Blog / Digital Marketing

Social Media Monitoring: A Complete Guide for 2026

Updated: February 12, 2026

17 min read

Social media monitoring is the tracking and analysis of conversations, mentions, and trends across social media platforms. What are people saying? Which social media channels drive conversations?

What is social media monitoring? Definition

Social media monitoring is the process of tracking and analyzing conversations, mentions, and trends about a brand, person, product, or topic across social media platforms. The goal is to understand what people say about a brand, product, competitor, or industry.

In simple words: Social media monitoring, means keeping track of what people say about your brand (or any topic) on social media channels.

Furthermore, social media monitoring tools have many analytical features that give insights into monitored keywords.

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

It helps you:

• See who mentions your brand on social media channels
• Know whether people speak positively, negatively, or neutrally
• Catch trends and viral topics early
• Discover what your competitors are doing
• Find influencers for collaborations
• Measure camapign performance in real time
• Respond quickly to customers or crises

In 2026, a solid social monitoring software should ensure:

• Tracking mentions: Tracking the key keywords, such as brand, product, service, industry, CEO, competitors, marketing campaigns, hashtags, and anything business-related.
• Multi-platform coverage: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, Reddit, forums, blogs, news sites, emerging platforms, and niche communities.
• 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.
• Identifying trends & insights: Spotting emerging topics, viral mentions, or recurring customer pain points to guide marketing, PR, and product strategies.
• Crisis management: 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.

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

We are looking for mentions of our brand to prevent crisis situations, to put out fires promptly, and to engage in important conversations regarding our business.

Hanna Milczarek

CMO at Cryptiony

What is AI social media monitoring?

AI social media monitoring is the process of using artificial intelligence (AI) to automatically track, analyze, and interpret conversations happening on social media platforms.

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

Social media monitoring vs. listening

Monitoring is basically just tracking what people are saying about your brand right now. Social media listening is about looking at what people are talking about on a larger scale and figuring out what it all means.

In short:

• Social media monitoring = just keeping up
• Social media listening = understanding the bigger picture

How do they work together?

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

The benefits of social media monitoring

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 are the key benefits:

• Brand reputation management: Identifies negative comments or complaints early, enables rapid crisis response, and helps to protect and enhance brand image.
• Understanding customer sentiment: Learn how customers view your brand to identify issues, highlight positive feedback, and adjust your messaging to protect your reputation.
• Better customer engagement: Identifying customer questions enables timely responses, helping build stronger relationships and trust.
• Crisis detection and prevention: identifies potential issues before they escalate, monitors viral conversations in real time, and supports faster crisis response strategies.
• Competitor benchmarking: Compare your brand with competitors by measuring share of voice and analyzing their reactions, campaigns, and customer feedback.
• Measure social media ROI: Revealing which campaigns, channels, and content drive meaningful engagement, conversions, and business results.
• Content and campaign optimization: Monitoring provides real-time insights to track engagement, measure reach, and optimize campaigns based on live data.
• Real-time insights: Real-time access to public sentiment, reputation management, competitor activities, and emerging market opportunities.
• Influencer discovery: Identifying potential brand advocates and partners by finding influential individuals in your industry.
• Lead generation: Identifying potential customers expressing a need for a product or service.

Brand mentions on social media (including untagged ones) are crucial for SEO and GEO in 2026. They strongly affect visibility in AI Overviews, and mentions on platforms like Reddit, LinkedIn, and Quora influence responses from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other LLMs.

How does social media monitoring work?

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. 

In short: 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 – Monitor all platforms where your audience is engaged. In 2026, you need to track:

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

Sentiment analysis – Detect and interpret emotions behind online conversations. In 2026, a solid tool should identify:

• 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

Real-time notifications – To stay updated, monitoring systems should provide:

• 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
• Integrations: Notifications through communication apps, such as Slack or MS Teams

Advanced analytics – Raw data needs meaningful context. Key analytical features that will boost social media performance:

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

Custom reporting – Reporting is about making social media data actionable. Types of reports that will streamline the job:

• Brand health reports: Track how people evaluate 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.

Step 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:

• Protecting brand reputation
• Improving customer service
• Improving target audience engagement
• Tracking campaign performance
• Monitoring competitors
• Identifying industry trends
• Generating sales leads
• Influencer identification
• Product feedback

Can you use it for all of the above? Of course, you can use social monitoring data for much more than that!

Step 2: Choose the right tool

There are many social monitoring solutions on the market. While choosing the tool, pay attention to:

• Budget
• Platform coverage
• Real-time alert capabilities
• Sentiment analysis accuracy
• Reporting features

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

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.

Step 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 tocapture all social 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
• Track competitors 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 chances:
  • 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

Important note: The more keywords you track, the higher the cost. Most tools base their pricing on the number of keywords monitored.

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 for understanding public opinions 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 a lot of 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? Including required and excluded keywords makes your monitoring project more accurate. This allows you to focus on the mentions and topics that are most relevant.

Step 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:

Step 5: Integrate with broader marketing strategy

Social media monitoring and analysis deliver valuable insights that can boost your social media marketing efforts in many ways.

That’s why I recommend combining it across teams:

• Social media management: proactively address social media mentions to boost engagement, brand awareness, and customer loyalty significantly
• Customer support: track what customers are saying in real time and act on complaints instantly
• Marketing: optimize 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 improvements and new features based on customer feedback

Step 6: Monitor, take action, repeat

The most important part of social media monitoring is consistency.

Consistently check-in.

Consistently clean up your results.
Consistently respond and react.

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

Regularly:

• Respond to crucial social mentions to boost your brand recognition
• Update keywords, queries, hashtags as the language evolves
• Refine filters to gain the most reliable data
• Compare against past performance and competitors

Top social media monitoring tools

There are a few tools for monitoring social media worth checking.

Here is a detailed comparison: The Best Social Media Monitoring Tools. Most of them offer a free trial period, which gives you a couple of days to play with the tool.

Now, let’s quickly check the top 4 tools worth your attention, (list updated in February 2026):

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, Hootsuite and Meltwater:

As you can see:

• Hootsuite is undoubtedly the most popular social listening tool, leading in total mentions, social mentions, reach, and overall presence score.
• Sprout Social is also a well-known tool in the marketing industry, performing solidly in non-social coverage and reach.
• Meltwater offers moderate coverage and reach but shows the lowest positive sentiment share.
• Brand24 is less popular, but it has the highest percentage of positive mentions (14%) and the lowest negative mentions (1%).

I also asked the AI Brand Assistant 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 

How important is AI social media monitoring in 2026?

According to Pluggo research, in 2025, the global social listening 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

AI-powered sentiment analysis 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

Want to see how sentiment analysis impacts your social media performance in practice?
Explore our comprehensive guide to social media sentiment analysis and learn how to turn audience emotions into actionable insights.

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.

How does it work?

• 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.

How does it work?

• 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.

How does it work?

• 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.

Key thoughts

On average, a person uses about 6.8 different social networks each month. The average daily time spent on social media is approximately 2 hours and 20 to 24 minutes.

These days, the volume of social media posts generated each day is enormous.

Your brand can be mentioned everywhere. That’s why, while using social media monitoring, remember to:

• Check your monitoring projects regularly
• Filter the noise and focus on key mentions
• Pay attention to the sentiment
• Track the performance of your competitors
• Set up alerts and automated reports

Social media monitoring FAQs

What’s the difference between social media monitoring and social media management?

Social media monitoring is about listening and analyzing, tracking mentions, trends, and sentiment to understand what people are saying about a brand or industry.

Social media management is about creating and engaging, planning content, posting, and interacting with the audience.

How often should I check social media monitoring projects?

Check social media monitoring:

• Daily if you’re a large brand, running campaigns, or at risk of PR issues.
• A few times per week for smaller or low-activity brands.
• Weekly and monthly reviews for deeper trend analysis.

Can ChatGPT analyze and monitor social media accounts?

ChatGPT cannot monitor social media accounts in real time or access them directly. However, it can analyze data you provide (posts, comments, reports) and help with sentiment analysis, insights, and strategy recommendations.

How can monitoring help with crisis management?

Social media monitoring helps with crisis management by spotting anomalies in mention volume, tracking public sentiment in real time, detecting crisis issues, and managing public perception effectively.