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Social media has fundamentally changed how business owners operate. From direct messages to comments to user generated content about a trend, person, or product, social media lets us tap into so much info. And a critical way to use all of that information = is social listening.
Social listening helps you understand what people are saying online—not just about your product or current trends, but about issues that your business is positioned to solve.
This guide will help you understand what social listening is, why it matters to your business, and what to track. You’ll also learn how to build a social listening strategy and use those insights to improve your customers’ experiences.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the monitoring, collecting, and tracking of cultural and industry conversations across social media platforms. These insights are analyzed in an effort to provide actionable steps to improve your business.
Social listening goes beyond followers, mentions, or direct messages, and digs deeper into the trends, products, and competitors by proactively monitoring and targeting specific keywords in a search.
The value of social listening comes from identifying patterns in what people are saying online. You might notice recurring customer complaints, questions about your industry, or growing interest in a trend related to your business. Those insights can help you improve your marketing, customer experience, products, or offerings.
For example, if a floral business sees a lot of conversations online pairing flowers with astrology, they might roll out a collection of bouquets for all 12 signs of the zodiac to capitalize on the emerging trend.
Why social listening matters for businesses
Social listening provides valuable information that can be leveraged to help your business in a number of ways.
Social listening helps your business:
Create solutions for unhappy customers
Find conversations about your industry
Become a trendsetter, not a trend follower
Understand your business’s brand reputation
Discover competitive insights
What’s the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
While they sound similar, social monitoring and social listening are different in key ways. Social monitoring is the practice of responding to customer queries, comments, or messages online. Social listening expands on that and tunes into broader conversations beyond just your online presence.
A quick way to remember the difference: listening is what’s being said about you (and your industry); monitoring is what’s being said to you.
What to track with social listening
Social listening works best when you cast a wide net, collecting data from a number of different mentions on a number of social media platforms. Consider tracking most, if not all, of the following:
Brand mentions: This includes both tagged and untagged mentions of your business, your products or services, and any hashtags.
Industry keywords and conversations: Keywords in your business’s niche, topics or hashtags, and any cultural moments or holidays or seasonal trends.
Competitors: Mentions about your competitors (tagged and untagged or related keywords), product launches, and customer sentiment (both positive and negative).
Customer feedback: Positive, middling, or negative sentiment about recent product launches, new services, marketing, or anything else related to customer experience.
Influencers and creators: People in your industry speaking about something related to your business; influential creators with high engagement initiating or engaging in conversations with themes that touch on your products or services.
Social listening applications and examples
Once you start gathering social listening data, the challenge becomes knowing what to do with it. These examples show how businesses can put those insights to work.
Identifying a trending topic for content creation: The owner of an independent clothing store sees a rising trend on a TikTok spotlighting early 2000s fashion. They post on their TikTok page with their apparel that reflects the trend.
Responding to customer feedback in real time: A hair salon owner sees a positive review on Google and thanks the customer in the comments.
Adjusting messaging based on sentiment: A yoga studio owner notices posts on X from users who don’t like brand’s new advertising; the owner decides to launch a contest so followers can vote on a new slogan.
Discovering partnership opportunities: A local gardener sees on Instagram that another well-known gardener is coming to town and decides to message them for a collaborative farmers market event.
Testing new products or services: A local massage therapist sees a lot of potential customers posting about sleep deprivation in their neighborhood Facebook group and the masseuse invites the group to try a package of services that bundle massage treatments with downtime in a dedicated nap room.
How to build your social listening strategy
If you’re brand new to social listening, and unsure how to formulating a strategy, consider following these steps:
Set your goals: Define what you want to understand from social listening. Do you want to know your customers’ pain points? Are you curious how businesses get recommended in your field? Once you know the information you’re after, you can plug in the appropriate settings for your tools. For example, a beauty and wellness salon may want to improve customer retention and boost repeat visits.
Choose your platforms: When selecting the platforms to use, consider what your customers use. Do your customers specifically lean more toward text-based channels like X or LinkedIn or video-based ones like TikTok?
Select keywords: Look at trends in your industry or the comment sections of your social media profiles to source a set of keywords that provide you with usable insights. Target your searches for similar businesses and competitors, industry keywords (i.e. “best flower shop in X”), and the names of your products or services.
Create tracking and reporting workflow for analysis: Set-up a workflow to collect, track, analyze, and report on your social listening data. For example, at the first of the month before you restock your store's inventory, you use social listening to see positive or negative mentions of your products, any key trends that will influence sales, and overall trends in your industry.
Integrate insights into your marketing and product decisions: Notice trends, repeat comments, or mentions and cluster those into something you can action. This data doesn’t have to be for big overhauls. Consider small adjustments, too. For example, if you’re a career coach and you notice that users online are looking for a job-search checklist, consider offering something that speaks to that need.
Be sure to revisit your approach as your business grows, your industry changes, or new technology is introduced. It’s possible focusing on different goals, different platforms, or different keywords will serve you better as things evolve.
Social listening platforms and tools
Before you dive into social listening tools, you should understand which platforms you need to be checking.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, just a helpful guide of common social channels you could leverage:
Instagram: Known for photo sharing, Stories, Reels, and creator or brand-driven content.
Facebook: A longtime social network centered around personal updates, groups, events, marketplaces, and business pages.
X (formerly Twitter): Built around short posts, real-time conversations, reposts, and commentary.
Threads: Meta’s text-first social platform, connected to Instagram and designed for conversational posting similar to X.
LinkedIn: A professional networking platform focused on career updates, industry conversations, and business content.
Pinterest: A visual discovery platform centered around inspiration, saved ideas, and search-driven browsing.
Reddit: A discussion-based platform organized into niche communities called subreddits.
TikTok: A short-form video platform known for trends, entertainment, tutorials, and algorithm-driven discovery.
YouTube: The O.G. video-sharing platform used for everything from tutorials and reviews to vlogs and long-form entertainment.
Snapchat: A messaging and social platform centered around disappearing photos, videos, and Stories.
For social listening, there are a number of different tools you can use. Many of the tools range in cost from free to a monthly fee. Free options (such as Google Alerts) have more limitations in terms of what you can do and how much data you can discover.
The range of cost for social listening tools is $10 to $100 per month for entry-level, limited social media management and listening capabilities. For established businesses looking for more data, potentially integrating with AI for discovering trends and mentions, the cost can begin around $100 and go up to $1,000 per month.
Common social listening tools include:
Sprout Social: An all-in-one platform for scheduling and replying to posts, generating targeted reports, and supporting small to midsize businesses.
Brandwatch: A customer intelligence platform for analyzing trends, tracking brand perception, and uncovering audience insights.
Sprinklr: An enterprise-level platform for managing social media with advanced AI integrations and large-scale team support.
Hootsuite: Another all-in-one platform for publishing content, detecting trends with AI, and supporting midsize business social media teams.
Social listening best practices and tips
Below are a few tips and best practices to maximize your social listening efforts and get the best actionable data.
Avoid data overload: It’s very easy to get too much information too quickly from social listening. Try to stick to your keywords and skip general information that isn’t directly tied to your goals or business objectives.
Focus on actionable insights: Social listening works best when you find an issue that can create an actionable insight or result. For example, your research surfaces Reddit threads where customers complain about keeping up with too many emails, so you dial back your sends to once a week.
Stay consistent: It’s common to get swept up by trends online. Being everything to everyone will often yield nothing in return. Remain consistent by targeting the keywords, phrases, and trends that represent and reflect your business specifically, not anything that’s floating around online.