Social media listening helps brands stay ahead. Instead of just watching for tags or comments, it lets you track public conversations about your brand, competitors, or industry — even if you're not directly mentioned. It’s the easiest way to understand what people are saying, what’s trending, and how your audience feels.
🔍 What is Social Media Listening?
Social media listening involves tracking, collecting, and analyzing conversations happening across social platforms — not just those directed at your brand, but those related to your industry, competitors, hashtags, or specific topics of interest.
It goes a step beyond simply monitoring mentions or comments. Social listening helps brands:
Discover what people really think
Understand industry trends as they emerge
Identify customer pain points before they become crises
Find opportunities for engagement, product development, or partnerships
💬 Why do you need Social Listening
1. Real-Time Brand Reputation Management
Your brand might be mentioned hundreds (or thousands) of times a day. Social listening allows you to catch negative conversations early and take proactive steps, turning potential backlash into positive moments.
2. Uncover Unfiltered Customer Feedback
People are more candid on social media than they are in surveys. Listening tools allow you to gather raw, unsolicited insights about your brand and products, giving you a more honest picture of how you’re perceived.
3. Competitor and Industry Intelligence
Listening doesn’t stop at your own mentions. You can monitor competitors to understand what’s working for them (or not), identify industry trends, and see how your performance stacks up.
4. Improved Customer Service
Customers often turn to social media for support. A listening strategy helps you catch service issues, respond faster, and show you’re actively engaged with your community — even when they’re not tagging you directly.
5. Smarter Content and Campaigns
By tracking the language and topics your audience is already engaging with, you can create more relevant content. Social listening helps refine your messaging and ensure your campaigns land with impact.
🚀 Start Listening with EmbedSocial
EmbedSocial makes social listening easy — collect, manage, and act on public posts from top social platforms.
Here’s how it works:
Collect public content from Instagram, Facebook, X, and YouTube — using hashtags, mentions, or specific accounts. Here’s how you can get started in just a few steps:
Create your account: Sign up for EmbedSocial and log in.
Add your sources: Click on ‘Sources’ and then select ‘Add new source’:
Choose your platforms: Select Instagram, X, Facebook, or YouTube → ‘Hashtags’ or ‘Mentions’:
Enter the hashtags or mentions: Add the specific hashtags you want to monitor, like your brand name or campaign-specific hashtags.
Note: Please note that before adding a specific source, for example Instagram hashtag, you will need to connect a Facebook account that manages a Facebook page connected with a Business Instagram account.
Monitor and manage your content - Once you’ve added your sources (hashtags or mentions from Instagram, Facebook, X, or YouTube), it’s time to review the content being collected.
Head over to the ‘Monitor’ tab from the left-hand menu in your EmbedSocial dashboard:
Here’s what you can do:
Apply filters to find the desired content:
Use filters to quickly find the content that matters most to your brand. You can filter posts by:Date range
Social media platform
Content type (photo, video, text)
Specific usernames or accounts
Organize and customize your UGC (User-Generated Content):
Make your content work for you:Tag posts for easy categorization (e.g., “positive feedback”, “needs follow-up”, “campaign X”).
Moderate posts by enabling, disabling, or deleting irrelevant or unwanted content.
Edit the content before reposting it:
We also have bulk options to tag, activate, disable, or delete posts. You just need to select the desired posts, and the bulk option will appear:
Track results with built-in analytics to measure engagement and visibility.
Once you've collected and organized your content, it’s time to turn insights into action.
Here’s how:
Access the ‘Analytics’ section: Use the left-hand menu to navigate to ‘Analytics’, where you’ll see a breakdown of your collected data:
Refine your dataset: Apply filters by time period, location, media type, or social media account so you focus only on the content that matters most.
Download and review: Export the filtered data for deeper analysis or reporting — ideal for teams needing to track sentiment, campaign reach, or audience engagement over time.
Spot trends and patterns: Identify which hashtags are performing well, where your brand is being talked about, and how people feel about your products or services:
This step helps you transform raw user-generated content into meaningful insights that support smarter decisions and better campaigns.
Social media listening with EmbedSocial video tutorial
If you have any questions, click the bottom right chat icon to talk with our customer success team or send us an email at support@embedsocial.com
We're here for you 🙏