What is social listening?
By Lim Wai Hong · · 2 min read
Social listening means reading what people say about your business online and acting on it. You track mentions of your brand, your products and your competitors across social apps, forums, video and podcasts. Then you decide which mentions need a reply today and which ones teach you something.
How is social listening different from social monitoring?
Monitoring counts mentions. Someone tagged you or used your hashtag, and the number went up.
Listening asks why the number moved. Why did the complaints start on Tuesday? What do people praise about your competitor that they never say about you? Monitoring gives you a count. Listening is the part where you read the posts and decide what to change.
Why does it matter for a small business?
Picture a customer who gets a cold coffee at your shop. They say nothing at the counter. That evening they post about it on TikTok, and other customers see the post before you do.
Social listening finds that post while you can still answer it. It finds the good posts too, like a customer who loves your new product and tags a friend. For a small team, I think this is the cheapest market research there is. Customers tell you what they want in their own words, and nobody has to fill in a survey.
How does social listening work?
The steps are the same whether you do it by hand or with a tool.
- 01
Pick your keywords: your brand name, your products, your competitors and the usual misspellings of each.
- 02
Collect the public posts, comments, videos and podcasts that use those words.
- 03
Sort them. Label each post positive, neutral or negative, and put the urgent ones first.
- 04
Act. Reply to the post, or pass the problem to the person who can fix it.
- 05
Look back each week. Which topics grew? Do people feel better or worse about you than last week?
Where do people talk about your business?
Not in one place, and often not in your language. A tea shop can get photos on Instagram and a long review in Chinese on RedNote in the same week. If you only read English posts on one app, you miss the rest.
Can you do social listening by hand?
Yes, if you get a few mentions a week. Search your brand name on each app once a day and keep a sheet of what you find.
It gets harder as the mentions grow. Search works differently on every app, and posts in other languages are hard to read. And the urgent post always seems to arrive on the one day you skip the check. At that point a tool makes more sense. It checks each app for you and flags the posts that need you today.