Mastering Social Listening in Marketing: Boosting Engagement

People always talk. So, what are they saying about your brand and industry? If you aren’t paying attention, you could miss out on emerging trends, hidden product issues, and big opportunities. That’s why social listening is becoming more commonplace. It helps marketing teams track the online conversation to improve decision-making.

This article takes an in-depth look at what social listening is in marketing. You’ll learn how to get started, challenges to avoid, and the benefits of leveraging the strategy for your brand.

The Fundamentals of Social Listening

First, let’s differentiate social listening from another common tactic, social monitoring. The latter tracks specific brand mentions, while the former takes a broader approach, considering industry-wide chatter, competitors’ social presence, and related topics. Or, as Chad de Lisle, VP of marketing at Disruptive Advertising, puts it, “Social monitoring tells you what’s happening; social listening tells you why.”

This article focuses on social listening, which occurs on a major of user-engagement platforms including:

• X
• Instagram
• Reddit
• Review platforms like Yelp and Amazon

Brands review relevant conversations to track their target audience’s evolving views. This helps marketing teams respond to shifting consumer sentiment in near real time. 

De Lisle explains why this is valuable: “[Social] listening gives brands the emotional insight to adjust their messaging, build community, and influence perception — making it [a] powerful tool for long-term growth.”

Your business needs to consider which avenue works best for your company’s social listening strategy. 

Benefits of Social Listening

Social listening makes marketing teams more effective through each of the following benefits:

• Real-time customer feedback: Learn from your customers’ unfiltered opinions without having to manage surveys or incentivize feedback.
• Crisis management assistance: Discover negative sentiment earlier, speeding up your response timeline and minimizing the damage.
• Competitive analysis: Understand how customers view competitors and find gaps for your brand to fill.
• Trend spotting: Discover emerging hashtags, pain points, and memes before they hit the mainstream. This can help your brand join the conversation while it’s still happening.
• Content ideation: Leverage what people are talking about to guide blog topics, social posts, video ideas, and paid campaigns.

Jaye Cowle, Founder & CEO at Launch Online, says that social listening “reveals what customers actually care about, not just what they say.” That can drive a business to take non-consensus actions that add extra value to the brand.

For example, Wendy’s used social listening while developing its new app. The fast food chain found that people were discussing how to get a quick meal without breaking their diets. 

This prompted the development team to add an interactive nutrition-tracking feature to the app, even though PR teams were skeptical. The feature was a hit, bringing many new users to the app organically who may never have found it otherwise — a benefit Wendy’s only earned through social listening.

Challenges of Social Listening

Social listening provides real-time insights that brands use to make better decisions. But the process isn’t without its challenges. Recognizing these can help your company use the strategy more effectively:

• Data overload: With so many platforms and conversations to track, the sheer volume of data can easily overwhelm one, leading to confused decision-making.
• Noise vs. signal: You could also have trouble differentiating between actionable signals and noise. You’ll need nuance to separate the two, and that may take time to develop.
• Privacy concerns: Users who care about data privacy may not like your company watching their conversations. You’ll need to balance your goals against these privacy concerns to avoid bad press.
• Cultural differences: Finally, global brands can struggle with linguistic and cultural differences while tracking sentiment. For example, emojis and GIFs can have wildly different meanings in different parts of the world.

Awareness is the first step toward overcoming these challenges. You’ll also likely need strategies for separating noise from signal in these massive data sets. 

For example, you might use an automated sentiment analysis tool and validate its findings with a human touch. Or you could segment conversations by topic, time, and source to zero in on what matters most to your business. Some teams even outsource social listening to third-party providers that specialize in it.

Setting Up a Social Listening Strategy

Following a structured approach to social listening will help you avoid challenges and unlock bigger benefits. Of course, your process will vary based on your company’s goals. So, use the following step-by-step instructions to create a custom social listening strategy that meets your needs.

1. Define Objectives

The first task is defining your social listening objectives. These will influence which conversations you track, the platforms you prioritize, and how you’ll determine success. If you don’t know what you hope to find in all that data, it’ll be easier to drown in it. So, consider whether you want to:

• Measure general customer satisfaction
• Spot the next serious concern sooner
• Benchmark your brand against the competition
• Track sentiment around a new product launch
• Identify gaps in your competitors’ offerings
• Evaluate how customers feel about a specific product or feature

You can prioritize one of these objectives or choose several. The key at this point is knowing what you want to achieve so you can develop strategies to achieve it.

2. Identify Topics for Monitoring

Now that you have an objective, consider what you’ll need to track to achieve it. For example, if you want to see how customers feel about your latest product launch, you’d probably track mentions of the product name and nicknames across several platforms.

Or maybe you want to find gaps in competitors’ offerings to target. If so, you could track their complaints on review sites to see what keeps coming up. In both examples, the objective determines the kinds of posts and sites you watch. This helps to minimize data overload, generating value sooner.

Some other topics you may want to listen to include:

• Your brand name: To track direct mentions
• Competitors and their products: To benchmark your brand against the competition
• Industry keywords and trends: To stay on top of emerging views, product features, and value propositions
• Campaign hashtags: To see how people respond to organic and non-organic campaigns

Consider what your business’s goals and objectives are to make a choice. 

3. Choose the Right Platforms and Tools

Next, choose the social media listening tools and platforms you’ll use to track conversations. This may depend on your industry, in addition to the objectives you outlined previously. For example:

• Companies in retail and food tend to focus on Instagram, Yelp, and TikTok
• Tech and gaming brands focus on Reddit, X, and forums
• B2B businesses prioritize LinkedIn, thought leadership blogs, and third-party review sites like Clutch

You’ll also need to decide whether to track these conversations manually or through a platform that offers automated assistance. Manual tracking can work, but it typically takes longer than going through a platform. If you want to speed up the process, the following tools are among the most widely used:

• Brandwatch
• Talkwalker
• Sprout Social
• Hootsuite Insights
• Mention

Each platform offers distinct features and benefits, so it’s worth exploring several before signing a long-term agreement. For example, Talkwalker can detect your image in social posts to capture conversations that don’t explicitly mention your brand. Sprout Social offers an integrated social media CRM and helps with publishing responses.

4. Build Workflows

Now you’re ready to design a repeatable workflow for your social listening activities. This integrates the practice into your broader marketing efforts, creating a uniform process that delivers results you can measure accurately over time.

Some key elements for a good workflow include:

• Frequency: How often will you listen to social conversations? Make sure it’s frequent enough to support your goals, but you don’t necessarily need to monitor mentions daily.
• Filtering: How will you filter signals from noise in data? Will you use hashtags, an automated tool, or a custom strategy?
• Reporting: How will you capture and share insights? Who will compile these reports? How frequently will you update them?
• Action: What actions will you take based on the reports you generate? The answer could depend on your goal. For example, you would send new content ideas to marketing, but receive frequent complaints to customer service.

Automation is the future. 

5. Assign Team Roles

Finally, you’re ready to assign employees responsibility for social listening tasks. As part of this process, consider creating a centralized dashboard where each task owner shares updates. This allows everyone to benefit from the full range of insights, even though each employee may only be responsible for a percentage of them.

Assign roles based on how employees support your marketing efforts. This keeps employees within their areas of expertise, allowing them to provide deeper insights.

For example, a social media manager is a good point person for monitoring daily activity and flagging urgent issues. A content strategist can monitor insights on blogs, videos, and social content, while a customer service manager watches social sites for complaints.

Social Listening Best Practices

Now that you have a system in place, let’s review some best practices for keeping your process sharp. Here are three worth considering:

• Set SMART goals: First, set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (or SMART) goals. This will help you get real value out of your social listening efforts instead of learning things that never actually translate into business benefits.
• Refine keywords regularly: Next, update the keywords you track over time to stay on top of the conversation as it shifts. You can get ideas from social listening, Google SEO data, and review sites, among other sources.
• Share insights broadly: Marketing may be responsible for most of your social listening activities. But they should share their findings with other departments regularly. Doing so will help everyone, from sales to support, refine their approaches based on social chatter.

These best practices are key to an effective social listening strategy. 

Future Trends in Social Listening

If you’re spending time and money developing a social listening strategy, it’s important to keep an eye on the future. Consumer behaviors evolve quickly, and you don’t want to get left behind with out-of-date practices.

Some key trends to watch today include:

• The expanding role of AI: New tools are leveraging AI to provide more intelligent social analysis. Using these can help you find deeper insights through sentiment analysis, tone detection, and auto-tagging.
• Customer data concerns: Customers today care more about data privacy than ever. You don’t want to damage your company’s reputation by crossing any lines.
• Predictive analytics: These are becoming more powerful, helping companies understand not just how customers feel now, but how they will feel next.
• Voice and video monitoring: New AI-powered technologies are improving at translating voice into actionable insights. As this happens, social monitoring on video-first platforms like YouTube and TikTok is poised to increase.

Read more: ‘How Social Media Signals Impact SEO’

Social Listening for Competitive Advantage

Social sites have a wealth of information about your brand, its target audience, and how they’re responding to changes in your industry. Listening to these conversations can make your company more nimble. You’ll be able to respond to change faster than competitors, adapt your marketing to match emerging trends, and find more competitive advantages to improve your bottom line.

About the Author

Anna Peck Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Anna Peck is a content marketing manager at Clutch, where she crafts content on digital marketing, SEO, and public relations. In addition to editing and producing engaging B2B content, she plays a key role in Clutch’s awards program and contributed content efforts. Originally joining Clutch as part of the reviews team, she now focuses on developing SEO-driven content strategies that offer valuable insights to B2B buyers seeking the best service providers.

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