Social Listening: Advanced Guide for 2025

You may have heard the phrase social listening before, but what does it actually mean? At its core, it is the process of monitoring online conversations to understand what people are saying about your brand, products, services, and anything that may be relevant to your business. Wisely used, it will be a game changer in your marketing strategy.

According to the 2025 State of Social Listening report by Social Media Today:

• 89.4% of surveyed companies use listening to analyze social data, making it the number one methodology for this purpose.
• Nearly 88% of agencies and over 68% of in-house brands perceive listening and social data as important for achieving their business objectives.
• The primary social listening methods brands use are trend & mentions volume analysis, sentiment analysis, keyword & hashtag tracking, topic analysis, and AI-powered emotion classification.

Sounds interesting?

In this post, we’ll discuss everything you need to know.

So read on to learn more!

What is social listening? Definition

Social listening is monitoring online conversations to understand what people say about a brand, product, industry, or topic in real time. It goes beyond counting mentions because it focuses on interpreting context, sentiment, and trends across various digital platforms.

In simple words: Social listening = What are people saying? + Why are they saying it? + What should we do about it?

Why do you need it? It will help you discover:

• Brand reputation & perception
• Competitor reputation & perception
• Customer sentiment & emotions
• Real-time feedback
• Emerging trends & market opportunities
• Target audience insights & demographics
• Campaign effectiveness
• PR crisis quickly
• Backlink opportunities

To listen to conversations, you need a tool that monitors the entire web in real time, including social media, news, blogs, forums, and reviews.

Such a tool should track both tagged and untagged mentions and offer advanced analytics.

Key elements of social listening in 2025:

• Real-time monitoring of conversations across multiple platforms and channels
• Sentiment analysis that automatically detects whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative, and uses natural language processing (NLP) for emotion detection
• Instant notifications for spikes in mentions and sentiment drops
• Topic and trend analysis that clusters conversations into themes
• Competitive benchmarking to pay attention to competitors’ share of voice, reach, customer satisfaction, and PR wins or failures
• Trendspotting to track emerging hashtags, keywords, and hot topics in the industry
• Advanced reporting with scheduling and quick sharing features

What is AI-powered social listening?

AI-powered social listening is an advanced form of social listening that uses artificial intelligence (AI), especially natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning to monitor, analyze, and interpret mentions in real time.

In simple words: Instead of just tracking mentions, AI-powered social listening understands context, emotion, trends and delivers actionable insights.

What does the AI actually do?

First of all, it speeds up the analysis of monitored data. Secondly, it presents ready-to-use insights and recommendations.

You don’t need to interpret the data by yourself. AI does the work for you, that’s the point.

Let’s take a quick look at how AI can boost social listening in 2025. Top tools already offer those features:

• Deeper sentiment analysis – It automatically detects whether mentions are positive, negative, or neutral, even when there’s irony, sarcasm, or slang involved, and understands emojis and hashtags.
• Built-in AI chat (just like ChatGPT) – Acts like your personal analyst. You can ask it questions, and it gives you answers based on real-time monitoring of online conversations.
• Better topic clustering – AI groups similar mentions or discussions into themes or trends (e.g., customer complaints, promotional content, product feedback).
• Quicker anomaly spotting – Detects unusual spikes in mentions, reach, or sentiment and explains what caused them.
• Automated insight generation – Transforms complex data into summaries, recommendations, and strategic takeaways.

Social listening vs. social monitoring

People frequently confuse social listening with social monitoring. It’s like confusing a thermometer with a doctor’s diagnosis (seriously!).

Because, whereas these concepts are close, they’re definitely not the same.

In a nutshell: Monitoring helps you handle day-to-day interactions. Listening helps you make informed, strategic business decisions.

Aspect	Social media monitoring	Social listening
Definition	Tracking and collecting online mentions, keywords, brand tags, and hashtags	Analyzing the monitoring data to extract insights, patterns, trends, and recommendations
Goal	Respond to conversations	Learn from conversations
Focus	Real-time, short-term, reactive	Strategic, long-term, proactive
Sources	Social media channels	Social media channels, news, websites, blogs, podcasts, video platforms, review sites
Use Cases	Identifying mentions, customer service, crisis management, and community engagement	Shaping marketing or product strategy, understanding consumer sentiment, competitive intelligence, and crisis prevention
Example	Replying to a customer’s social media post complaining about delayed shipping	Identifying that customers want sms notifications about shipping based on repeated mentions

Summing up, social media monitoring is a part of social listening – the part that observes and collects data, while listening analyzes it to generate insights and guide strategic action.

What are the benefits of social listening?

We must clarify one thing: social conversations listening isn’t just about tracking mentions– it’s about unlocking real business value.

As such, it becomes a powerful asset in any brand’s toolkit.

Here are the key benefits that make it an essential part of all brand and marketing strategies:

• Customer Sentiment – Understand how audiences feel about campaigns, products, and messages.
• Brand Health – Monitor reputation shifts, risks, and key discussion topics.
• Competitive Analysis – Benchmark share of voice and track consumer views on rivals.
• Crisis Management – Detect early warning signs and measure response impact.
• Trend Discovery – Spot rising keywords, niche topics, and competitor trends.
• Campaign Performance – Evaluate reactions, reach, and ROI of campaigns.
• Customer Satisfaction – Capture authentic feedback, complaints, and UGC.
• Product Development – Use feedback to refine features, address needs, and innovate.

1. Understanding of customer sentiment & insights

Sentiment analysis tells you how people feel about your brand — positive, negative, or neutral. Insights from those sentiments help you understand why they feel that way.

You can discover:

• Whether the target audience sees your campaigns in a positive or a negative way
• What specific products, features, or messages trigger emotional reactions
• Which platforms generate the most feedback (positive or negative)
• What emotions (admiration, anger, joy, sadness, disgust, fear) are associated with your brand mentions

2. Brand health under control

Advanced listening software delivers real-time reputation insights and competitive context, so you can protect and strengthen your brand image.

You can discover:

• Whether brand sentiment is improving or declining
• What people talk about most when mentioning your brand (e.g., customer service, pricing, product quality)
• How does your brand perception change after campaigns, product launches, or crises
• Specific events, social media posts, or authors causing brand reputation risks

3. Access to competitive analysis

The 2025 State of Social Listening report cited above clearly shows that competitor analysis is the primary use case for analyzing social data for agencies and independent brands.

So, most specialists use social media listening to reveal consumer perceptions of competitors’ brands.

You can discover:

• Who’s dominating the market buzz
• What percentage of mentions do you own
• What users love about a competitor’s product
• Are influential sources talking about your competitors

4. Powerful crisis management

Social media listening tools are made to detect early warning signs, monitor public sentiment, and help you respond before a crisis escalates.

You can discover:

• Sudden spike in mentions, especially negative ones
• The original post or comment that triggered the issue
• How the public mood is changing hour by hour or day by day
• Whether your response is working

5. Immediate trend discovery

Many brands use social listening to identify industry trends before they become mainstream. That’s because it’s one of the fastest, most scalable ways to discover what’s going on in the industry.

You can discover:

• Rising keywords, hashtags, and phrases before they spike
• Niche trends formed in specific subcultures or communities
• Influencers who started the trend
• Trends your competitors are engaging with

6. Campaign performance boost

According to Socialbakers, social listening can improve campaign return-on-investment by even 25%! How? By more accurate targeting and content creation.

Analyzing audience conversations is a game-changer for optimizing targeted marketing campaigns, as it helps us understand customer language and interests.

You can discover:

• How people feel about your campaign
• Which campaign elements trigger the strongest reactions
• Social and non-social reach of camapign
• Advertising Value Equivalent (AVE) based on online buzz

7. Improved customer satisfaction

Listening to customer conversations lets you understand their emotions & preferences, detect frequently reported issues, and – ultimately – improve customer feedback. Evidence?

According to the McKinsey report, companies implementing listening into their customer experience strategy enjoy a 17% higher customer satisfaction rate than competitors.

You can discover:

• Unfiltered, authentic customer opinions and emotions about your brand
• Complaints, frustrations, the moment of posting, even if you’re not tagged
• Which parts of the customer journey trigger the most negative reactions
• User-generated content that increases brand credibility

8. Smarter product development

By listening to social media conversations, you can design, improve, and prioritize features based on honest user feedback, not assumptions, internal bias, or limited survey responses.

You can discover:

• Unmet needs, feature requests, or frustrations in natural conversations across Reddit, X (Twitter), TikTok, forums, and reviews
• What users say they don’t use or don’t like
• Hidden expectations by analyzing how people talk about your product and competitors
• How users describe your product

Why is social listening important?

“Because online conversations are where today’s trust is built—and buying decisions are made. Especially in B2B, where purchases are costly and complex, people turn to their networks for real experiences, not Google.

Your audience is out there talking about their challenges, goals, and what’s changing in their industry. If you’re not listening, you’re missing a goldmine of insights to shape your messaging, content, and entire go-to-market strategy.”

Sara Stella Lattanzio, B2B marketing leader & LinkedIn influencer

How to use social listening? 6-step strategy

Social listening is a quite simple process, but you’ll need the right brand monitoring tool.

Of course, you can do it manually, but it’s much more time-consuming and less effective. 

Here are 6 steps that will help you set up your strategy.

Step 1: Define your goals

In the beginning, decide what you want to achieve.

Seriously, many people ignore this initial step and follow the “it will work out somehow” strategy. Wrong way.

Without clear goals, you’re just collecting data with no direction. It’s like driving a car just for fun – you can enjoy it, but you’re wasting your brand resources for nothing truly meaningful.

Instead, define what goal (or goals) will guide your social listening strategy.

And you have plenty to choose from:

• Brand reputation management
• Increasing brand recognition
• Social media analytics
• Improving customer experience & service
• Building customer engagement
• Getting customer feedback
• Tracking campaign performance
• Identifying brand ambassadors & candidates for influencer marketing
• Content creation and distribution
• Brand health tracking

In practice, according to the State of Social Listening 2025, the most frequent goals for real businesses are: 

1. Market insights (58% of agencies and 37,5% of brands)
2. Brand perception (56% of agencies and 52,8% of brands)
3. Cultural & societal trend analysis (56% of agencies and 61,1% of brands)
4. Crisis management (42% of agencies and 56,9% of brands)
5. Content strategy (37% of agencies and 31,9% of brands)

Remember, though, that choosing your goal or goals for your social listening strategy is not a lifetime decision! They can evolve with time.

What’s important is to have a well-defined starting point.

Step 2: Pick a social listening tool

Theoretically, you can do social medai listening manually and research social media channels to identify valuable mentions. But is it effective? Definitely not. 

It takes a lot of time, and there is a high chance you will miss important posts.

Advanced social listening tools research data sources automatically and help you identify the most popular and important mentions, draw valuable insights, and identify emerging trends

So, once you have your goals in place, it is time to pick the right tool that will do most of the job for you. Usually, you can sign up for a trial to test a tool before you buy it.

When looking for the right tool, check those 5 factors:

• Number of monitored sources – the more, the better
• Features that will support your goals – pay attention if the tool constantly develops its features, and if it includes helpful AI features
• Cost-effective pricing – depending on your budget and scale
• Opinions posted on tools review websites – I recommend checking G2 and Capterra
• Customer support – issues happen frequently, so choosing a tool with a great customer service team is important.

Check: The Best Social Listening Tools

Step 3: Set up the keywords you want to track

Social media listening tools do their job thanks to tracking keywords. Such a keyword can contain anything: a brand name, a hashtag, an industry-relevant topic, and any other phrase.

Now, your task is to define what you want to monitor. Pick the keywords that match your goals.

Think about what will work best, like:

• The name of your brand, product, or service
• Your company hashtag
• Your campaign-specific hashtag
• Your CEO’s or any other prominent employee’s name
• Your competitors’ brand names and hashtags
• Industry buzzwords 
• Trending topics relevant to your niche
• Names of events you’re participating in or sponsoring

Step 4: Create a monitoring project

Setting up a monitoring project is relatively easy. Most social listening tools have a similar process, so I’ll discuss the process using Brand24.

Below, you can see the project creation wizard. To run a project, you need to set up the main keyword, hashtag, or phrase for which your project will collect data.

Then, you can add optional advanced settings, such as:

• Project name
• Required keywords –  each of which must appear in order for the mention to be collected 
• Excluded keywords –  each one of which can appear if the mention is to be collected
• Language(s) – include or exclude specific languages
• Sources – include or exclude specific data sources
• Notifications – rules for receiving mobile or email notifications
• Reports – daily & weekly reports, as well as Storm Alerts rules (for sudden spikes in mentions that may indicate a crisis or viral trend).

Step 5: Work with social listening data

Okay, you’re all set up! Now, it’s time to explore data.

In the Mentions tab, you’ll start seeing results whenever someone mentions your keywords on social & non-social platforms.

From there, you can engage with them directly or take action based on what you “hear”. The good practice is to monitor the results regularly and respond as necessary.

Now you can:

• Click on mentions to be redirected to the social media platform, where you can directly respond.
• Discover sources (platforms) that deliver the most mentions, so you will be able to pick social media platforms that are the most effective.
• Sort results by popularity to discover the most influential & important mentions and treat them as a priority.
• Check the sentiment of each mention so you can respond to negative ones quickly.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more benefits and use cases. You will find them in the next step. 

To gain comprehensive knowledge on how to do social listening, check the webinar hosted by Monika, Customer Success Manager at Brand24.

You will learn how to:
✔️ Create a project
✔️ Interpret social listening data
✔️ Take advantage of Brand24’s features to benefit your business.

Check the video 👇

How can brands use social media listening to identify and engage with their target audience?

“Social media listening gives you all the information you need about the right channels, topics, people, and hashtags to connect with your audience. All you need to do is use this data and go out there!”

Justyna Dzikowska, Head of Marketing at Brand24

Step 6: Optimize, expand, and continue

At this stage, you have probably tested your social listening strategies. It’s time to maximize your results and reach even further. 

How to do it? 

Take a look at the tips written by Adam Górnicz, Customer Success Manager at Brand24, who is an expert in optimizing monitoring projects. 

Optimize

Using the brand’s X (Twitter) handle, domain, or Facebook URL as additional keywords may boost your results significantly. 

Remember, some posts may contain one of those forms, instead of the full brand’s name, and you gotta catch ’em all, right? 

Polish

One of the few things that may improve your results in terms of their relevance is the skillful use of the excluded keywords section. 

With the help of this function, mentions containing excluded keywords will not appear in your data pool ever again.

But hey, you don’t have to meditate trying to figure out what are the words that appear with your mentions the most, to choose the irrelevant ones. 

The context of a discussion tab, in the Analysis tab, will do it for you:

Extend your point of view

Instead of monitoring the brand or the competitors only, try to look at the bigger picture. 

Keeping your social listening eye on the industry itself may be very beneficial.

It can translate into more potential clients, valuable information about industry trends, or data you wouldn’t even expect to find!

But how exactly are you supposed to do that?

1. Create a project with the topic and its variations as keywords, choosing the language you are interested in.

2. Analyze our good ol’ context of a discussion tab (man, I really love that feature!). 
   
   Even at first glance, it gives you an overall view and shows the brightest points, like the biggest problems, the biggest players, or even clues to hot discussions around the subject.

3. Learn about the most influential social media profiles in the industry, with the help of the Most Share of Voice and Most Followers profiles tab, and track their posts and opinions. 
   
   After all, it is their opinion that often influences setting trends.

4. Keep tracking the most popular mentions manually. 
   
   The more popular the post, the bigger its impact on the industry may be, so keep up with the most popular ones at least.

Using the social listening tips above will surely improve your results and make you feel like a media monitoring ninja!

Social listening examples

Want to see how a well-optimized digital listening strategy can uncover valuable and actionable insights?

Check out these case studies from real brands:

Trend analysis: Neon Panda

Neon Panda, a Mexican beverage brand, uses a monitoring tool to stay culturally relevant and ahead of consumer trends.

Results: When “natural hydration” started growing as a topic among consumers, Neon Panda immediately noticed it. Then they used it to shape future messaging and product exploration.

Competitor analysis: XTB

XTB, a global trading platform, monitors competitors’ activities, including their promotions of features or offers, changes to their products, and customer complaints or negative feedback.

Results: When XTB notices competitors making changes that customers don’t like, it becomes an opportunity. For example, if a rival altered its stock investment offering and received negative feedback, XTB used that as a chance to highlight how its own offering was superior.

Improved customer experience: Pasibus

Pasibus, a Polish restaurant brand, uses a brand listening tool to detect customer feedback and meet customer expectations.

Results:

• Started a “Burger of the Month” campaign, where followers vote for what they want. This is a direct way to get feedback about menu preferences.
• After launching new or special menu items, they use the tool to monitor reactions, including reviews, shares, discussions, and what people like and dislike.
• They also track feedback from cities where they don’t yet have a restaurant. Those mentions are used to measure demand in new markets.

Link building: Chilli Fruit

Chilli Fruit, a link-building and consulting agency, tracks mentions related to clients’ names and companies to discover backlink opportunities.

Results:

• Up to 1,500 unnotified mentions captured for more than a dozen clients. These are cases where quotes or mentions appeared in reputable publications (e.g. on Forbes, Yahoo Finance) but the client was not informed.
• About 10% of a client’s backlink requirement was satisfied through link‑building activities derived purely from monitoring mentions.
• Over 100 projects (guest post / external content) set up using data from Brand24 for content/visual enhancement.

Brand reputation: PiwikPRO

PiwikPRO, an analytics and data activation platform, uses social media listening to protect, measure, and maximize its reputation. Credibility is crucial in analytics and privacy business. Misinformation or false claims can damage trust.

Results: The team watches for “outdated or incorrect descriptions” of their product’s functions, especially in contexts of privacy, data security, and GDPR compliance. If someone has misrepresented their work, Piwik PRO responds or corrects.

Read more: Social Listening Examples From Inspiring Brands

The future of social listening 2025/2026

What can we expect in 2025 and 2026? Are there any emerging trends in the digital listening area?

I’ve asked those questions to Michał Sadowki, CEO & Founder of media monitoring and listening software.

Here are his key predictions for the coming months:

1. Social listening as fuel for AI Visibility & LLM SEO

Mentions of brands and key topics across social platforms increasingly become essential signals for large language models (LLMs) like GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Just as backlinks were once the currency of SEO, brand mentions now act as the “fuel” for visibility in AI-generated responses.

Maintaining a high volume and quality of mentions across Reddit, LinkedIn, Quora, and X (Twitter) will directly influence how and whether a brand appears in LLM-generated outputs.

In 2025, we expect listening tools to be integrated into AI visibility strategies, helping marketers identify and activate high-impact conversation threads that shape algorithmic understanding of brands.

2. Integration with AI Assistants via MCP and similar protocols

With the rise of Multi-Channel Plugins (MCPs) and API connections between tools like Brand24 and Large Language Models (LLMs), we anticipate a significant increase in real-time querying of social listening data through chat interfaces.

By mid-2026, Forrester predicts that over 40% of enterprise users will rely on LLMs to access third-party social data. This shift will transform social data from being merely passive analytics into interactive intelligence within AI systems.

3. Smarter, correlative insights powered by AI

Thanks to advancements in correlation modeling and multimodal learning, social listening platforms will become significantly better at discovering non-obvious relationships between social chatter and business outcomes.

Expect tools to:

• Predict brand perception shifts based on sentiment and competitor buzz
• Correlate spikes in social mentions with customer churn or NPS drops
• Detect emerging influencer clusters in micro-communities before they trend

Platforms like Brand24, Talkwalker, and Sprinklr are already embedding predictive analytics modules, and IDC forecasts that AI-driven insight layers will grow by 55% YoY through 2026 in social intelligence platforms.

Conclusion

We’ve covered a lot today, so let’s review!

Final thoughts:

• Manual social media listening is time-consuming and less effective. Instead, use AI-powered tools that will automate the process and do most of the job for you.
• The main reasons why companies invest in social media listening are doing market research, measuring brand perception, analyzing trends, crisis detection & management, and improving content strategy.
• Social listening can help you find leads, but you must set up a project correctly and use filters smartly. 
• Starting brand listening is simple, but you need to pick your goals and choose relevant keywords you want to monitor first. 
• Most of the tools, like Brand24, offer a free trial so you can test them carefully.