Definition: Social listening is tracking public online conversations about your brand, competitors, products and industry, then analysing them to guide content, product and customer decisions.
Also called: social media listening, brand monitoring
Updated October 11, 2026
Monitoring is reactive: finding mentions and replying to them, one by one. Listening looks at the conversation as a whole: what people complain about, which topics are rising, how sentiment shifts after a launch. Most teams do both, and monitoring often feeds listening.
Listening only pays off when someone acts on it. Turn recurring questions into posts and help articles, pass product complaints to the product team, and add rising topics to the content calendar. Review the findings on a fixed rhythm, for example monthly.
A meal-kit brand notices a steady stream of posts asking whether its recipes work for one person. It publishes a carousel of single-serving adaptations, which becomes one of its most saved posts of the quarter.
Share of voice is the percentage of all mentions, conversations or ad visibility in a market that belongs to your brand, compared with the competitors you track.
Community management is the work of building and looking after a brand’s audience on social media by replying to comments and messages, moderating conversations and starting discussions, so followers feel heard and keep coming back.
Content pillars are the small set of recurring themes, usually three to five, that a brand’s social media content is built around, each tied to what the audience cares about and what the business wants to be known for.
A social media audit is a structured review of all of a brand’s social accounts, covering profiles, content and results, to find what is working, what is not and what to change.
Write once, tailor each version yourself or with optional AI, and schedule to 6 networks from one calendar.