You may have heard the phrase social listening before, but what does it actually mean? At its core, it is the process of monitoring online conversations to understand what people are saying about your brand, products, services, and anything that may be relevant to your business. Wisely used, it will be a game changer in your marketing strategy.
According to the 2025 State of Social Listening report by Social Media Today:
- 89.4% of surveyed companies use listening to analyze social data, making it the number one methodology for this purpose.
- Nearly 88% of agencies and over 68% of in-house brands perceive listening and social data as important for achieving their business objectives.
- The primary social listening methods brands use are trend & mentions volume analysis, sentiment analysis, keyword & hashtag tracking, topic analysis, and AI-powered emotion classification.
Sounds interesting?
In this post, we’ll discuss everything you need to know.
So read on to learn more!
What is social listening? Definition
Social listening is monitoring online conversations to understand what people say about a brand, product, industry, or topic in real time. It goes beyond counting mentions because it focuses on interpreting context, sentiment, and trends across various digital platforms.
In simple words: Social listening = What are people saying? + Why are they saying it? + What should we do about it?
Why do you need it? It will help you discover:
- Brand reputation & perception
- Competitor reputation & perception
- Customer sentiment & emotions
- Real-time feedback
- Emerging trends & market opportunities
- Target audience insights & demographics
- Campaign effectiveness
- PR crisis quickly
- Backlink opportunities
To listen to conversations, you need a tool that monitors the entire web in real time, including social media, news, blogs, forums, and reviews.
Such a tool should track both tagged and untagged mentions and offer advanced analytics.
Key elements of social listening in 2025:
- Real-time monitoring of conversations across multiple platforms and channels
- Sentiment analysis that automatically detects whether mentions are positive, neutral, or negative, and uses natural language processing (NLP) for emotion detection