Social Listening: A Complete Guide to Benefits, Strategy & Implementation for 2025

For brands, social listening is not just a nice to have – it's a must-have in 2025. Jeff Bezos famously stated, “If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends, but online, they can each tell thousands or even millions of connections through social media.” One poor customer experience can snowball into negative brand sentiment and PR crises. Courtesy social listening.

Not only this, listening helps identify shifts in customer behavior and brand perception, alerting brands about potential PR crises. It also offers a wealth of insights crucial for enhancing customer engagement, marketing campaigns, and product roadmaps.

In this guide, you'll learn the benefits of social listening, the best tools to use, and actionable steps to implement it in your business.

What is social listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking the conversation happening online related to your brand, industry, competitors, and keywords.

To break it down, social listening strategies involve tracking:

Brand: Mentions of your brand name, product, slogans, and hashtags.

Industry: Trends, news, and challenges.

Competitors: Mentions of their brand, campaigns, and customer perception.

Keywords: Direct and indirect mentions relevant to your brand.

In turn, social listening helps:

• Understand customer sentiment and how positively or negatively people perceive your brand.
• Gain competitive intelligence by observing competitors’ strengths, weaknesses, and successful strategies.
• Improve customer engagement by identifying opportunities to respond to customer queries and concerns in a timely manner.
• Mitigate potential PR risks by identifying and addressing negative conversations circulating online before they escalate.

Lucifer: Netflix’s Social Listening Win

A popular example of social listening is the revival of the show Lucifer by Netflix. Fans worldwide demanded to bring back the show using #SaveLucifer on various platforms like Twitter and Reddit. Netflix quickly acknowledged the positive sentiment and made a strategic decision that paid off. The result – Lucifer became one of Netflix’s most-watched series.

read more examples

Social listening vs. social media monitoring

Social listening and social monitoring are related to some extent as both focus on tracking online conversations, but they differ in scope and objective. Let’s discuss it in detail.

The importance of social listening for businesses

Social listening is foundational to social media marketing success. It won’t be an overestimation to say it should be incorporated in your social media strategy. This video explains why:

The key benefits of social listening can be summed up as:

1. Better understanding of customer needs

Social listening allows you to tap into discussions happening in real time. That helps you uncover pain points, preferences, and emerging demands. Factoring these into your product roadmap, marketing, support, and sales helps you meet customer expectations better and faster.

2. Strategic crisis management

Real-time monitoring allows you to detect potential crises or spikes in negative sentiment early and respond promptly, preventing reputational damage and maintaining customer trust. Proactive crisis communication and management reflects your responsiveness and consideration of your audience’s concerns, further strengthening trust.

3. Spotting trends

When used effectively, social media listening spots new trends early, filtering through industry chatter to focus on the right conversations. This helps you shape your messaging and content strategy, adapting to evolving consumer needs for a strong market position.

4. Evaluate marketing performance

Social listening tools can evaluate your marketing efforts by analyzing campaign performance. They also enable you to study audience reactions to conferences, events, and promotions, helping you identify what's relevant and what falls flat. These insights into audience perception and campaign alignment with your goals can help refine your strategy.

How social listening works: Tools and techniques

Social listening strategies involve incorporating various tools and techniques to monitor, analyze, and respond to conversations on different online platforms.:

Top tools for social listening

1. Sprinklr

Sprinklr’s social listening tool enables brands to monitor conversations across 30+ digital channels. It leverages powerful AI and generative AI to provide in-depth insights on sentiment, emotions, and text classifications ensuring quick and precise results for businesses.

Top features include:

• Visual listening: Detects brand logos in different visual formats like GIFs, images, and videos.
• Instant insights: Calculates key brand metrics like awareness, share of voice (SOV), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) across major social platforms.
• Team collaboration: Enables sharing real-time insights across teams with ready-to-use reports and flexible customization options.
• Real-time alerts: Automates response processes for quick crisis management.

2. Brandwatch

Trusted by many brands, Brandwatch allows users to perform as many searches as needed to track topics of discussion about brands and products.

Top features include:

• Customized searches using 48 different operations, making results for more targeted insights.
• Access historical data and track trends, spot opportunities, and analyze shifts in conversations over time
• Tap into millions of data points across over 100 million online sources and get a broad and diverse view of online sentiment.
• Monitor global conversations with support for multiple languages.

Social listening technique

1. Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis analyzes online conversations and classifies them as positive, negative, or neutral with the help of Machine Language (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP).

2. Trend tracking

It involves processes like data collection, preprocessing (tokenization, stop-work removal), keyword analysis, and text scoring.

Social listening works by keeping track of sudden rises in mentions, topics, or hashtags that are gaining momentum, which could indicate emerging trends or reveal new patterns used to describe a particular topic or rising interest. It also involves real-time analysis of which social media content is going viral.

Additionally, it enables businesses to detect when special issues, movements, or shifts in attitudes influence consumer behavior.

👉For instance, if consumer’s attitude shifts towards sustainability, and start talking about eco-friendly clothes more, the insights might be useful for brands to shift their long-term strategy or even launch a new line of sustainable clothes.

3. Competitor analysis

Social listening gathers data on which competitor campaigns are performing well or failing. It uses AI to determine whether customers feel positively or negatively about a competitor's brand, helping identify pain points in competitor products or services that a brand can capitalize on. It also uncovers gaps in the market by analyzing unmet customer needs.

A great example here is Wendy’s which is quick to jump on competitor’s tweets.

4. Keyword monitoring

While keyword monitoring serves raw data on the frequency and reach of terms, social listening adds depth by analyzing the emotions of people about those terms and why they're discussing them.

How social listening improves customer experience

Customers may discuss difficulty with your product or dissatisfaction with specific aspects of your service. Social media listening can help identify recurring complaints or frustration, allowing brands to directly address and fix the issue.

Additionally, it can help understand the context of the conversation, avoiding misinterpretation of slang or sarcasm, and making it easier to offer a more personalized and relevant experience.

Moreover, social listening can be a game changer in the area of customer service:

• It can pick up on negative mentions immediately even if the customer hasn't directly tagged the brand, allowing real-time identification of issues before it escalates.
• Effective sentiment analysis helps customer service agents tailor their responses for a more empathetic and effective resolution.
• Agents can analyze customer's social media history and gain insights into their past interactions with brands. This gives ideas about the preferences and communication style, enabling agents to offer more personalized support.
• It helps prioritize customer service requests based on urgency and impact.

Spotify introduced ‘Blend,’ an AI feature that allows users to create a shared playlist with friends and “DJ” and curates personalized music. To develop these features, Spotify utilized social listening considering users' feedback where they wanted to engage with friends over music, not just listen alone.

Social listening for marketing and brand strategy

Social listening plays a major role in marketing and brand strategy by helping businesses understand what their target audience is discussing, the language they use, and their pain points. This helps brands to adjust their messaging, and content accordingly, using audiences’ preferred tone, keywords, and topics.

Additionally, it helps identify authentic and reliable brand advocates by analyzing their real impact and alignment with brand value.

Further, social media listening enhances strategies by optimizing customer support, identifying recurring complaints or questions, and addressing them in real time. It also enables personalized marketing efforts by segmenting audiences based on their expressed interests and behaviors.

Social listening also impacts your content creations by:

• Understanding your audience and the content they prefer.
• Identifying trending topics to create timely and relevant content.
• Improving your content strategy by providing insights on what content resonates well with the audience and what doesn't.
• Measuring the success of your content by tracking mentions, shares, and comments.

Apart from that, social listening plays a huge role in competitive analysis. It can track competitor mentions, giving you ideas about their brand visibility and reach. This allows for easy comparisons, helping you assess your influence.

Not only that but understanding their sentiment reveals how customers perceive them. Understanding their strengths and weaknesses can help you reflect on potential areas for improvement in your offering.

As a result, you can:

• Address gaps in the market that your competitors are not addressing.
• Adapt the successful campaigns run by your competitors and adapt their strategies to your marketing efforts.

McDonald's leveraged social listening during its “Grimace’s Birthday” campaign, when a viral TikTok trend emerged around the Grimace shake. The brand quickly engaged with the trend through a humorous meme, boosting engagement and generating free marketing. This proactive approach contributed to strong Q2 earnings.

Challenges and limitations

While social listening tools can extract meaningful insights from vast amounts of data online, it comes with its own set of challenges and limitations. Let's discuss some of them.

• The way too much content on social media can make it challenging for social listening tools to filter out irrelevant information from relevant ones – leading to inaccurate data analysis and insights.
• Data collected by the social listening tools may be irrelevant, outdated, or inaccurate.
• There's a potential for automated sentiment analysis to make errors and misinterpret customer’s sarcasm, irony or other forms of language.

To overcome these limitations, Sprinklr offers powerful filters, multilingual support and AI powered sentiment analysis that helps brands sort through large amounts of data, identify relevant conversation, and understand customers' sentiment across languages.

While social listening is a crucial aspect of extracting meaningful insights into customer sentiment, it comes with its own set of challenges such as:

• With the sheer volume of social media posts, online reviews, and other digital content, filtering through the noise to find relevant insights can be challenging.
• Customers from different parts of the world use different languages to share their thoughts and emotions, which makes it different for brands to comprehend the feedback.
• Social listening tools can misinterpret customer's sarcasm, irony, or other forms of language.
• Since data is just information until it's analyzed and turned into actionable insights, organizations must invest time and resources to bring out the value.

These capabilities help brands sort through large amounts of data, identify relevant conversations and understand customer sentiment across languages.

How to implement social listening in your business

Here is a walkthrough on how to implement social listening in your business.

Step 1: Outline your objective

The first step is to outline your objective clearly to prevent getting lost in the plethora of data available online. It will allow you to filter the noise.

The objectives could be:

• Brand health: Run a deep analysis of your brand to understand public perception.
• Industry insights: Keep an eye on what's new and what would make good content.
• Competitive analysis: Understand how your products, pricing, marketing strategy, and distribution stack up to competitors.
• Audience insight: Understand your social media audiences and what they care about for a better targeting strategy.

Step 2: Choose the right tool

Make sure you consider the following factors while selecting the right social listening platform.

• The features should complement your objective.
• The tool should support all the major social media platforms.
• It should have AI capabilities for sentiment analysis.
• It should be easy to navigate and have a customizable dashboard.
• It should integrate seamlessly with your existing systems such as CRM, email marketing tools, and analytics platforms.
• It should be cost-effective while also offering all the necessary features without hidden fees.

Step 3: Create a list of key terms to monitor

A list of relevant keywords and phrases will help you collect the most valuable insights. You can create a list based on the following categories and incorporate them into your social listening tool setting.

• Name of your brand.
• Your brand's social media handles.
• Words and hashtags related to your brand.
• Key topics your audience is interested in.
• Trending industry terms.
• Insights you've gathered from your audience.
• Your product name.

Step 4: Take steps to gather your results

Develop a process for addressing typical social listening insights. Identify which comments can be addressed right away and how, and which ones need to be escalated to higher management.

Immediate actions could include liking or sharing positive comments or replying promptly to complaints.

Other comments might be worth tracking for future analysis, such as emerging conversation patterns, potential brand advocates, or suggestions for new products or services.

Then organize your findings into a spreadsheet. This will help identify trends and patterns, allowing you to transform your findings into useful insights.

Step 5: Leverage the knowledge you've gathered

You can enhance your broader digital strategy by:

• Regularly monitoring brand mentions.
• Gathering insights from your campaigns and social media accounts.
• Observing your brand's sentiment and market presence.

For instance, if you observe that users frequently discuss specific features of your product, it's a good idea to highlight features in your marketing efforts.

Future trends in social listening

As we move into 2025, social media listening is set to undergo a major transformation, revolutionizing the way brands connect with their audiences.

The integration of cutting-edge technologies such as AI, improved analytics, and evolving digital trends will turn social listening into a key strategic asset for businesses. Here's what we can expect:

• As consumer demand for personalization grows, social listening will advance with AI, and big data, allowing brands to analyze the audience in greater detail and understand their unique preferences, behavior, and challenges.
• Social listening will expand beyond text and analyze images, and voices, with platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube, becoming key to capturing consumer sentiment as visual and audio content dominate.
• As users shift to niche platforms and private communities, social listening will expand to spaces like Discord, Slack, and specialized forums, uncovering valuable insights from overlooked conversations about consumer and patient experiences.
• With advancing technology and ethical challenges, social listening will have to emphasize transparency and data privacy to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Therefore, with these shifts towards deeper insights, multi-format analysis, predictive capabilities, and ethical consideration, brands have to leverage cutting-edge tools to make informed decisions and connect more deeply with their audiences.

And Sprinklr is here to lead your way with advanced AI and big data. Tap into both mainstream and niched platforms to better understand your audience, create personalized engagement, and ensure data privacy and compliance.