10 Key Social Listening Metrics You Should Track [2025]

If you’re serious about growing your brand, social listening should be a part of your daily routine. But let’s put one thing clear – collecting data just for collecting data makes no sense. To make it really work, you need to track the social listening metrics and understand what they mean for your business. Okay, but which ones actually matter? That’s exactly what this article will help you discover!

Mesures d'écoute sociale are data points that help to measure how people talk about your brand, products, competitors, or industry trends.

They allow you to understand multiple aspects of your online presence, such as:

✔️ Brand awareness
✔️ Public perception
✔️ Marketing & PR campaigns performance
✔️ Market position
✔️ Online visibility trends

The list below is the result of more than 10 years of expertise at Brand24.

We’ve carefully selected the most meaningful social listening metrics based on what has proven to work across thousands of real-world use cases.

10 Most Important Social Listening Metrics to Track:

01 Volume of mentions

Volume de mentions shows how frequently a brand, product, service, or keyword appears in online conversations.

They can appear in many places, such as social media platforms, news, blogs, forums, and so on.

Tracking the volume of mentions over time helps you:

• Detect trends and seasonality – spikes and dips signal your marketing campaign’s performance, product launches, events, or seasonal patterns in your target audience’s interest.
• Measure brand visibility – the growing number of mentions usually reflects the increased notoriété de la marque or buzz around a given topic.
• Spot emerging issues – a sudden spike in mentions (especially when combined with negative sentiment) may indicate the beginning of a crisis that needs immediate attention.

Each time someone uses your tracked keyword – like your brand’s name – it counts as one mention.

Comment mesurer ?

Measuring brand mentions can be completely effortless if you use a dedicated outil d'écoute sociale.

Such software solutions automatically track keywords across the web and social media in real time, gathering mentions from millions of sources.

Par exemple, Brand24 – which is one of the best social listening tools available – tracks and analyzes mentions published on:

• Social media – Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, TikTok, Bluesky, Telegram & Twitch
• News sites, blogs, podcasts, video platforms, forums & other websites
• Review platforms & newsletters.

With such a tool, you just need to create a project and set a date range to check the volume of mentions in a given period.

Real-world example: 

In just a few clicks, I discovered that in May 2025, the GoPro brand was mentioned over 75,000 times.

A quick scroll through the Analytics dashboard revealed that nearly 93% of these mentions came from les plateformes de médias sociaux.

I also examined the chart for GoPro-related mentions and noticed several spikes in volume (the blue line), which could correspond to user-generated campaigns or viral events.

It is definitely worth a deeper investigation.

02 Reach of mentions

Reach of mentions represents the estimated number of people who could have been exposed to your brand online.

Unlike the volume de mentions, which simply counts how many times a keyword was used, reach presents how many people could have seen those mentions.

To calculate that, you need to consider the visibility and influence of the source. Why?

Because a mention from a popular influencer, top-notch media outlet, or viral post has a much higher potential reach than a comment on a niche forum or a small blog.

Tracking the reach of your mentions helps you:

• Understand brand exposure – reach provides more context to your mention volume by showing how many people could have seen your brand online.
• Mesurer l'efficacité de la campagne – if your campaign generates high reach, it’s a sign that your marketing strategy works well as it appears to a wider audience.
• Find opportunities for influencer collaboration – you can identify potential ambassadors or strategic partners.

Comment mesurer ?

In Brand24, re-visit the Analysis tab and find the exact numbers for your social and non-social media reach.

Now, go to the Mentions tab and take a look at the reach chart (green line) to see the general trend.

As you can see below, there are two visible spikes in GoPro’s reach. Over both of them, there are icons with exclamation marks.

De quoi s'agit-il ?

It’s an Détecteur d'événements IA – the feature that automatically spots unusual patterns in your mentions and finds the cause for that situation.

In the case of GoPro’s spike from June 15th, the spike in reach was caused by the Father’s Day viral promo awards.

03 Sentiment

Sentiment shows whether your brand, product, or campaign mentions are positive, neutral, or negative in tone.

It’s a qualitative and super important social listening metric.

Pour faire simple, analyse des sentiments adds context to raw mentions and helps you understand what people actually feel about your brand. 

Each mention is analyzed and categorized based on its emotional tone.

Par exemple :

• “I love how easy it is to use [brand_name]!” → Positive 😊
• “I just bought [brand_name]. Let’s see how it goes.” → Neutre 😐
• “Terrible experience with [brand_name].” → Negative 😤

Monitoring sentiment over time helps you:

• Gain in-depth insights – understanding what drives positive and negative emotions can help improve your products, services, and campaigns performance
• Monitor your brand reputation – a sudden spike in negative sentiment can indicate a crisis, product issue, or customer service problem that needs your focus.
• Identify customer pain points – understanding customer sentiment enables you to see patterns in reviews, complaints, and comments, providing valuable feedback directly from your audience.

Comment mesurer ?

Let’s start from the Brand24’s Analysis tab again.

A quick glance at the Overview table unveils how many negative and positive mentions your brand gathered in a chosen period (in my case, June 2025).

A bit under the table, you can see a sentiment breakdown chart.

That’s a simple chart presenting the share of positive, neutral, and negative brand mentions.

Of course, you shouldn’t miss the sentiment analysis chart in the Mentions tab.

As you see, GoPro enjoys a very stable, positive reception.

Well done, guys!

04 Engagement

Engagement is an important social media metric measuring how people react to and interact with content that includes your brand mentions across different platforms.

Depending on the social media channel, the engagement signals are:

• Aime et reactions (e.g. ❤️, 👍, 🔥)
• Commentaires et replies
• Actions et retweets
• Saves et reposts
• Mentions et tags
• Clics (on links, profiles, hashtags)
• Points de vue

All these actions show that the content is interesting or emotional enough to engage users. 

Besides, engagement signals are strong boosters to your performance des médias sociaux as they notify platform algorithms that the content is valuable. 

The more people engage with a post, the more likely it is to be:

• Shown to broader audiences (via explore pages, recommendations, feeds)
• Prioritized in followers’ timelines
• Promoted in trending or suggested content

In short, engagement doesn’t just reflect impact – it drives organic reach.

Comment mesurer ?

Well, that’s a pretty complex issue.

Depending on the social media platform, the engagement metrics vary.

Usually, you can easily get insights into your own engagement metrics via native social media analytics tools, like Meta Business Suite (Facebook and Instagram), YouTube Studio, or LinkedIn Analytics.

But if you want to track engagement around your brand mentions published by others (like earned media or user-generated content), then a social listening tool like Brand24 is the way to go.

The Analysis tab presents the exact numbers for engagement metrics, such as reactions, comments, and shares.

By applying a source filter, you can also see only the social media conversations happening on particular platforms (like Instagram only).

05 Share of Voice (SOV)

Partage de la voix (SOV) reflects the percentage of online conversations in your market, industry, or topic that are about your brand in relation to your competitors.

In other words, it’s your visibilité de la marque vs. the other’s visibility.

If people talk about your brand more often than your competitors, your share of voice is higher.

It’s important because it usually translates to stronger brand awareness and a more dominant position in your niche.

Tracking Share of Voice helps you:

• Benchmark your visibility – you can see your performance de la marque against competitors regarding online presence.
• Understand market perception – a growing SOV often signals increasing interest, awareness, or authority in your industry.
• Uncover gaps and opportunities – if your competitor dominates the conversation, you can inspire yourself by its marketing efforts.

Comment mesurer ?

The most important aspect of Share of Voice is that you must choose the right competitors to have a reliable reference point.

These can be direct business rivals, category leaders, or brands targeting the same audience.

Once you’ve selected the competitors, go to Brand24 and:

1. Set up separate projects for your brand and each competitor by tracking their brand names and relevant keywords.
2. Aller à la page Onglet Comparaison in Brand24’s dashboard and scroll down to see the Share of Voice charts.

As you can see below, when it comes to reach, GoPro and its two direct competitors – DJI and Insta360 – go head-to-head.

But in the case of mentions, DJI definitely dominates the other two brands.

06 Score de présence

Score de présence is a numeric value that indicates the brand’s or topic’s online popularity (presence) at a given time.

It combines several social listening data – like the volume de mentions, atteindreet historical performance – into one simple metric.

That makes understanding how strong your présence de la marque is across the internet much easier!

In short, the Presence Score answers the question: “How visible and popular is my brand right now?”

Comment mesurer ?

Measuring Presence Score with Brand24 is totally effortless.

You can access the Presence Score box by visiting the Analysis tab, scrolling down, and searching for the “Presence Score” box.

It looks the following 👇

07 Équivalent de la valeur publicitaire (EVP)

Équivalent de la valeur publicitaire (EVP) is the approximate amount of money you would have to spend on paid advertising to generate the same level of exposure your brand received through earned media mentions.

So, unlike the other social listening metrics we discussed above, AVE translates organic visibility into financial value.

It gives you a tangible perspective on how much your online presence is worth.

Tracking AVE helps you:

• Track marketing and PR spending – by demonstrating the ROI of your PR & marketing efforts to your manager, stakeholders, and clients.
• Compare the value of PR vs. paid media – to allocate your budget more accurately.
• Comparer PR campaign performance – AVE lets you see which campaigns brought the most value based on organic reach and coverage.

Comment mesurer ?

Visit the Brand24’s Analysis tab and search for the AVE cell in the right-hand table.

If you need more valuable insights, visit the AI Metrics Analysis tab.

There, you will find a chart presenting the impact of particular sources on your Advertising Value Equivalency.

08 Hashtag performance

Performance des hashtags shows how well specific hashtags are doing in terms of visibility, engagement, and contribution to your brand’s online presence.

They help connect your brand to wider conversations, improve discoverability, and organize content across different platforms.

Tracking hashtags helps you:

• Monitor branded campaigns (e.g. #GoProYourSummer)
• Analyze event coverage (e.g. #CES2025)
• Suivre les tendances du secteur (e.g. #ActionCam, #TravelPhotography)
• Understand what resonates with your audience

Comment mesurer ?

Brand24 offers a special tab for hashtag analytics. Its name is, surprise, surprise! Hashtag Analytics!

Once you’re there, you can analyze each hashtag regarding its volume, reach, sentiment, and Share of Voice within your project.

You can also easily filter them out to mute the irrelevant noise.

09 Trending topics

Sujets d'actualité are the most popular themes discussed in online conversations related to your brand, industry, or competitors over a specific period of time.

They allow you to identify what drives most interest in your niche, the audience sentiment around these themes, and how your brand fits into or stands out from those conversations.

Tracking trending topics in social conversations helps you:

• Adjust your messaging in real time – by tailoring your communication strategy to emerging trends.
• Keep up with industry insights – by identifying trends and hot topics in your market niche.
• Spot content opportunities – by creating blog posts, videos, and social media content around what people already care about.

Comment mesurer ?

Social listening tools often include topic recognition in their toolboxes.

For example, Brand24 offers a dedicated AI-powered Topic Analysis tab that clusters the most frequently mentioned keywords and phrases into topic groups.

One click reveals the most popular discussion themes, along with their short descriptions, volume & reach of mentions, Share of Voice within your project, and sentiment share.

For example, the top 3 topics for GoPro are:

1. Action camera content
2. Motorcycle lifestyle content
3. Tendances des médias sociaux

10 Top authors and sources

Top authors and sources are the people, media outlets, blogs, or social media accounts that generate the most impactful mentions of your brand.

Not every voice on the internet has equal influence. Some accounts have massive reach, strong credibility, or highly engaged audiences. 

Tracking who (and how) talks about your brand helps you focus on the sources that truly shape your public perception and drive conversations that matter.

Tracking top authors and sources helps you:

• Discover brand advocates – these could be creators, journalists, or customers who organically promote your brand. It’s worth to reward them!
• Spot potential influencers – to enhance your marketing strategy with new and impactful collaborations.
• Understand channel performance – see which social platforms or websites generate the most buzz about your brand.

Comment mesurer ?

The quickest way to discover your top contributors in Brand24 is to visit the Analysis tab and check sources & profiles with most Share of Voice and most followers.

To see which platforms drive the most buzz to your brand, I encourage you to check the AI Metrics Analysis. 

You’ll find a lot of detailed info, i.e. sources generating the most reach or the most reach efficient platforms.

Conclusion

Écoute sociale is more than just monitoring your brand online – it’s about interpreting the data that matters to your business.

To do that correctly, you need to track the appropriate social listening metrics. 

Mentions volume, atteindreet sentiment show how people talk about your brand and how far those conversations spread.

Building on that, engagement et La part de voix help you evaluate your impact and benchmark your brand with competitors. 

Score de présence et AVE show how visible your brand is and how much that visibility could be worth in real life.

When it comes to content and campaign planning, you should definitely track your performance du hashtag et trending topics. 

Also, do not forget about the top authors and sources! They help you spot key voices worth listening to – or collaborating with. 

With social media listening tools like Brand24, the whole process is nearly effortless.

Réflexions finales :

• Social listening requires proactivity. Observing metrics is not enough.
• High volume of mentions without positive sentiment is a red flag, not a win.
• AI-powered tools like Brand24 provide meaningful insights, not only raw data.
• Not all trends are worth following – choose the ones that support your goals.
• Focus on sources that drive real value. This way, you’ll maximize your efficiency.

Démarrer un essai gratuit Brand24 de 14 jours and turn tracking online conversations into smart, data-driven decisions!