What is social listening and why you need it
Summary/Overview
Social media is one of the richest sources of insights into your audience, competitors, and industry. Understanding these consumer insights is where social listening comes in. By tracking keywords, brand mentions, and conversations across platforms through social listening, you can uncover what people really think about your brand, products, and market.
More than 61% of businesses now use social listening tools to stay ahead — if you’re not, you’re leaving valuable insights on the table.
Key takeaways
With the right listening strategy, you can:
- Understand what your customers like (and don’t).
- Keep tabs on competitors and market shifts.
- Spot social media and content trends before they peak.
- Catch and resolve potential PR issues quickly.
- Fuel smarter marketing, product, and relationship strategies.
What is social listening?
Social listening is the practice of tracking conversations about your brand, industry, and competitors across social platforms. You can do it manually, but most businesses rely on tools like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, Emplifi, or YouScan to make the process scalable and actionable.
It’s not just about monitoring mentions. It’s about uncovering the bigger picture: How people feel about your brand, what trends are bubbling up, and where opportunities (or risks) are hiding.
Social listening versus social media monitoring
These two often get confused. Social listening takes things a bit further by extracting meaning from the conversations people are having. Here’s the simple breakdown:
- Monitoring = watching for direct mentions of your brand (mainly to catch issues fast).
- Listening = tracking conversations across your industry, competitors, and key topics (to learn, adapt, and grow).
Both are important, but listening takes you from reactive to strategic.
Why social listening is a priority in 2025
Social listening has evolved from a nice-to-have to a business-critical tool. In 2025, social teams are leveraging listening to prove ROI — moving beyond vanity metrics like likes or follows. It’s now ranked as the second-highest social media priority for organizations.
Emerging trends include:
- Smarter AI sentiment analysis, detecting sarcasm, emojis, and nuanced emotions.
- Multimedia listening, analyzing not just text, but images and voice across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Trendjacking with micro-virality, using social listening to understand community sentiment and avoid overplaying viral moments.
The payoff? Faster crisis response, smarter campaign pivots, and the ability to predict consumer trends before they peak. That’s also why it’s now a core piece of social media reputation management.
The benefits of social listening
Social listening is a powerful tool for being able to relate authentically with your audience.
Audience/customer insights
Social listening and social media monitoring can help you to understand what your audience is saying about your products or services and brand as a whole. This kind of insight is invaluable and shines a light on anything that needs correcting or improving. However, it goes beyond doom and gloom — social media listening can also give you insights into what your customers love about your brand, as well as highlight all the wonderful and relevant conversations in which you may wish to get involved.
Business and product insights
Understanding the conversations around your business, products, or services gives you both honest and impactful feedback. Use this information to give feedback to other teams within your business, such as your product or marketing teams, to make improvements and necessary tweaks.
Industry trends
Listening to conversations from your industry can give you a lot of insight into what is and isn’t working — as well as a deeper understanding of your industry as a whole. This enables you to spot upcoming trends and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to your product offerings or your marketing strategy.
Crisis management
Naturally, crisis management is a big part of both social listening and social media monitoring. By listening for mentions of your brand across social media networks, you’ll be able to pick up on any less-than-positive conversations that might be floating around these platforms. This enables you to put your customer support hat on in order to solve any problems, apologize for any wrong-doings, and turn some frowns upside down.
Relationship building
Social listening isn’t about passively listening and learning from what you see. It’s also about looking for the right conversations and opportunities to get involved in by sharing content from your brand or offering valuable industry insight. Monitoring mentions of your brand specifically also helps you find conversations with your customers and continue to nurture these relationships.
Find relevant communities
Monitoring industry-relevant keywords helps you discover whole communities filled with potential customers. You can infiltrate these communities by sharing relevant insights and expertise, as well as related information about your products and services. As with any good social selling strategy, it’s important to build trust and a respectable reputation before you try to sell.
Keep an eye on competitors
Social listening can also be a very effective way to keep an eye on your competition. Any positive interactions can provide inspiration for your marketing or customer support teams, while any negative sentiment can educate your team on necessary changes. Any disgruntled customers complaining about a competitor could also provide an opportunity to swoop in and offer your business as an alternative. In general, it’s always a good idea to be aware of what your competitors are doing. You’ll want to find out if they’re offering anything you’re not, what deals they are running, if they’re launching new products, etc. Social listening helps you to stay in the loop.
Discover social media trends
Looking for content ideas? Social media listening can help you to understand not only industry trends, but also social media trends. Social listening is a great way to gather inspiration for making engaging and creative social media content.
How to get started with social listening
Ready to put it into action? Here’s where to start:
- Choose your keywords carefully: Track your brand name, product names, common misspellings, slogans, hashtags, competitor mentions, and industry buzzwords.
- Know where to listen: Different platforms host different conversations. Cast a wide net, then focus where your audience is most active.
- Refine your search: Narrow by geography, demographics, or specific communities to filter out noise.
- Learn from competitors: Don’t just monitor yourself — their wins and mistakes are valuable lessons.
- Share your learnings: Feed insights into product, sales, customer support, and marketing.
- Watch for sentiment shifts: A sudden change (good or bad) is worth investigating quickly.
- Limit false positives: Refine queries so you’re not bogged down in irrelevant chatter.
Tip: Social listening isn’t just about eavesdropping — it’s about engaging. Use what you hear to connect with people and add value to the conversation.
AI-driven listening and emotion detection
Social listening used to stop at “positive, negative, or neutral.” But conversations online are rarely that simple — there’s a lot of gray area. In 2025, AI-powered tools can pick up on the emotions hiding between the lines.
That means they can tell whether a “great” is actually frustration, or someone is excited about your product launch, or a meme is being used sarcastically. They can even predict whether a small grumble might snowball into a bigger issue.
You’re not just tracking mentions anymore. You’re tuning into the mood behind the message so you can respond with empathy, fix problems faster, and spot opportunities before they disappear.
Listening beyond text: TikTok, YouTube, and more
Not all conversations happen in a tweet or a comment anymore. Customers are talking about your brand in TikToks, YouTube reviews, podcasts, and even niche forums like Reddit or Discord.
Luckily, social listening tools are keeping up. They can:
- Pull insights from TikTok hashtags and captions.
- Scan YouTube transcripts and comments for brand mentions.
- Spot your logo in user-generated photos or videos.
- Even monitor voice-based chats and live streams.
If you’re only listening to text, you’re missing half the story. Visual and audio mentions matter just as much — sometimes more.
From listening to action: fueling growth
Social listening isn’t just about collecting data; it’s about using what you learn to actually grow your business.
Smart brands are plugging social listening straight into their marketing and sales strategies by:
- Turning popular hashtags into ad copy.
- Spotting micro-influencers who already love their brand.
- Using listening data to fine-tune ad targeting.
- Tweaking campaigns in real time when audience sentiment shifts.
It’s less about “we heard you” and more about “we heard you, and here’s what we did about it.” That’s where listening turns into real results.
Social listening with ethics in mind
With all these powerful tools, it’s tempting to track everything and everyone. But here’s the catch: just because you can listen, doesn’t mean you should.
In 2025, privacy laws (like GDPR and CCPA) are stricter than ever. Customers also expect brands to respect their space. That means:
- Be upfront about how you use social listening data.
- Don’t cross the line into feeling creepy or invasive.
- Double-check AI outputs for cultural context — slang and sarcasm can throw off algorithms.
- Stay compliant if you’re listening across multiple markets.
Handled the right way, social listening builds trust instead of breaking it. And trust, as we know, is the foundation of any long-term customer relationship.
Social listening isn’t just about mentions, it’s about understanding the bigger picture — your customers, your competitors, and your market. Start small, refine as you go, and then level up with advanced tools and strategies.
Done right, it’s one of the fastest ways to protect your brand, spark growth, and build real connections in 2025. Start your social listening strategy today with Adobe Express.