What is social listening?

Social listening is the practice of identifying when a particular keyword or term is mentioned on social media channels. Often companies employ social listening to spot when consumers are talking about their brand on specific platforms, but it can also be used to find social mentions of any topic you are interested in researching.

What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring?

The two terms are often used interchangeably and can mean the same thing. However, sometimes people use “social monitoring” to refer to the practice of monitoring somebody’s social media usage, either in the context of employees in the workplace, or parents monitoring their child’s social activity.

How can social listening increase customer advocacy?

By listening to social media conversations about your brand, it’s possible to get deeper insights into how people really feel about your products and the service you offer. Smart businesses can use this information to make improvements that are focused on customer advocacy.

Which social media channels does Meltwater monitor?

Our social listening platform covers the full Twitter Firehose, public Facebook groups and pages, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, blogs, discussion forums, consumer reviews websites, and podcasts. Users also benefit from Meltwater’s market-leading media monitoring service, which adds online news, print and broadcast media to the platform.

Social Listening

Billions of conversations take place in social media every day. Those discussions help people make all kinds of purchasing decisions and influence public perceptions of businesses just like yours. Whatever kind of business you’re in, people in social are talking about your industry, your competitors, and you.
If you’re not paying attention, you’re missing opportunities.

Meltwater can help you start listening.

Illustration of Meltwaters Social Listening Dashboard

The Ultimate Social Listening Tool

Whenever somebody mentions your brand on social media, or talks about a topic that’s important to your business, you should know about it. Meltwater offers the industry’s most comprehensive social listening platform, so you can be sure you never miss a thing. Our tool scours data feeds from:

Twitter
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube
Reddit
Blogs
Discussion Forums
Podcasts
Online News
Consumer Reviews Sites

Wherever your company is mentioned, Meltwater makes sure you know about it. We even use AI algorithms to spot when your brand gets talked about, in thousands of podcasts. Why waste time regularly performing a manual keyword search across multiple social networks when we can automate the entire social listening process for you?

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News and Social Media Monitoring Tools in One Platform

PR and social media are closely aligned, so why should you use two separate tools for tracking social media mentions and news coverage? With Meltwater you can monitor your brand in traditional broadcast, print, and online news, alongside social media -saving you time and money.

No need to pay for separate monitoring tools
Staff only need to train on a single platform
Build reports more quickly
Get a 360-degree view of your brand health

Say Goodbye to Keyword Limits

Meltwater gives you unlimited keyword search capability with no caps on result volumes. What does this mean? You can search for as many different keywords, brand names or hashtags as you like and you won’t be billed extra - no matter how many results those searches produce.

This is great news for agencies who want to grow their client base without growing their costs, and for in-house teams that need to carry out a number of social media research tasks, and try out different ideas, while keeping the budget under control. Our social media monitoring platform gives digital marketing professionals everything they need to effectively protect and grow their brands.

Don’t Just Listen, Learn from Social

Our analytics tools help you make sense of social media data. There’s no point in tracking brand mentions if you don’t understand what it all means, and that’s why we provide social analytics tools that help you uncover the trends and patterns which will give you real business insight to help you make more informed decisions.

It doesn't matter whether you just want to analyze a single hashtag, or build a sophisticated search query that captures social media data around a complex topic, our monitoring tool has all the features you need to find those insights.

But it’s not just about what’s happening right now. To get a truly meaningful understanding of any topic, you can use Meltwater to search a 15-month archive of social data, including the full Twitter Firehose. This allows you to analyze historical patterns and perform year-on-year comparisons of key metrics.

Spot new consumer trends in real-time
Uncover untapped opportunities
Build campaigns on solid data
Benchmark previous campaigns
Gather competitor intelligence

With such a significant source of social data at your fingertips, there’s absolutely nothing you can’t learn. Build your query with our powerful Boolean search tool, and then dive into the data using the industry’s best analytics tools, to discover the hidden insights that will power your next marketing campaign, or inspire your new product range.

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Risk management

Spot a Crisis Before it’s a Crisis

A crisis can come out of nowhere for almost any brand and, most of the time, it’s going to start on social media before snowballing into a bigger problem. With Meltwater social listening, you’ll get an early warning when people start talking about your brand online, whatever the reason, and quickly understand the underlying themes that are driving the conversation.

With automated alerts and reporting tools, you can be sure that as soon as something big starts happening, you’ll be the first to know. Don’t wait for monthly coverage reports to alert you to when a crisis is brewing. Meltwater can send alerts directly to your phone so you can move quickly to get ahead of the issue. When you spot the signs of a potential problem you’ll be able to take action fast, before it spirals into a full-blown crisis and spills over into the news media. If you're responsible for safeguarding the brand reputation of a business, social media monitoring is an essential tool.

Instant insights

Understand Sentiment at a Glance

Our sentiment analysis tools help you get a quick view of how people feel about your brand, or any other topic. Tracking sentiment over time means you can easily see trendlines for positive and negative sentiment, to clearly understand if your campaigns are having the right impact on the perception of your brand.

Meltwater also breaks down sentiment by channel, so you can see how you're performing on social compared to news media, or if a conversation on a particular social platform is driving a shift in sentiment.

Our sentiment-focused word-clouds break out the most common words from positive and negative discussions, making it easy to visualize the themes that are underpinning different perceptions of your brand reputation.

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"Social listening helps us better understand whether key messages are resonating or becoming lost in the noise. The best way to increase engagement with our audience is to focus our communications around topics that our audience deem important. 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."

Stephen Ward, Deputy Chair and Communications Director at Pride in London

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Meaningful metrics

Know Your Customers Like Never Before

Meltwater’s social media monitoring tools can help you get to the heart of your customers’ wants and needs. Even if they’re not talking directly about your brand, they’re talking about your industry or product category. By listening and analyzing those conversations you’ll be able to build a clear picture of their interests, attitudes and behaviors, enabling you to create more targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

The world moves quickly these days, and our social media monitoring platform gives you a real-time view of evolving consumer trends. The discussions taking place on social networks are a rich source of insight into the changing behaviors, expectations, and attitudes of your customers and by performing analysis on this social data you'll be able to keep your strategy ahead of the curve.

Perfecting media partnerships

Identify Authentic Influencers

Everybody’s an influencer these days! But our social listening tools can help you find the people who are truly influential in your market, by looking for the people who are central to conversations that impact your brand, and analyzing their audiences to confirm whether they’re the genuine article or not as relevant as you'd like.

Building partnerships with genuine influencers can prove to be a lucrative marketing strategy, but only if you can be sure you’re working with somebody who’s authentically built a real audience that trusts their opinions. We can help you find those people, and avoid the frauds with their artificially inflated follower counts.

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Market Research in the World’s Biggest Focus Group

Got a new idea you want to test? Social media monitoring tools give you instant access to the world’s biggest focus group. Log into our platform, build your search, and within seconds you’ll be able to tap into the thoughts and opinions of billions of people, giving you the ammunition to breathe life into your ideas.

Market research used to take months, as it required building surveys, gathering focus groups, and collating results - but not any more. With Meltwater social listening you can get an immediate answer to almost any question, letting you find gaps in the market and spot rising trends before anybody else. And, if you’re not sure how to get to the answers you’re looking for, our expert customer support team is always on hand to help you build the right queries and make sense of the results.

Keep up with what's important

Social Listening Capabilities

On-demand historical ad-hoc research
Owned and earned analytics in a single view
Topic and conversation trends analysis
Competitive monitoring and benchmarking
Brand, keyword or complex queries comparison
Customized user lists or audience types
Consumer segmentation and behavior analysis
Content strategy markers and audience optimization
Crisis management, security and compliance
Custom unlimited dashboard and report building
Export insights via API
Market intelligence gathering via Explore

Illustration of Meltwaters social media monitoring analysis dashboard

Built for Collaboration

Meltwater’s enterprise-level social listening tools are built to empower teams to work seamlessly and efficiently. Whether you’re a small in-house team, or an agency collaborating with your clients, our platform gives you the tools you need to keep everybody informed and on-track.

Need regular reports to share with key stakeholders? It's never been easier. Simply set up your social media search, then configure the reports to be generated daily, weekly, or monthly. From there, you can sit back and let Meltwater do everything on autopilot.
Need a dashboard to give you real-time actionable insight? It couldn't be simpler. Set up the search, choose which dashboard widgets you need, and then share access with your team members.

With Meltwater, everybody has the information they need and easy access to the features that matter most to them, so nothing will ever fall through the cracks again!

No other listening tools offer this all-in-one workflow capability, that's trusted by the world's biggest brands and most innovative agencies to deliver enterprise-class social media monitoring.

Read why customers love us

Testimonials

Andres Giuliani, Community Manager, Brote

"With Meltwater, I no longer have to double-check our results outside of the social listening platform in order to confirm that our clients are covered. I sleep much better."

Giovanna Genard, Assistant VP for Strategic Communication and Marketing, Old Dominion University

"Our goal is to better listen to our community and know what they care about. Using Meltwater not only keeps us informed, but it allows us to interject our thought leaders into the conversations where they can make the biggest positive impact for ODU."

Lauren Hackett, Senior Vice President Global Communications, The Economist

"One of the biggest challenges we had was putting that all together into a comprehensive, insightful presentation that would allow us to really have a clear picture of where we are across the board, also a deeper dive into the insights from there. Previously we had numbers, but we didn't know what was behind the numbers."

Get to the Heart of the Data

Our social analytics tools are simple and intuitive, designed to help you explore social data and get right to the insights you need. But if you need more advanced analytics capabilities, Meltwater can export raw social data directly from the platform, so you can easily import into the analytics tool of your choice.

Alternatively, use our social listening API to plug your own solution into Meltwater.

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Know More About Your Competitors Than They Do

Meltwater social listening helps you understand so much more about your own customers and markets, but why stop there? We can give you the inside track on your competitors too.

Find out what their customers love, or hate, about their products, how people are reacting to their marketing campaigns, what opportunities they’re missing. All of this valuable insight is waiting for you on social media, if you know where, and how, to look.

Easily compare your share of voice, sentiment, engagement and other key metrics with one or more competitors. Our social listening tools will give you so much competitive intelligence, they’ll wonder if you’ve got secret super-powers.

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World-Class Customer Service

Even with social media monitoring tools as powerful and intuitive as ours, we know that customers still need a little help from time to time. Our team of product experts is always on hand to give you advice and assistance to make sure you’re getting maximum value from our platform.

Whether you need help crafting a search query that will get you exactly the results you need, you want advice on how to analyze social data, or you’re just looking for a little refresher on how you use our platform’s features, we have a 24/7 global support network ready to assist. We know that our trusted customer service is just as important as our proven social media monitoring platform.

Want to learn how we can help you?

Frequently asked questions

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