Every day, billions of conversations take place online: on social media, blogs, reviews, podcasts, and more. Social listening is a strategy to help you sift through these huge volumes of social data to extract the pieces that are relevant to you.
When you’re growing a brand, you need eyes and ears everywhere your audience is. If you’re out of the loop, you have no idea what others are saying about your brand or a competitor.
Trying to find these mentions manually is time-consuming, and sometimes it feels impossible. With social listening tools, you can automatically capture key mentions and the context surrounding them. Here’s a closer look at the social listening process and how you can use it to your advantage.
Jump to a section:
What Is Social Listening?
What Types of Data Can Be Measured Through Social Listening?
Why Is Social Listening Important?
What Are the Top Use Cases for Social Listening?
Why Use Social Media Listening Tools?
How to Build a Social Listening Strategy
Social Listening Case Study: Pride in London
Using Social Media Reporting Effectively
Get Started with the Meltwater Social Listening Suite Today
FAQs: Social Listening
What Is Social Listening?
Social listening refers to how you discover and analyze what people post on social media platforms. You filter the content you want to see by using keywords and search terms to narrow down the results.
Social listening platforms aggregate data from a wide range of sources, including Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube, Reddit, Pinterest, Snapchat, blogs, discussion forums, consumer review sites, and even podcasts.
If you're looking for some podcasts to inspire you, take a look at the best financial podcasts, the best PR podcasts, the best retail podcasts, the best social media podcasts, the best SEO podcasts, the best Shopify podcasts, the best eCommerce podcasts, the top branding podcasts, and the best tech podcasts out there.
With social listening, you can easily find out about important social media statistics and make use of specific social media analytics, like:
- YouTube Stats
- Twitter/X Stats
- Twitter (X) Analytics
- TikTok Stats
- Instagram Stats
- Facebook Analytics
- Instagram Trends
Social listening data also helps you dig down regionally. Find: social media statistics for Australia, social media statistics for the Philippines, social media statistics for Hong Kong, social media statistics for Singapore, social media statistics for Indonesia, social media statistics for Malaysia, UK social media statistics, social media statistics for Sweden, South African social media statistics or UAE social media statistics.
What is social listening vs monitoring?
There’s some overlap between the terms social listening and social media monitoring. Monitoring is the first step; you’re combing millions of conversations for mentions that matter.
Listening is the second step; it uncovers the context behind those mentions so you can understand what’s being said. This helps you determine why those mentions matter and how to use that data accordingly.
What Types of Data Can Be Measured Through Social Listening?
Quantitative data gets you the numbers to prove the broad general points of your research. Qualitative data, on the other hand, brings you the details and the depth to understand their full implications. The two are complementary. In order to fully understand data, you usually need both.
Quantitative social listening data
- The number of social mentions: the number of times a specific keyword (a product, brand, expression, or hashtag) is mentioned on social media
- The scope of the social mentions: the number of Internet users potentially exposed to a message, calculated according to the audience of the people that have shared the message
- The number of engagements: the number of interactions between users and content
Quantitative data can be divided into two categories:
- Descriptive data: Gives you a trend or key figures, such as the number of new subscribers, engagements, impressions, or clicks.
- Actionable data: Contextualizes this information by deepening the analysis. Answers questions such as: Where do my new subscribers come from? What type of content receives the most engagement? At what time should I post to get the most amount of impressions?
Qualitative social media data
Qualitative data helps companies better understand numbers. This is achieved by listening to online exchanges and conversations by consumers, which are undoubtedly full of useful information. The quantitative data tells us what’s going on; the qualitative data helps us understand why this is happening.
Here are two primary examples of qualitative data:
1. Sentiment analysis
The development of semantic analysis technologies has made sentiment analysis possible. This lets us know if a keyword, phrase, or name is mostly negative, positive or neutral, and is an extremely useful indicator for assessing the perception of a product, update, company, campaign, or CEO.
By identifying peaks and dips in sentiment, we have a much better chance of understanding how audiences feel about a particular topic.
It’s also useful in determining high positives — which may be due to an influencer having posted about you — or extreme negatives, often the tell-tale sign of a crisis.
2. Trend analysis
No one has the ability to read through the millions of posts shared every day, but it is possible to automatically analyze correlations between exchanges and extract commonalities and tendencies. This kind of trend analysis is perfect for companies wanting to understand the context in which your brand or product is being talked about, and with which themes it is associated.
How is social listening data gathered?
- On social media networks: Most of the main social media networks have their own range of statistics and analysis tools, accessible through the users' business profiles. The data they provide can be great to use to understand the performance of your profiles and single posts.
- With social media engagement tools: Many social media management tools provide more advanced automated analysis for a more in-depth understanding of the data on social media.
- With social media listening tools and social media monitoring tools: For the most exhaustive analysis possible, it’s best to focus on not only your current community but those interested in your competitors and the wider industry.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
In a typical day on social media, 1.4 billion people log on to Facebook, 5 billion Snaps are sent, and 95 million photos are shared on Instagram.
That's a lot of opportunity, but that much data takes time to sift through. That’s why taking advantage of AI for social listening is important. AI-powered insights help reduce human error by analyzing commonalities between posts, identifying sentiment, and uncovering key conversation drivers.
Social media listening platforms give PR and marketing teams the power to easily explore all of this data and extract meaningful insights that can help them make better-informed business decisions.
Here’s how:
- Social listening makes it possible to listen to a much wider and more diverse audience, allowing you to tap into the ideas and opinions of billions of people all around the world.
- It mitigates the issue of response bias commonly found in surveys and interviews because the data comes from people expressing themselves freely on social media.
- Social media listening enables companies to identify trends and patterns among those billions of online conversations, using trend detection, trend forecasting, and trendspotting to identify risks and opportunities that might otherwise pass them by.
Tip: Learn the best way to jump on trends as a brand with our Ultimate Trendjacking Guide!
- Social listening is a much quicker and easier option. Focus groups take time and resources to organize, whereas social media listening can be done very quickly, as often as required.
- Social listening is real-time, giving you up-to-the-minute data on what people are saying about a topic right now.
- The process requires less budget, less time, and fewer human resources. You only need a computer and a social media listening tool.
Social listening can’t entirely replace market research, but it certainly makes it easier for marketers to get faster answers to a lot of questions. Social listening complements research projects and serves as a more accessible everyday source of market intelligence.
What Are the Top Use Cases for Social Listening?
Different companies use social listening for different purposes. They all share a common goal: to get ahead of conversations, or at the very least, join them authentically.
Here are some ways companies are using social listening tools like Meltwater to improve visibility into their businesses:
Reputation
Keep track of all social mentions of your brand and products to understand how your company is being perceived and what topics are surrounding it.
Crisis monitoring
Anticipate crises and limit the chances of them going full scale by tracking your brand’s sentiment and potentially negative keywords. This allows companies to react as quickly as possible if something comes up. You can also track the impact of a crisis, such as changes in public perception and sentiment.
Competitive intelligence
Analyze the communication, news, LLM presence, and reputation of your competitors. Social media listening can enable you to predict trends, remain up to date with industry innovation, and stay ahead of competitors.
Trend reports
Identify key topics that drive conversations in your market. When you understand the relevant themes your target audience is talking about, you can discover technologies or trends that your company could pioneer.
Lead generation
Discover exciting new business opportunities by listening for any aspect of your product or business. Pair your search along with complementary terms like “how to” or “which tool do I choose,” and engage with these consumers and their community.
Advertising reach
When you launch a new ad campaign, you expect people to go nuts and talk about it. Social listening can tell you if people are doing exactly that. It can monitor for mentions of campaign-related keywords so you can see if your product and message resonate.
How to Build a Social Listening Strategy
Follow our step-by-step process to get your company's social listening strategy off the ground!
1. Define your goals
- What do you want to get out of the tool?
- Do you want to know your consumer better?
- Stay ahead of your competition?
- Protect your reputation from a crisis?
2. Determine channels to monitor
Think about your goals and whether they are achievable on the social media channels where your audience hangs out. Any good social listening tool will be able to showcase which channels your audience is communicating on.
If, for example, your goal is to drive people to your website, Instagram isn’t the best platform for this, as it’s somewhat restrictive about where you can post a link.
3. Choose the right tools
We’ve provided a few tips to help with your search for the perfect social listening tool below:
- Consider the search mode: Searches can become quite complex, so filter your searches to only what is most relevant (especially if you are a company with a generic name like Apple). Learn how Boolean search works to amplify the impact that social media listening can have on your brand.
- Filter in customer service: Some social media listening tools, like Meltwater’s, come with dedicated Account Managers, enabling you to get the most out of the tool — not to mention the fact that account managers are especially helpful in an unexpected crisis.
4. Set up alerts
To stay on top of your game, set up alerts so that you never miss an important social mention of your brand, competitor, or industry. You can choose whether you want to be alerted on all mentions or only when a crisis or major trend emerges.
5. Analyze and compare your social media metrics
In just a couple of simple steps, you can create a visually appealing page of insights that’s easy to understand. We call these dashboards. Social media dashboards show all of your most important social media metrics at first glance.
Dashboards in Meltwater are customizable, so you can be as high-level or granular as you want, and tailor the information to the intended audience. Your social media manager will be interested in starting a conversation with influencers, while your CEO may be more interested in seeing your share of voice, for example.
6. Share your results
Meltwater also offers a branded reporting service which is part of the social analytics you get, using the insights found through social media listening. Similar to dashboards, the reports are compiled specifically for you and include whichever stats and insights you choose.
You can then share your hard work and the results with colleagues, clients, or another department using our Newsletter feature.
Social Listening Case Study: Pride in London
Pride in London uses Meltwater’s social media listening tool to make sense of conversations taking place online. Stephen Ward, Deputy Chair and Communications Director at Pride in London, discusses the value of social listening.
Social listening helps us better understand whether key messages are resonating or becoming lost in the noise. We measure messages using volume and sentiment metrics. Looking at the tonality of conversations is particularly helpful in ensuring we continue to be objective concerning the success of our campaigns.
Pride also uses Meltwater to track their community growth and ROI. Their tremendous growth, both online and offline, is clearly reflected in the numbers.
In 2013-2014, Pride grew by 135%, from 2014-2015 growth peaked to 215% and indications suggest 2016’s community growth will follow the same trend. I attribute such positive growth to authentic engagement- reflecting community views in our messaging and bringing them to a wider audience through fully integrated and interactive campaigns.
Using Social Media Reporting Effectively
All of this social data isn't going to be very helpful unless it can be presented to people in a way that's useful to them, and that's what social media reporting is for.
Social media monitoring tools generally enable you to build reports that feature all of the key metrics and KPIs that are important to you and then have them automatically generated and distributed as often as you need, whether that's weekly, monthly, or quarterly reports.
Once it’s up and running on autopilot, all of your stakeholders can receive their regular social media report without your taking time to manually pull the data together and put it into a presentation-ready format. A social media reporting tool should do all of the heavy lifting for you.
What kind of information should a social listening report include?
In order to be truly useful, a social listening report should include a combination of the following:
Mention trends
This most fundamental metric shows how frequently your brand (and other important keywords) are being discussed in social media, and whether that's trending up or down over time.
Sentiment analysis trends
Are positive or negative discussions of your brand increasing or decreasing? This is another key metric that's a great indicator of brand health and can give you an early warning sign of a crisis or opportunity that requires a fast response.
Tip: Learn more about how sentiment analysis works.
Related themes
Tools like word clouds provide an easy-to-understand way of showing the most commonly used words and phrases in discussions relating to your brand in a social media report. They add context to the keyword and sentiment trends by social reporting the topics that are driving those trends.
Locations
Social listening tools can help you understand where in the world people are talking about your brand. So if your social media report shows that there's a sudden unexpected spike of brand mentions in, say, New Zealand, you'll know that there's something interesting happening that you need to investigate.
Influencers
A key element of social media marketing is understanding who the most influential voices are in your market. Social media listening software can identify the people who have the most clout in relevant conversations and include them in your regular social reporting.
Social Media Channels
It's important to use brand tracking (aka brand monitoring) via brand tracking software/brand monitoring tools to know where people are talking about your brand the most. X? Facebook? Blogs? Discussion forums? You can't engage with people if you don't know where they are, so your social media reports should include this information.
For more details, check out our blog about Facebook monitoring. We also support the unique case of Korean social media and have a list of the top Asian news channels and websites to follow.
Why Use Social Media Listening Tools?
Social media is never static; it’s constantly growing and evolving. But one thing that doesn’t change is that when people use these platforms to create, share, and consume content, they leave a trail of digital breadcrumbs. This record of their online behavior, which is analyzed through social media intelligence, is what we call social data. Social listening tools harness this data and turn it into easy-to-digest insights.
Tools replace the need to manually collect and sort through data. Brands can listen at scale instead of trying to monitor every social channel themselves. Having done-for-you data lets you act on insights faster and get ahead of conversations.
When you have social listening tools that help distill and analyze data, it’s easier to draw conclusions and take action. You’re trading guesswork for real action steps, so you can keep moving full steam ahead.
--> Read more about why social listening is important. Also, take a look at the best social listening tools and the best social media monitoring tools on the market.
Get Started with the Meltwater Social Listening Suite Today
Stay ahead of every conversation. Book a Meltwater demo to see how social listening helps you uncover insights, track brand sentiment, and turn online discussions into strategic action.
FAQs: Social Listening
Frequently asked questions about social listening.
What strategies help businesses integrate social listening data into their broader marketing or PR efforts?
Businesses can connect social listening insights to campaign planning, content calendars, crisis management, and media outreach by regularly sharing trend reports across marketing and PR teams. Integrating listening data into dashboards alongside performance metrics helps teams spot patterns, validate messaging and marketing efforts, understand trends, and adjust strategies in near real time.
How can social listening tools support businesses during a reputation crisis or unexpected event?
Social listening tools provide early warning by detecting spikes in negative sentiment or unusual conversation volume. This allows teams to respond quickly, align messaging, correct misinformation, and monitor whether public sentiment improves after actions are taken.
Can businesses in specific regions or industries tailor social listening strategies to address local market challenges?
Yes, businesses can filter social listening by geography, language, platform, or industry-specific keywords to capture more relevant insights. Localizing helps brands understand regional sentiment, cultural nuances, regulatory concerns, and competitive dynamics that influence customer perception and decision-making.
