Qu'est-ce que la veille des médias sociaux ? Guide pour la seconde moitié de 2025

There are over 5.24 billion social media users in 2025. And they are posting quite a lot of content. For example, in August, according to Brand24 data, Nike received 248k social media mentions, Spotify 355k, McDonald’s 116k, while iPhone 16 received 63k. Let’s discover what insights you can uncover with social media monitoring.

But before we get started. Why am I actually writing about social media monitoring?

Let me quickly explain.

I have been working for a media monitoring software company since September 2021.

And since then, I have participated in hundreds of meetings focused on product development, customer needs, and the latest monitoring trends.

I have closely watched how our product has evolved and grown. My goal is to give you first-hand knowledge.

What is social media monitoring? Definition

Surveillance des médias sociaux is the process of tracking and analyzing tagged and untagged mentions across various platforms to understand what people say about a brand, product, competitor, or industry.

En outre, les outils de surveillance des médias sociaux sont dotés de nombreuses fonctions analytiques qui vous permettent d'obtenir un grand nombre de données et d'informations sur les mots-clés surveillés.

So you can draw the right conclusions and implement them into your social media strategy.

Now, as you know the basics, let’s take a look at key elements of social monitoring. What’s all about?

Tracking mentions

Tracking the key keywords. In business, they could be connected to: brand, product, service, industry, CEO, competitors, marketing campaigns, hashtags, and anything business-related.

Real-time alerts & engagement

Catching valuable mentions as they happen and replying to customer questions or complaints.

Analyzing sentiment and emotions

Identifying whether the social media conversations are positive, negative, or neutral to gauge the target audience’s perception and emotions.

Identifying trends & insights

Spotting emerging topics, viral mentions, or recurring customer pain points to guide marketing, PR, and product strategies.

Gestion de crise

Detecting sudden spikes in negative mentions that could signal a PR issue, so a brand can respond quickly and protect its reputation.

Measuring impact

Tracking reach, engagement, volume of mentions, AVE, and share of voice to measure the effectiveness of campaigns.

Remarque importante : You can monitor only public social media posts and content. The sources of social media mentions depend on which tool you choose.

Brand mentions on social media (including those untagged) play a vital role in SEO and GEO in 2025. They strongly impact the frequency of appearance in AI Overviews. Moveover mentions from social media networks such as Reddit, LinkedIn, or Quora influence the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

Social media monitoring vs. listening

At first glance, these two concepts may seem very similar to you. I understood that, before I was hired at Brand24 in 2021, I didn’t see much difference either.

But there’s a difference for sure.

In a nutshell: Monitoring catches individual social conversations in real time. Listening aims to understand the story behind all those conversations.

Surveillance des médias sociaux	Écoute sociale
Focuses on ce que people are saying	Focuses on pourquoi people are saying it
Real-time tracking of mentions and conversations	Analysis of broader trends and patterns
Focus on specific keywords, hashtags, and direct mentions	Focus on sentiment, topics, and industry conversations
Typically reactive and immediate in nature	Strategic and forward-looking in nature
Excellent for customer service and crisis management	Ideal for product development, campaign planning, and market research

How do they work together?

While monitoring helps you respond to immediate needs and concerns, listening helps you develop better long-term strategies.

Comment fonctionne la surveillance des médias sociaux ?

When it comes to technical aspects, in simple words, monitoring tools use something like a Google robot to crawl social media platforms in almost real-time in search of predefined keywords. 

En bref : Effective social media monitoring combines mentions tracking from multiple social platforms, sentiment and emotion detection, real-time alerts, and advanced analytics and reporting.

Here are the key components:

Social platforms coverage

Effective social monitoring starts with collecting data from all relevant platforms where your audience engages. In 2025, you need to track:

• Mainstream platforms: X (Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Telegram, Twitch
• Forums and community sites: Reddit, Quora, Medium, industry forums
• Niche platforms: Spotify, Soundcloud, Bluesky,
• Review sites: TripAdvisor, Booking, Yelp, App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot

Segment analysis

Tracking mentions is just the beginning. Effective monitoring must detect sentiment and interpret the emotions behind social media conversations. In 2025, a solid tool should detect:

• Sentiment : Positive, neutral, negative tone of mentions and topics
• Emotions: Admiration, anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness
• Intent: Information, promotional, sales, networking, greetings, advocacy, entertaining, opinion sharing

Notifications en temps réel

Monitoring is about being up to date with what’s going on on social media. That’s why an effective monitoring system needs to ensure advanced alerts, such as:

• Instant alerts: Also called storm alerts for spikes in mentions
• Crisis detection: Real-time alerts for spikes in negative sentiment
• Email alerts: Regular email summaries of new mentions
• Intégrations : Notifications through communication apps, such as Slack or MS Teams

Analyse avancée

Data without analysis has limited value. The key to success is to transform raw data into actionable insights. Key analytical features that will boost social media strategy:

• Source breakdown: See from which social media app the mentions come from
• Reach and interactions: Measure brand awareness and discover which channels give you the most visibility
• Influencer Score: Identifies the most influential authors and sources mentioning the brand
• Hashtags en vogue : Discover which hashtags are often used by the target audience
• Topic analysis: Groups mentions by subtopics to understand what people are actually talking about

Rapports personnalisés

Reporting is about making social media data actionable. It should show what is happening online and help teams decide what to do next. Types of reports that will smooth the job:

• Brand health reports: Track how people perceive brands and products over time
• Campaign performance reports: Measure the impact of specific social media campaigns or hashtags
• Crisis and incident reports: Provide a detailed view of spikes in negative sentiment
• Competitor comparison report: Compare your brand’s visibility and sentiment with competitors

Social media monitoring strategy

Here are my top tips for setting up a successful social media monitoring project and gaining real value from it.

A strong social media monitoring strategy starts with a clear purpose, and then you need to pick the right tool. Use well-selected keywords to set up a monitoring project. Establish a routine with real-time listening, regular reviews, and reports, focusing on key metrics. Finally, integrate insights across your teams.

1. Decide why you’re monitoring

First of all, you need to define your purpose. Why are you monitoring social media?

Start with a clear objective, which could be:

• Gestion de la réputation
• Campaign performance tracking
• Crisis detection or prevention
• Analyse comparative des concurrents
• Connaissances des clients
• Identification des influenceurs
• Product feedback

Can you use it for all of the above?

Of course, you can use social monitoring data for much more than that!

This is just a reminder that it’s a good idea to have a plan (maybe several plans, one for each different use), or you may find yourself getting overwhelmed and confused by all the data.

2. Choose the right tool

There are many social monitoring solutions on the market. My recommendation is to choose the one that best fits your needs and budget.

What are the most crucial features of a solid social media monitoring tool?

• Contrôle en temps réel
• Multi-platform coverage
• Analyse des sentiments
• Analyse du sujet
• Reach & engagement metrics
• Identification des influenceurs
• Part de voix (SOV)
• Event detector
• Automated reporting & alerts
• Advanced filters & boolean search
• Geo & demographic insights
• Comparaison des concurrents
• Historical Data

Make a list of must-have features and sources to track. Some social media monitoring platforms offer free trials. It’s a great way to test a tool’s full potential.

If you have any doubts, don’t hesitate to contact customer service and ask about the tool’s capabilities. They will help you with pleasure.

3. Choose relevant keywords

Your monitoring is as good as your queries. That’s why it’s worth spending some time thinking about relevant keywords:

• Track your brand à capture all mentions, including those untagged:
  • Your brand name, e.g., Lush, Lush Cosmetics
  • Common misspellings or variations, e.g., Lusch, LushCos, lushh, Luscosmetics
  • Your social media handles (without @), e.g., lushcosmetics, lush, lushpoland
  • Product names or service names, e.g., Sleepy Lotion, Snow Fairy, Twilight Spray
  • CEO name, e.g., Mark Constantine
• Track branded hashtags to measure campaign engagement and user-generated content.
  • Campaign hashtags, e.g., #LushChristmas, #LushHalloween
  • Event hashtags, e.g.,
  • Community hashtags, e.g., #LushAddict, #LushieHaul
• Suivre les concurrents to enter insights into their strategy, sentiment, and share of voice:
  • Brand names, e.g., The Body Shop, Bath & Body Works
  • Product names or service names, e.g., Tea Tree Cleanser, Aromatherapy Sleep Lotion
  • Campaign hashtags or slogans that they use, e.g.,
• Track industry and niche keywords to identify trends, emerging topics, and new business opportunities:
  • Industry terms, e.g., natural skincare, clean beauty
  • Problems your audience talks about, e.g., skin sensitivity, acne-prone, chemical-free alternatives
  • Trends, e.g., skin cycling, zero-waste packaging

Remarque importante : The more keywords you want to track, the more you usually need to pay. Most tools base their pricing on the number of monitored keywords.

How to get more relevant conversations in a monitoring project?

I have two powerful tips for you.

Pro Tip 1: Use required keywords

This is especially useful when you want to find out what people are saying about your company or product with respect to other companies and products.

Pro Tip 2: Use excluded keywords

This is especially useful when you see many mentions containing a keyword that disrupts the entire project.

I quickly entered Sleepy as an Excluded keyword in my Lush monitoring project. As a result, the tool will show me mentions of body lotions without mentioning Sleepy, one of Lush’s most popular body lotions.

Why is it helpful? Adding the required and excluded keywords makes your monitoring project more precise. This allows you to focus on the mentions and topics that matter most.

4. Set up a social media monitoring process

So there you have it, a well-performing project based on the right keywords. What’s next? You need a routine.

Here’s an example of a well-defined social media monitoring strategy:

• Real-time listening: Set alerts for sudden spikes or negative mentions
• Daily/weekly reviews: Track ongoing campaigns and brand health
• Monthly/quarterly reports: Spot long-term trends and strategic insights

While checking your data, pay attention to the key social media monitoring metrics:

• Volume de mentions: Is brand buzz increasing?
• Atteindre: How far are conversations spreading?
• Sentiment: Are mentions positive or negative?
• Engagement: Are people interacting with your content or mentions?
• Sources d'information: Which platforms are driving the most mentions?
• Share of Voice (SOV): Who dominates the market?
• Trending topics and hashtags: What are emerging trends and customer interests?
• Influencer Score: Who are the top authors, creators, and sites that mention your brand?

5. Integrate with broader marketing strategy

Social media monitoring and analysis deliver powerful insights that can boost your marketing efforts in many ways. That’s why I recommend combining it across teams:

• Social media management: proactively respond to médias sociaux mentions to increase engagement, brand awareness, and customer loyalty significantly
• Soutien à la clientèle: track what customers are saying in real time and act on complaints instantly
• Marketing: refine content and campaigns based on feedback, analytics, and metrics
• PR: monitor customer sentiment, prepare responses to crises, or leverage positive buzz
• Partnership management: identify content creators already talking about your brand, which leads to potential influencer partnerships
• Product Teams prioritize fixes or new features based on customer feedback

6. Monitor, take action, repeat

La partie la plus importante de la surveillance des médias sociaux est la cohérence. Effectuez des contrôles réguliers. Nettoyez régulièrement vos résultats. Répondre et réagir de manière cohérente.

Monitoring social media platforms is automated, but you should be part of it.

Regularly:

• Answer to crucial mentions to boost your brand recognition
• Update keywords, queries, hashtags as the language evolves
• Refine filters to gain the most accurate data
• Benchmark against past performance and competitors

Case study: How HypeAuditor monitors YouTube, TikTok, X, and Twitch

Nick Baklanov, PR & Research Manager at HypeAuditor, faced the challenge of monitoring media coverage, tracking competitor activity, and reacting quickly to emerging, important conversations.

By implementing a social media monitoring tool, he:

• Discovered which sources are talking about HypeAuditor the most
• Started to measure PR impact effectively 
• Simplified stakeholder reporting, offering clear performance metrics like Advertising Value Equivalency
• Monitors competitors to find new PR opportunities and expand media network

Principaux enseignements : Nick’s experience shows how a single tool can support multiple layers of a modern PR and social strategy, including measuring media impact, uncovering competitive insights, and allowing real-time reactions.

Read More: How HypeAuditor Found New Media Opportunities with Brand24

Top social media monitoring tools (list updated in September 2025)

There are a few tools for monitoring social media worth checking. Here is a detailed comparison: Les meilleurs outils de suivi des médias sociaux. Most of them offer a essai gratuit period, which gives you a couple of days to play with the tool.

Now, let’s quickly check the top 3 tools worth your attention:

	Brand24	Sprout Social	Hootsuite
Vue d'ensemble	AI-driven social media monitoring and analytics tool	All-in-one social media management suite offering social listening	Long-standing social media management platform offering monitoring
Sources surveillées	Instagram, X (Twitter), Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, Telegram, Twitch, Pinterest, Bluesky	Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, X (Twitter), YouTube	Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads, X (Twitter), Bluesky, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, Reddit
Best for	Agencies, Mid-sized businesses, enterprises	Mid-sized businesses and enterprises	Large agencies and enterprises
G2 review rating	4.6	4.4	4.3
Starting price	Individual plan starts at $149	Social listening is offered as an optional add-on, pricing starts at $999 per month	Basic monitoring starts at $99, advanced social listening is offered as an add-on in custom plan

I have been tracking the key tools for social media monitoring for quite some time. I use Brand24 for this purpose, which provides me with valuable insights.

Let’s unvocer them.

Here you can see the comparison of the online performance of Brand24, Sprout Social, and Hootsuite:

Hootsuite is undoubtedly the most popular tool, gaining the largest number of online brand mentions. Sprout Social is also a well-known tool in the marketing industry. Brand24 is less popular, but it has the most positive sentiment.

I also asked the Assistant de marque AI about the key strengths and features that users mentioned online. Here’s a list:

Brand24:

• Strong in real-time monitoring and AI features 
• Particularly effective brand monitoring and sentiment tracking
• Praised for affordability and effectiveness for businesses of all sizes

Sprout Social:

• Known for comprehensive social media management
• Strong analytics and engagement tracking features
• Popular among enterprise clients 

Hootsuite:

• Strong in multi-platform management 
• Popular for advanced scheduling and content management
• Some users report pricing concerns 

FAQ

What is AI social media monitoring?

Surveillance des médias sociaux par l'IA is the process of tracking, analyzing, and interpreting mentions and conversations about your brand, competitors, or industry across social platforms, but enhanced with artificial intelligence (AI).

Instead of just showing raw numbers (mentions, comments, reactions, reach), AI tools go deeper and provide context, insights, and recommendations.

How important is AI social media monitoring in the second half of 2025?

Selon le Pluggo research, in 2025, the global écoute sociale market is projected to reach USD 10.32 billion, with 62% of marketers already actively using these tools.

AI social media monitoring helps you achieve your goals more quickly. AI analyzes the monitored data and provides you with real-time, actionable insights.

Let’s take a closer look at how AI can enrich social media monitoring features:

Smarter sentiment analysis

alimenté par l'IA analyse des sentiments is far more advanced than traditional methods. It goes beyond “positive/negative/neutral”. It can detect specific emotions.

Advantages of using AI sentiment analysis:

• Detects sarcasm, irony, and cultural nuances.
• Understands emojis, hashtags, and slang
• Identifies emerging topics driving sentiment shifts.
• Provides real-time insights with visual dashboards and alerts.
• Can explain why sentiment changed

Built-in AI chat (just like ChatGPT)

Top tools offer AI-powered chat that you can use to talk about your monitoring data. It works like ChatGPT but is driven by your monitoring project data.

All you need to do is ask questions, for example:

• What are my competitors’ weaknesses?
• Which influencers drive the most reach for us?
• What caused our negative sentiment last week?
• What’s the performance on Instagram?

The chat will provide you with a comprehensive answer. You don’t have to dig into data. Social media tracking has never been easier.

Ready to use AI insights

AI Insights are essentially automated, AI-powered summaries and recommendations based on your brand’s online conversations.

Instead of showing only raw data (charts, mentions, numbers), AI Insights interprets what’s happening and tells you what actions to take.

Comment cela fonctionne-t-il ?

• AI analyzes your mentions, sentiment, reach, and topics using NLP and machine learning.
• Then it translates data into clear, actionable takeaways.

Real-time anomaly detection

AI anomaly detection (also called event detection) acts like an early warning. It tells you that something happened and explains why.

Comment cela fonctionne-t-il ?

• When there’s a sudden spike (e.g., a viral tweet, negative press, or influencer shout-out), the AI immediately detects it.
• Instead of just showing numbers, it explains the cause of the anomaly in 2–3 sentences.

Advanced topics discovery and analytics

AI helps you understand what people are really talking about. Instead of just giving you raw mentions, Topic Analysis automatically clusters conversations into themes so you can see the bigger picture.

Comment cela fonctionne-t-il ?

• It groups online mentions into discussion categories (e.g., product quality, pricing, customer service, influencers).
• Uses AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to detect context.
• Shows you which topics dominate the conversation and how much reach or engagement they generate.

Why is social media monitoring important?

Monitoring social media is crucial because it delivers immediate insights into how the public views your brand, products, services, or industry across multiple social channels.

Here’s why it matters:

Understanding Customer Sentiment

Social media monitoring reveals how people feel about your brand, not just what they say. By tracking sentiment (positive, negative, neutral), you can:

• Detect dissatisfaction early
• Spot praise worth amplifying
• Adjust messaging based on tone and protect the réputation de la marque

Content & campaign optimization

Social media monitoring reveals how campaigns perform in real time. You can:

• Track hashtags and engagement
• Mesurer la portée des médias sociaux and presence score
• Adjust campaigns based on live data

Crisis management and prevention

Spikes in negative sentiment or unusual activity can signal a brewing crisis. Monitoring lets you:

• Quickly identify the reason for the crisis
• Define the emotions and opinions behind marque mentions and social media conversations
• Proactively replying to social comments or concerns

Analyse comparative des concurrents

Thanks to social media monitoring efforts, you can see how people perceive your brand versus your competitors. You can:

• Mesurer la part de voix to see what percentage of the total industry conversation is about your brand
• What’s triggering positive or negative reactions for other brands
• Check what competitors are executing, including their campaigns, social strategies, and customer feedback