What is Social Listening, and Why Is it Important?

Social listening involves monitoring social media platforms, forums, and other online spaces to understand what people are saying about your brand or product. It’s a bit like keeping your ear to the ground, but online. By paying attention to these conversations, you can learn a lot about your audience, from their preferences and pain points to current trends and topics they feel passionate about.

You can use these insights to improve your products and services, as well as connect with your audience on a more personal level.

Why Social Listening Is Important for All Brands

Social listening can benefit your business, regardless of its size, because it helps you stay in tune with your customers and their changing needs.

• Discover pain points. Identify what makes your customers tick and what holds them back. Use these insights to address common pain points and improve your products and services.
• Respond to issues. Identify and respond to customer feedback promptly, turning potential crises or bad press into opportunities for growth.
• Generate leads. Beyond managing customer leads, social listening can help you find fresh leads. Identify industry-relevant keywords, join conversations, and forge meaningful connections with potential customers.
• Track competitor sentiment. Learn from the positives and negatives people share about rival brands and products. This can help you make strategic, customer-led decisions and stay ahead of the game.
• Jump on trends. Use social listening to identify emerging trends and jump on them while they’re hot. This can increase engagement and your chances of going viral.

Social Listening vs Social Monitoring: What’s the Difference?

Social listening and social monitoring are related, but they have different goals.

Social monitoring focuses on tracking and responding to specific mentions, comments, and messages about your brand in real time. Think of it as addressing the “what” — what are people saying about your brand right now? It’s more reactive and immediate and identifies issues or trends related to your brand.

Social listening takes a broader view, by analyzing big-picture conversations and trends in your industry — not just direct mentions of your brand.

It’s about gaining deeper insights, by exploring the “why” behind conversations. Why are people talking about certain topics? What motivates people? What emotions drive conversations? It’s more proactive and strategic than social monitoring and helps inform long-term business decisions.Put simply, monitoring deals with symptoms, while listening uncovers the underlying reasons behind them.

For example, imagine you’re in a store. Social monitoring would be like responding to individual customers at the counter, while social listening would involve stepping back and observing all customer interactions, to improve the overall store experience.

Both are valuable, but social listening gives a more comprehensive understanding of your audience and market trends. Social monitoring is more concerned with day-to-day engagement and customer service.

How to Implement Social Listening

Get started with these tips and best practices for social listening.

Pick the Right Platforms

The key to effective social listening starts by being on the same platforms as your audience. Focus on where they’re most active. For B2B companies, that might be LinkedIn and X, while B2C brands might have better luck on Facebook and Instagram. Don’t forget niche platforms, like Reddit, or industry-specific forums relevant to your business.

Tip: search for relevant keywords on all major platforms, to see where the liveliest conversations currently take place.

Set Thoughtful Alerts

You can set up alerts on your chosen platforms, so you’re notified when someone talks about your brand or industry. Instead of broad terms like “content,” use more targeted phrases like your brand name, product name, or specific industry terms.

The more niche you go with your keyword alerts, the easier it will be to get to the heart of interesting, relevant conversations and avoid jamming up your inbox with unnecessary notifications.  

Tip: regularly analyze and tweak your alerts to better match your brand, products, and industry. 

Respond Promptly

Quick responses show that you’re attentive and care about your audience’s concerns. Aim to address mentions, especially negative ones, as soon as possible. 

According to the latest Sprout Social Index, 69% of consumers want brands to respond within 24 hours, and 16% want a response within minutes. So, the quicker, the better. You can respond privately, by directly messaging an individual, or publicly, by posting an open message that protects your brand reputation.

Remember, while negative feedback obviously puts a damper on things, it’s also a great opportunity to learn and improve your products or customer experience. By teaching you more about your target audience, it’s just as valuable as positive feedback.

Balance Promotion and Helpfulness

If you plan on using social listening to identify leads, focus on providing value to them first. Offer helpful information or solutions before promoting your products or services. This builds trust with potential leads and adds credibility to your marketing.

Old research found that leads need about seven touchpoints with a brand before they buy, but this is changing. More recent studies have found it can take anywhere between one and 50 touches, depending on how warm a prospect is. The more you can prove your expertise — and connect with potential leads before you sell — the better.

Assign Team Responsibilities 

Social listening is almost a full-time job in itself, especially if you have a big brand that generates a lot of online chatter. To help streamline your listening process, try designating specific team members to handle different types of mentions or inquiries. This helps you provide consistent and targeted responses that avoid the awkwardness of multiple team members responding to the same issue.

Tip: break up responsibilities by platform (e.g. one team member focuses on LinkedIn and another focuses on X). Or break them up by sentiment (e.g. one team member focuses on positive feedback and another on negative).

Develop a Response Playbook

You might notice over time that recurring issues crop up. If this is the case, create standardized responses for common issues or questions. This helps ensure that  customers with similar issues receive similar responses. It also gives team members a roadmap for how to respond consistently to various issues. This is particularly important if you plan on having multiple team members focus on social listening.

Tip: in addition to documenting standardized responses to common issues, your playbook should also provide guidance for how team members can respond to less common issues and queries. Do this by highlighting helpful words they can use and issue-specific resources they can send customers.

Track Trends Over Time

Use your alerts to keep tabs on which trends emerge and disappear over time. This is particularly useful if you have a business with seasonal peaks and troughs. Don’t forget to document and regularly analyze the data and insights from your social listening efforts. You can use these to identify emerging trends, recurring issues, or shifts in sentiment — all of which can inform your future marketing and product strategies.

Choose the Right Tool

There are a handful of social listening tools that can make the process easier, from comprehensive platforms to more specialized tools. 

Here are some of our recommendations: 

• Positional’s Social Listening toolset. Create alerts on your favorite platforms to be notified when someone talks about your brand or a specific keyword. You can filter mentions by platform to see where most conversations happen.
• Sprout Social. A comprehensive solution that uses AI and automation to unpick insights and adjust listening filters. You can analyze competitor conversations, analyze campaigns, and monitor key events, too.
• Hubspot. Monitor conversations on X and LinkedIn. This is pretty limited compared to other platforms but provides some coverage of real-time conversations.
• Hootsuite. A powerful social listening platform that uses AI to analyze conversations and condense them into clear summaries. AI also runs sentiment analysis to understand the emotion behind mentions and how people feel about your brand or a particular topic.
• Mentionlytics. Another all-in-one platform that uses AI to track online conversations about your brand, products, and competitors. Set up alerts on your most popular channels, and gather data in visual dashboards and graphs.
• Syften. Monitor relevant keywords in niche communities. See who’s talking about your brand in real time, and get regular alerts.
• Google Alerts. A great starting point if you’re on a tight budget. Set up alerts for relevant keywords to see conversations across multiple channels.

How to Create Actionable Insights From Your Social Listening Findings

Got your data, but don’t know what to do with it? Here’s a step-by-step guide to building out your social listening strategy.

1. Define Your Goals

First, decide what you want to get out of social listening. Do you want to improve customer service? Get a better understanding of your audience? Jump on trends? You should also decide how you’ll measure your success. This might be based on how positive or negative people’s comments are, how many people interact with your content, or how many mentions your brand gets versus a competitor.

“I have what I call gold standard KPIs (key performance indicators),” says Danny Gardner, Social Intelligence Lead at Haleon. “They help me answer questions outright or set the context for a series of additional tasks that will help me answer the questions.”

These KPIs include:

• Total mentions
• Original mentions
• Users (how many people are creating X total and Y original mentions)
• Engagement

2. Segment Your Data 

Segmenting your data can help you understand the information you get from social listening. For example, you might group data by:

• Who’s talking
• Location
• Language
• Channel or platform
• Topics
• Sentiment

You can then filter out what you don’t need, such as posts before a certain date or information from irrelevant sources. 

3. Visualize and Communicate Your Data

After organizing your data, make it easy to understand and use. Create simple visuals like charts or graphs to show what you've found. Use clear, simple language to explain:

• What the data shows
• Why it's important
• What you think should be done about it

“Most of the social media data you analyze is noise,” says Gardner. “But then you have to deal with the one-word posts, long-form ranting paragraphs, etc. There's so much that can skew your data. The most popular graphs in the world are the line graph, bar graph, and pie graph — and for good reason. They give you a sense of volume, change over time, and share some of the most useful descriptive analytics you can calculate in social listening.”

4. Validate Your Insights

Before using your insights to make decisions, double-check they're correct and useful. You can do this by running surveys and small experiments, or by getting feedback from others.

Also, compare what you've found with other information you have, like website data or sales numbers, to make sure everything lines up.

“It's less about validating and testing social insights, but about continually refining your approach to ensure the insights remain relevant, representative, and actionable in a rapidly changing digital landscape,” says Barika Phillips Bell, Co-Founder of B3 Media Solutions. “For example, the data sources you choose to monitor, the keywords you track, and even the timing of your data collection can influence the insights you gather and how you interpret them.”

By checking your insights this way, you can be more confident they're right and avoid mistakes. This makes your findings more trustworthy and helpful when making decisions.

5. Prioritize and Act On Your Insights

Once you’ve validated your insights, decide which ones are the most important. Choose based on how big an impact they could have, how urgent they are, how easy they are to address, and how well they fit with your overall plans.

Then, decide who will do what, set deadlines for each task, and keep track of how things are going.

6. Learn From Your Insights

Lastly, use what you've learned to keep getting better. Regularly look back at your social listening efforts and ask what went well, what didn’t go so well, and how you can improve. Ask for feedback from customers, employees, and partners — and use their ideas to make your social listening even better.

“The process of social listening doesn't end once you have gathered data and insights,” says Phillips Bell. “It's an iterative process that requires businesses to regularly review their data, assess their strategies, and make adjustments as needed. I like to call this 'active listening', which involves absorbing information, reflecting on it, and using it to enhance understanding.”

Four Examples of Social Listening in Action

Check out these examples of real-life social listening from a variety of brands. 

How Positional Uses Social Listening to Generate Leads on LinkedIn

Positional’s co-founder, Nate, has set up an alert for “internal linking” on LinkedIn. Since this is one of the use cases that Internals solves, it makes sense to track people talking about “internal linking,” and join the conversation when promoting the product feels right.

Note how Nate says something smart and helpful before subtly promoting the tool in his comment.

There are two ways this type of social listening can help you generate leads:

1. Responding to posts where people are looking for specific help (and you know your product or service can provide that much-needed help)
2. Responding to posts that talk broadly about a relevant topic (by sharing info about your product or service). This exposes you to a wider audience of people who might be interested in what you’re offering and builds up your reputation for expertise in that topic

How Delta Uses Social Listening for Crisis Management

Brand reputation is everything in the online world. One negative comment can put off a potential customer for life — and Delta realized this when it was called out for badly handling a golf team’s clubs.

The airline immediately responded by apologizing for the situation. While this doesn’t undo what happened to the golf clubs, it still shows potential and existing customers that the brand cares about them.

Tip: set up alerts for your brand name to see mentions as soon as they come in. This will help you tackle negative feedback instantly — before it does any further damage.

How Innocent Smoothies Uses Social Listening to Nurture Existing Relationships

Innocent Smoothies is well known for its tongue-in-cheek social media responses, but it’s clear that its customers appreciate it.

When someone mentions the brand or product on social media, Innocent is quick to swoop in and offer a witty, reassuring comment. They’re also great at picking up negative feedback and spinning it into something positive.

How The Barbie Movie Used Social Listening to Jump on Trends

The marketing for the Barbie movie was something else! And the eagle-eyed social media team quickly picked up on emerging trends, thanks to social listening.

When fans compared Ken’s wardrobe to an outfit worn by BTS member Jimin in a previous music video, the Barbie team capitalized on the trend. They shared a video of Ken (a.k.a. Ryan Gosling) acknowledging fan observations and gifting Jimin his guitar from the movie.

Final Thoughts

Social listening is the online equivalent of sitting in a coffee shop and eavesdropping on conversations. It helps you tune into online discussions about your products, services, and industry — to get real-time insights into who your audience is and what matters most to them.

Here are a quick recap of things to keep in mind:

• Social listening goes beyond monitoring mentions — providing deeper insights into customer sentiment and industry trends.
• Implementing social listening involves choosing the right platforms, setting thoughtful alerts, responding promptly, and balancing promotion with helpfulness.
• To create actionable insights, remember to define clear goals, segment data, visualize findings, validate insights, prioritize actions, and continuously learn and improve.
• The right tools, from comprehensive platforms to specialized solutions, can help you implement and manage your social listening efforts.

By embracing social listening, you can stay ahead of the curve, respond effectively to customer needs, and make data-driven decisions geared toward driving growth and improving customer satisfaction. Remember that social listening is an ongoing process that needs regular refinement and adaptation. So be sure to maintain this continuous cycle to keep your finger on the pulse of changing customer needs.