?** On which questions you need answered. A cheaper tool that covers your actual channels beats an expensive one that covers channels you're not on.
**Why publish your own fail?** Because the alternative is a feature table where every vendor ticks every box, which is how this category got untrustworthy.
## Build personas from what you already have
**Personas built from your own reviews and ad comments.** [Book a demo](https://marxx.ai/book-a-demo) -- bring your Google Business Profile and one running ad, and run the ten tests on us live. Including the Hinglish one.
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