Social team of one, losing Sprout... What do you use for inexpensive B2B social listening (LinkedIn, X, Reddit...Claude)?

For this budget I’d separate coverage from workflow. Most tools won’t cover LinkedIn public posts broadly, so ask each vendor to spell out exactly what it can ingest and label the gaps instead of comparing dashboards as if they offer full listening. For ten clients and five topics, pilot only a couple of client names and one topic across company pages, X, and Reddit first. Keep a small log of useful mentions, false positives, source, and date; that tells you whether the coverage is worth paying for before you scale the query list.

For the month-to-month trial, give the vendor a handful of public posts you already know about and check whether it finds them, how quickly alerts arrive, and whether Boolean aliases are manageable. LinkedIn may need a separate manual routine around public pages and relevant conversations. For this solo team, a short weekly review that turns findings into pitch angles or calendar questions may be more useful than a polished sentiment score.

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Heads up on LinkedIn: most listening tools hit the same wall there because LinkedIn keeps public post data pretty locked down, so a lot of them can only pull your own company pages.

For B2B tech, Reddit, niche forums, and trade media usually carry the more useful chatter for media pitching anyway.

But whatever you shortlist, test it on one client's name and check it catches threads you already know exist

heads up, linkedin barely lets any tool listen through its api, so ask every vendor to demo that part live before you sign