Social listening is the process of analyzing online conversations to understand audience sentiment, trends, and insights about your brand or industry.
Social listening is the process of analyzing conversations, trends, and sentiments across social media and online platforms to understand how people feel about your brand, industry, competitors, and key topics. Rather than focusing on real-time responses like social monitoring, social listening takes a broader view, it looks at patterns over time to reveal what your audience is really thinking, feeling, and expecting.
While social monitoring helps you react to individual mentions or issues as they arise, social listening helps you adapt by turning conversations into strategic insights. This practice goes beyond what’s being said — it uncovers why it's being said, offering valuable direction for product development, brand messaging, content strategy, and customer experience improvements.
Social listening analyzes:
Here’s why social listening is an essential practice for brands, marketers, and business leaders:
Social listening helps you gauge how your audience feels about your brand or industry in general. Are people excited, frustrated, confused, or inspired? Understanding sentiment lets you fine-tune your messaging to better connect with your audience emotionally.
By analyzing what topics your audience is already talking about or responding to, you can create more relevant, valuable content. Social listening helps uncover content gaps and high-performing themes that may not show up in your analytics alone.
Staying ahead of industry trends gives you a competitive advantage. Social listening tools help you identify rising topics or shifts in conversation before they go mainstream, so you can lead the conversation, not follow it.
Listening to what people love (or wish existed) can offer powerful clues about unmet needs. Brands can use these insights to improve features, launch new offers, or pivot messaging to better match customer expectations.
Want to know how people talk about your competitors? Social listening provides a behind-the-scenes look at how rival brands are perceived, what they’re getting right, and where they’re falling short, giving you insight into how to differentiate your brand effectively.
Social listening begins by collecting public data from various online sources, including: social media platforms, forums, blogs, reviews, and news sites. Specialized tools scan for mentions of key phrases, brand names, hashtags, or competitor references and gather them into a central dashboard.
From there, the process typically follows these steps:
Smarter social scheduling starts here.
Start your 30-day free trial
A subscriber is someone who opts in to receive content from a creator or brand regularly and directly.
Stories are short, time-limited photo or video posts on social media that disappear after 24 hours.