Social listening
Social listening is the analysis of public social media conversation to understand what people are saying about a brand, topic or market and why.
Last updated September 28, 2026
Definition and how it differs from monitoring
Social listening goes a step beyond counting mentions. Social media monitoring collects posts that name a brand so a team can respond to them. Social listening analyzes the wider conversation, including posts that never name the brand, in order to identify themes, audience segments, emerging issues and the language people use.
The typical process is to build queries for the brand and its topics, collect posts from the platforms the tool can access, classify them by theme and, in some tools, by sentiment, and report trends over time. Which platforms are available depends on each platform's data access rules, and those change.
A caution that applies to any analysis of social data: some of the activity is automated or coordinated. See bot detection before treating volume as audience.
Common misconceptions
Social listening does not represent the whole population. Users of any one platform differ in makeup from the general public, and vocal users differ from silent ones. It is a view of a public conversation, not a poll.
See how these signals show up in your own coverage on the PeakMetrics platform or run the free AI Perceptions check. Back to the glossary.