How to Use Social Listening for Audience Insights: 6 Examples
Social listening has become an invaluable tool for businesses seeking to gain deeper audience insights. This article explores six key strategies to harness the power of social listening, from tracking conversations on emerging platforms to combining social data with proprietary information. Drawing on insights from industry experts, these tactics will help organizations adapt their strategies in real-time and stay ahead of evolving trends.
- Track Conversations on Emerging Platforms
- Monitor Industry Trends Beyond Brand Mentions
- Leverage Social Listening for Comment Marketing
- Adapt Strategy Based on Real-Time Feedback
- Identify Author Challenges to Improve Services
- Combine Social Listening with Proprietary Data
Track Conversations on Emerging Platforms
Lately, we've been using our own platform to track mentions and keywords on Threads. It helps us surface real conversations from people actively looking for tools to solve problems around UGC, feedback aggregation, and social proof.
This gives us direct insight into how users describe their pain points, what language they use when searching for solutions, and how competitors position themselves. For example, many Threads users struggled to merge Google and Trustpilot reviews. That insight led us to build a unified widget with cross-platform reviews and AI summaries.
Social listening has become a core part of shaping product decisions, refining messaging, and uncovering new market opportunities.
Monitor Industry Trends Beyond Brand Mentions
My approach to social listening is based on curiosity and strategy. I don't just monitor mentions of my brand—I track keywords, competitor names, hashtags, and broader industry topics. This approach helps me understand what people are saying to or about my brand and what they're discussing in the surrounding space. I use tools like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, or even simple Twitter/X and Reddit searches to identify trends, sentiment, and unmet needs.
I look for patterns: Are people asking the same questions? Are there recurring complaints or praise? Are conversations moving to new platforms or tones? These clues inform content strategy, product improvements, and customer support initiatives.
One example where social listening paid off was during a product launch. We saw a spike in negative sentiment about a packaging change—customers found it confusing but hadn't mentioned it to us directly. Because we caught it early through Reddit and TikTok chatter, we updated our FAQs, briefed customer service, and created an Instagram Story to clarify the change. As a result, engagement went up, and negative mentions dropped.
For me, social listening isn't just reactive—it's proactive insight gathering. It keeps me connected to the real people behind the data and allows for better, faster decisions.
Leverage Social Listening for Comment Marketing
For starters, the social listening tool I created, Advite, reads Twitter (in addition to Reddit, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and some Facebook Groups), and notified me about your query! I'd say that I focus less on insights/audience and more on using social monitoring to drive a comment-marketing strategy. Comment marketing is where you engage with people who are posting content about your brand's area of focus. It's 10 times easier than creating content, with the benefit of being attached to hundreds of content pieces - any of which can go viral, where you'll reap secondary benefits. For example, on a previous e-commerce brand I used to manage (SPOTMYUV), a few Reddit comments earned us 10,000 sales in 24 hours, a spot on The View & Live with Kelly and Ryan, which we leveraged to get CVS / Walmart distribution.
Adapt Strategy Based on Real-Time Feedback
My approach to social listening involves using tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch to monitor conversations around our brand, competitors, and industry trends. I focus on tracking key topics, hashtags, and customer sentiment to understand what resonates with our audience. By engaging with both positive and negative comments, I can identify emerging concerns or opportunities.
For example, when we noticed a spike in conversations about sustainability in our industry, social listening helped us identify that customers were increasingly concerned with eco-friendly practices. We took this insight and launched a campaign highlighting our sustainable efforts, which resonated strongly with our audience. It not only boosted engagement but also helped position our brand as a leader in sustainability. Social listening provides valuable real-time feedback that allows us to adapt our messaging and strategy, staying ahead of the curve and ensuring we meet our audience's evolving needs.
Identify Author Challenges to Improve Services
My approach to social listening is straightforward yet purposeful: I keep an ear to the ground on what people are saying about writing, publishing, and storytelling—not just about Estorytellers, but the entire industry. I track important hashtags, participate in relevant forums, and monitor comments from our competitors. I pay special attention to the challenges authors face, such as the struggle with book marketing or the feeling of being adrift after finishing their manuscript.
There was a time when I observed a group of aspiring authors sharing how overwhelmed they felt after completing their manuscripts. That observation inspired us to create a new post-writing support package, which turned out to be one of our most sought-after services.
Social listening goes beyond just keeping tabs; it's about identifying trends and then offering real value. It helps us stay ahead of the game, reveals what truly resonates with our audience, and enables us to connect with them in a meaningful way.
Combine Social Listening with Proprietary Data
Social listening is more than just monitoring mentions—it's about extracting meaningful patterns from the digital conversations happening across our industry. At Fulfill.com, we've developed what I call "network intelligence"—a multifaceted approach to gathering insights that combines traditional social listening with our unique position at the intersection of thousands of eCommerce businesses and 3PL providers.
We track conversations across platforms where our target audience congregates—Reddit threads where DTC brands discuss fulfillment challenges, LinkedIn where supply chain professionals share pain points, and Twitter where real-time disruption information often breaks first. This digital eavesdropping is then enhanced by our proprietary data on matching patterns and success factors.
One particularly valuable insight emerged during the early pandemic when we noticed an emerging conversation pattern across social channels about brands struggling with single-region fulfillment strategies. While major news outlets focused on port congestion, our social listening revealed that mid-sized eCommerce brands were actively seeking distributed fulfillment solutions to mitigate regional lockdown risks.
We quickly developed resources specifically addressing this need and connected with several technology partners to enhance regional fulfillment capabilities. The result? We helped dozens of brands transition to multi-node strategies before this became standard industry practice.
Social listening also extends to our online communities where we can directly engage with brands. The unfiltered feedback there has shaped several of our matching algorithms—we've adjusted weighting for factors like seasonal capacity planning based on consistent pain points mentioned in these conversations.
In this industry, the brands who succeed aren't just reacting to what happened yesterday—they're positioning themselves based on the subtle signals indicating where fulfillment is heading tomorrow. Social listening provides those critical early indicators.
