A strong marketing strategy should always be outcome-driven. Most organizations embark on a campaign knowing exactly how they want people to feel and what they’d like them to do. But sometimes there’s value in changing the order of things. That’s what social listening challenges us to do.
Social listening is the practice of proactively monitoring social media channels and online conversations for mentions of your brand, your competitors’ brands, and relevant keywords. According to a survey from Social Media Today, about 60% of businesses now have a social listening system in place and are monitoring for keyword mentions.
We’ve spoken about audience definition for B2B organizations and the importance of knowing not just who your audience is but also how they like to consume content. There are many ways to gather these insights, including through website analytics and survey data, but social listening has become a rising trend in both content and brand marketing strategies in 2025.
One of the most common questions I see about the trend is, “What’s the difference between social listening and social media analytics?” While both can present valuable insights into your audience or target audience, social listening is less about numbers and more about building your strategy through understanding perceptions, sentiment, and opinions. The qualitative nature of social listening is something marketers often struggle with. Our Content Compass research found that 60% of respondents said they “sometimes” or “only rarely” use data to determine audience preferences, and 31% “rarely” or “never” conduct qualitative research to gain insight into audience preferences.
While your social media analytics may suggest specific strategy adjustments based on the data, you may not know what to expect from social listening. That said, there’s still a right way to conduct social listening to ensure that it’s strategic and never passive. For example, you should always have a list of topics or keywords you want to follow, and you should determine what you want to better understand, such as audience reception to a new branding decision or audience opinion on a competitor’s product. Being intentional in what you want to learn allows you to better sift through mentions, tags, comments, reviews, and social media conversations, including those beyond your own page. It’s going from letting the numbers tell a story to letting people tell a story.
For B2B companies, this means new opportunities to strengthen your brand reputation and industry authority; an opportunity to curate a thought leadership pipeline that reflects topics your audience prefers; and new opportunities to identify market gaps and trends, get ahead of potential crises, identify strategic collaboration opportunities, and keep a pulse on competitor activity.
There are many tools that can aggregate the insights from your social media and online channels and follow specific keywords. But if budget is a factor, there are free features within social media platforms and actions you can take to at least begin to incorporate social listening into your strategy. On most platforms, such as LinkedIn, you can follow specific hashtags and receive notifications about trending posts that include them. Create a weekly checklist of channels, spaces within those channels (such as pages or groups), and online forums you want to monitor and search with your keywords or topics. Again, this is the manual route, but if you don’t yet have the budget to invest in a tool, these actions can at least steer you in the right direction to better understand your current audience and target audience.
As marketers, we spend much of our time focusing on what we’re putting out into the world. While your typical social media monitoring may involve quick responses and reactions, with social listening, you’ll gather findings over time and adjust your strategy for the long term. Let this be your reminder to sometimes just sit back and listen.
