Imagine you have recently launched a fitness apparel brand you hope to grow. There’s a lot of competition, and you must find a way to stand out and appeal to your target audience. As a small business, you may not immediately have the time or resources to conduct a traditional market analysis. 

To better understand your market, you decide to engage in social listening. Social listening is the process of analyzing online conversations about your brand, your competitors, and the industry at large to gain insight into your audience.¹ AI and natural language processing tools can aid in collecting and analyzing data by scanning social media platforms, forums, blogs, and news sites for mentions of specific keywords, hashtags, or brand names. This method provides insights into target audiences, customer sentiments, and competitors, allowing you to refine your marketing messages, improve products based on real-time feedback, and support crisis management in case a negative sentiment emerges. One of the most popular social listening platforms is Hootsuite, which tracks mentions, analyzes customer sentiment and highlights trending topics in a specific space. 

To understand how to market your fitness apparel and grow your business, you review your brand anytime it is mentioned or tagged on social media and set up alerts to see any posts that hashtag #fitnessfashion and #activewear. This allows you to monitor trending content for fitness apparel, know the kind of products people like, and understand people’s sentiments toward your brand.²

Over time, you notice that many people are complaining about the lack of eco-friendly options in fitness apparel. Luckily, you already use sustainable materials for your clothing and decided to emphasize it in your marketing campaign. By social listening, you have gained a better understanding of customer needs and can adapt your strategies accordingly to position your brand as a leader in sustainability in the fitness apparel market. 
In the fast-paced digital age, where we spend a great deal of our time online and use it as a means to express ourselves, social listening is a key tool for businesses. Social listening allows businesses to gather industry and competitor data and track industry trends to identify potential risks, inform product positioning, and discover influencers and brands to collaborate with.³

Customer Insights: The process of analyzing and understanding data related to customer demographics, behavior and feedback to gain a deep understanding of customers.⁵ Social listening provides valuable customer insights. 

Competitive Intelligence: The gathering and analyzing data related to competitors and the market at large to inform strategic business decisions. Social listening provides critical competitive intelligence by tracking online conversations on competitors and industry-related topics.

Social Media Monitoring: Tracking specific mentions, keywords, and engagement metrics on social media platforms. This is the data collection step, which is considered social listening when analyzed and interpreted.² 

Product Positioning: The strategic process of defining how a product is perceived in the minds of target consumers through a unique value proposition. Social listening provides insights into consumer desires and perceptions, allowing businesses to adapt their product positioning. 

Crisis Management: An organization’s strategy to respond to unexpected external events or trends that could harm the organization.⁶ Social listening allows organizations to identify potential threats through real-time analysis of industry-related subjects online and customer sentiment towards the brand.³ 

Influencer Identification: The process of finding influencers who are relevant to your brand and popular with your target audience.⁷ Social listening helps you to identify the right influencers to collaborate with to amplify your product.

When the internet came around in 1983, it opened a new frontier for businesses. Companies and business owners now could reach their customers through the World Wide Web, revolutionizing marketing and creating the field of e-commerce. 

In 1997, the first social media network, Six Degrees, was created. Although short-lived, it was the first of its kind and laid the foundation for future networks such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.⁸ As social media evolved and gained popularity in the early 2000s,  it became clear that there were new business opportunities. These sites were not just platforms through which people connected to one another; they were data goldmines. 

While customer behavior and sentiment previously had to be monitored through surveys, feedback, and market research, social media provided a new platform for businesses to learn about their customers. Businesses could gain into customer preferences, perceptions, and behavior by tracking conversations online. Although it is unclear where the term social listening first came from, it gained traction with the rise of social media. At first, social listening referred to monitoring social media channels to understand what people were saying about them in relation to a specific campaign. After running a campaign, a business would evaluate data gathered through social listening to assess how it resonated with customers and inform future adaptations.⁹ 

As technological tools advanced, social listening expanded beyond intel on one’s own business or specific campaign, monitoring not only what customers were saying about a business itself in real-time but their competitors and the industry at large.⁹ Social media tools like hashtags, created in 2007,¹⁰ allowed businesses to create alerts for conversations related to their industry to keep up to date with trends. 

In 2008, Brian Solis, a widely-recognized digital analyst, and Jesse Thomas, a prominent figure in social media marketing and data visualization, co-wrote The Conversation Prism, which helped to popularize social listening. The Conversation Prism was a model to help businesses visualize conversations on the web and provided strategies for social listening.¹¹ 

Today, almost everyone uses social media. In the U.S., 72% of adults use at least one social platform.⁸ This has contributed to the age of big data, providing businesses with endless amounts of information about their customers. Artificial intelligence has also revolutionized social listening, with tools that can quickly analyze hundreds of data points surrounding customer sentiment, emotions, and contexts, moving social listening from the monitoring of mentions to in-depth analysis of conversations.¹² AI tools are able to go beyond simple monitoring, using machine learning to detect patterns, emotions, and trends across conversations. As a result, businesses now have the power to gain actionable insights in real-time, allowing them to proactively engage with customers, shape strategies, and stay ahead of market trends. 

Social listening allows companies to identify unmet needs, refine product strategies, and anticipate crises before they escalate. When researching a brand, people often look to social media first, so businesses must adapt their approach in real time. In an era where digital presence and perception define success, social listening must be a core strategy. 

Brian Solis

A prominent figure in digital analysis and anthropology and co-author of The Conversation Prism. The Conversation Prism provided a map of the social media ecosystem, offering businesses a framework and strategies for leveraging social listening.¹¹ Solis is a globally recognized public speaker, sharing his expertise on the effects of emerging technology on business and society.¹³ 

Jesse Thomas

CEO and founder of JESS3, a creative agency specializing in data visualization and co-author of The Conversation Prism. Using his graphic design expertise, Thomas helped provide a visual map of social media networks to guide businesses to where conversations happen online and where social listening efforts should be guided.¹⁴

Social listening has far-reaching impacts that can transform how businesses interact with their audience and the market. By leveraging real-time insights, companies can refine their strategies, anticipate customer needs, and uncover new opportunities for growth and collaboration.

Better Understanding of Audience

Social listening allows businesses to better understand their customers and their needs. The data-driven approach allows companies to respond to existing pain points, ensuring their product will resonate with the target audience. Although other forms of customer feedback, like surveys or reviews, can also support audience understanding, people tend to be more honest when they aren’t aware that their comments are being analyzed. Psychological biases like the response bias cause us to tweak our responses in self-response surveys to be more socially desirable, so a company might think their product is ticking all the boxes when, in fact, there are elements customers aren’t happy with but are too afraid to say so.

Social listening provides valuable insight into existing customers and potential new customers who are discussing gaps within your industry or what they like about some of your competitors. If you run a brewery, you may see conversations online about people looking for alcohol-free options, and this could be the catalyst for a new offering that brings in a new customer base.² 

Tracks Real-Time Sentiment

Thanks to technological advancements and AI, companies can gather and analyze vast amounts of data rapidly. Instead of having to wait to see quarterly numbers fluctuate, through social listening, a company will quickly learn if customers’ perspectives change. Instead of waiting for disaster to strike and being reactive in their decisions, businesses can be proactive and get ahead of the change. This makes social listening a great tool for crisis management, as businesses gain an early warning sign if people’s perceptions or desires change.²

For example, if a coffee shop saw the viral 2015 video of a turtle with a plastic straw lodged in its nostril and reviewed the response it was getting, it could have guessed that people would start to boycott places that used straws and other single-use plastics. They could have quickly shifted to paper straws to avoid customers’ being against their brand.
Additionally, emerging AI technologies like natural language processing have moved social listening beyond monitoring keywords. AI models are starting to push to interpret what’s behind the words—the tone, emotion, and context of conversations, so businesses not only know what their customers are saying about them, but how they feel about them too. As these models continue to develop, they will likely get even better at identifying things like sarcasm and slang to gain a deep understanding of the target audience. These advancements make sentiment analysis more accurate and actionable, helping businesses respond to customer concerns more precisely.

Reveals Opportunities for Collaboration

Partnering with influencers or brands with similar values can help a business gain exposure to a broader customer base. In a world with so many options, people are looking for recommendations from people they relate to and trust, making it difficult for emerging businesses to penetrate the market. 

Social listening provides insight into the important figures within your industry and who your target audience follows and listens to. This reveals new collaboration opportunities to spread the word about your business and product. Social listening can show you who already supports your brand, making it easy to form connections based on similar values that will resonate with your audience.² 

Social listening, while powerful, comes with its fair share of challenges and debates. From navigating an overwhelming volume of data to ensuring ethical practices, businesses must carefully address these controversies to harness the full potential of this tool.

Sifting Through The Noise

The omnipresence of social media means that vast amounts of data points need to be gathered and analyzed. While this can reveal in-depth information about a target audience, it also means there’s a lot of irrelevant data out there. 

Let’s say Apple is alerted whenever someone uses the hashtag #apple. While some people will use this when talking about their phone, laptop, or other Apple products, others will likely use it when trying to promote their new apple pie recipe! That could skew the results if the technology being used is not sophisticated enough to sift through the noise and determine which posts and conversations are relevant to the brand.¹⁵ 

Misinterpretation of Data

Even if the tool is able to sift through the noise only to gather relevant hits accurately, it can be difficult to accurately interpret sentiment without a complete picture of context or tone. Some existing social media monitoring tools only report when and how often keywords or a brand is mentioned without a deeper analysis of whether it is a positive or negative conversation.15 Even more sophisticated AI tools might not yet be able to accurately track sentiment, as it can be challenging to pick up tone from social media posts.

For example, if someone posted a product with the caption, “I just LOVE this bag. It’s so practical, " they could love the product or perhaps using sarcasm.  

Additionally, as a business needs to decide which keywords to track, there can be bias in social listening setup. The value of social listening is dependent on the business’s ability to select the right keywords, being broad enough to understand the market at large but specific enough to avoid analyzing irrelevant data.¹⁶

The difficulty of ensuring data is accurately analyzed through social listening could lead to businesses making decisions based on incomplete or misunderstood data.

Ethical Concerns

Thinking about companies “listening” to you probably feels weird and uncomfortable. Social listening requires companies to monitor and analyze conversations on social media platforms. Although this is limited to individuals with public profiles, many people are unlikely to expect their Instagram stories to be used for market research purposes.¹⁷ Although social media platforms ask for our consent when we sign up, few people consider the broader implications… or even read before they agree to those terms. 

After data is collected, there can also be issues with personal information. Businesses must ensure security measures to protect the personal information collected and remove any personally identifiable information.¹⁷ However, anonymizing the data would be counterintuitive if a company is using social listening to identify influencers with whom to partner. 

Growing ethical and privacy concerns led to the World Health Organization developing a moral framework for social listening to ensure that the data collected through social listening is being responsibly used.¹⁸ There are also regulations like the GDPR, a European union-wide regulation that controls how personal data can be handled. They emphasize the need to gain explicit consent for collecting data, limit tracking by requiring explicit opt-in for unnecessary cookies and email marketing, and will issue fines when companies are not following these guidelines.¹⁹

Tylenol Marketing

Tylenol was first marketed to treat pain and fever in 1893.²⁰ Over 130 years later, it stands as the world's largest-selling brand among all health and beauty products.²¹ It is a household name because it has constantly evolved and innovated as people’s needs and sentiments have evolved.

For example, in 2015, Tylenol found out through social listening that individuals who participated in hobbies that required intense, sustained focus, such as knitting, were experiencing migraines. Knitters would post about how their hobby would cause eye strain and migraines. Tylenol used this valuable insight to target its digital marketing. They began to create content showing people taking Tylenol to alleviate symptoms experienced during knitting and other sustained-focus hobbies.²² Due to their social listening and new marketing strategy, Tylenol experienced an increase in website traffic.²³

You’re Not Just Listening to Spotify—Spotify is Listening Too

Spotify is currently leading the pack in the audio streaming market with over 30% of the market share.²⁴ One of the reasons that Spotify has been so successful is because the company uses social listening to understand what matters to their customers, and they adapt their campaigns and products accordingly.

For example, as people have become more interested in astrology, Spotify took advantage of the trend to make an Instagram post asking people to comment on their sign so they could provide a song to match. They knew their customers were interested in astrology and likely to engage with the post. 

Back in 2016, through social listening, Spotify knew that the general sentiment about the year was negative, with many disruptions and disasters.²⁵ In response, Spotify created a “Thanks 2016, It’s Been Weird” to match customers’ feelings. One example was a post that stated, “Dear 3,749 people who streamed “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” the day of the Brexit vote, hang in there.” ²⁶

Through social listening, Spotify maintains a pulse on public opinion, which allows it to appeal to its customers, acquire new customers, and maintain the loyalty of existing ones.

The “Social Dilemma” Dilemma

After The Social Dilemma movie came out, people became more aware of the dangerous impacts of social media networks, and online conversations quickly shifted. People were quicker to identify when a company was manipulating their decisions. Any company social listening knew they would have to adapt. In this article, Preeti Kotamarthi advises businesses to make sure they are nudging their consumers ethically and adapting their designs to appeal to the new online sentiment. 

Social Media and Moral Outrage

For social listening to be effective, it’s helpful to know when moral outrage is spreading and how it spreads so businesses can act quickly and avoid further negative comments. In this article, Paridhi Kothari explores how moral outrage spreads through the MAD model (exploring motivations, attention, and design). Kothari shows how algorithms favour content that creates an emotional response, leading to reinforced group identities and polarization.

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