Social Listening is now a crucial asset for any company to grow in a competitive market.
You need to be present where your customers are. You must stay close to the ground and engage quickly with users, to build a strong online reputation.
But it can quickly become time consuming to monitor mentions of your brand on all the platforms that are now available, from social media to online communities, and check every source.
You need a tool that can handle all the monitoring for you, and keep you updated on new conversations as they happen. A tool to lift that weight for you, so that you can focus on engaging with your customers and prospects.
To help you choose the right tool, we regularly test and benchmark the different tools available.
Today, we will analyze buska as the Best social listening alternative to Google Alerts  :

buska.io vs Google Alerts

So let’s dive in and see how these tools can help you :

How to Signup ?

• buska offers a 7 day trial with a very simple and quick onboarding (under 2 minutes).
  
  When you sign up, you are asked to type the first keyword you want to monitor.
  And you get instant access to the latest mentions.
  The UI is intuitive and there is no need for detailed tutorials or guided onboarding

Buska onboarding tour

• Google Alerts is free.
  You need to provide an email to receive the alerts.
  Setup is minimal. Type in the keyword to monitor, and add your email address.
  You can display more options for the settings

Conclusion :

 Buska is easy to setup, but requires a sign-up. Onboarding is quick and simple.
Google Alerts setup is straight forward : keyword + email addres.
But you have to reload the page for each keyword you want to track.

What sources are monitored

The tools both monitor different platforms.

🔍 With buska , you get access to :

• Linkedin

• Facebook

• Twitter

• Youtube,

• TikTok

• Pinterest

• Instagram

• Reddit

• Quora

• Medium

• Google Search

• Google News

• File Search (Ultimate plan)

• IndieHackers
  and more…

Google Alerts doesn't disclose the list of sources but they monitor :

• News websites

• Web pages

• Blogs

• Public forums

• Videos (titles)

• Books

It doesn't guarantee any results for social media monitoring.
Note that studies show that Google Alerts misses on average 40% - 50% of mentions for a brand.

How to get notified

Both tools let you setup notifications to be alerted when a new mention of you keywords pops up online.

buska allows you to easily setup notifications via :

• email

• browser

• Slack

• Discord

• Whatsapp (soon)

Just turn toggles on and connect your accounts, and you are set.
You’ll receive alerts (weekly, daily, instant – depending on your plan) when it finds new mentions.

Google Alerts doesn't have an online display. You can only receive alerts via email :

• you can specify the frequency (real-time, daily, weekly)

• you can define the language of the mentions you monitor

• you can list specific regions / countries for the source of mentions.

Conclusion :

buska offers more options and « plug’N’play » solutions for notifications.
You can receive alerts on many different communication channels.
Google Alerts is solely an email notification tool

What other features they offer :

Google Alerts doesn't offer any extra feature. And doesn't monitor social media.

Sentiment Analysis :
Only buska provides Sentiment Analysis for the mentions tracked. This lets you understand at a glance how the audience feels about your brand.

Analytics :
Only buska gives you access to visual stats of key Metrics
Buska offers more insights and visual charts of the social listening activity.

Document Search :
Buska lets you search for mentions of your brand or keywords in any publicly shared document.
It can be a pdf Report or Study, a Competition Analysis table, a Top list image where your brand is quoted….

How social listening looks

The tools have different approaches :

🔍 buska opted for a sleak minimalist design, focused on showing the mentions of the brand.
– The Dashboard shows you the Key metrics and latest mentions.
– The Feed shows all the mentions you have. You can filter by source, language, or sentiment.

Buska also sends designed emails when there are new notifications of mentions of the brand.

Google Alerts doesn't have an online interface. It is only email alerts.
The email lists the mentions with a quick preview for each.

There are no indications of date for the mentions. It mixes recent mentions with months/ years old mentions for the keyword.

How much does it cost ?

🔍 buska targets startups, entrepreneurs and small businesses and aims for a self serve approach. It offers 3 plans :

• Free Trial – 7 days to test all the features of the Pro Plan.

• Pro Plan – with 3 keywords. It adds Facebook, Tiktok as sources, and gives more notification options and Sentiment analysis

• Ultimate Plan – with 10 Keyword, adding File Search, Team Management and more features.

The prices are aligned with the budget and needs of the target audience : from the Solo Founder to the fast growing Scale up and Growth teams.

- Google Alerts is a free tool. Note that you can track only one word per alert set.

Which tool to choose ?

We have seen that 🔍 buska appears to be the best social listening alternative to Google Alerts in 2024 .
The tools have different approaches :

buska is a comprehensive Social Listening tool, tailored for SMBs and Scale-ups.
It tracks numerous resources, and offers dedicated social listening features like sentiment analysis and real time notifications.
You can receive different sorts of notifications and access mentions on the platform.

Google Alerts is a simple notification free tool. You only receive email alerts with the mentions of your keyword.
Accuracy is approximate and you receive alerts for all sorts of mentions from different periods.

If you are looking for a powerful social listening tool for your company and get the best money to value tool, buska is clearly the way to go.

if you want to start monitoring keywords for Web mentions, as a first step, Google is a good option.
But you cannot expect accurate results and it doesn't track mentions from social media.