social listening
Monitoring online conversations to understand what people say about a brand, topic or competitor.
Definition
Social listening tracks mentions, topics and sentiment across social platforms, forums and news. It helps brands spot complaints early, learn how customers describe needs, find trends and measure reaction to campaigns. Tools vary in coverage and accuracy, and sentiment analysis in particular is imperfect, so human review matters. Insights should flow into product, support and content decisions to be worth the effort. Define a short list of topics and competitors to track, since monitoring everything produces noise and no insight.
In a sentence
Social listening revealed customers used a different word for the product.
The team flagged a rising complaint before it spread.
