Social listening

Social listening is monitoring public conversations for mentions of a brand, its competitors or its topics, beyond the notifications platforms send. It catches the discussions that never tag you.

The distinction that matters is with social monitoring: monitoring is seeing what arrives at your door (comments on your posts, messages, tags), listening is going out to find what is said elsewhere, including the untagged mentions, misspellings and competitor threads.

Most people who buy listening use it for three things: catching complaints early enough to answer before they harden, watching a competitor's launches land, and finding recurring questions worth turning into content.

It is genuinely costly to run, which is why it is a paid add-on in most tools, including ours. Fresh searches across platforms consume third-party data services; anyone offering unlimited listening for free is aggregating stale data.