Social listening
Social listening is tracking what is said about an organisation, a brand or a subject on social channels, including when you are not tagged. It is about the pattern across those posts, not about replying to one of them.
Published
Who it is for
For whoever needs to know what is circulating about the organisation before it surfaces somewhere else. In larger organisations that is the communications team, in smaller ones the owner.
It matters at two moments. When something goes wrong and the first posts are already circulating before the first question arrives. And when you want to know why a campaign is or is not landing, because that rarely shows in the platform's own figures.
Why you would do it
Most posts about an organisation are not addressed to that organisation. People write about you, not to you. Watch only your own channel and you miss the conversation.
That gap is wide. A complaint aimed at you arrives as a message; a complaint about you stays where it is and gets read by everyone except you.
The second argument is that social channels are often where something surfaces first. A subject starts in a reply, grows in a thread, and only then reaches a journalist. Watching early gives you the choice to respond before it is an article.
Which channels we track and what we pull
Eight platforms, and a fixed set of fields per post: the platform, the link, the author, the text, the language, the date and the engagement figures, meaning likes, comments, shares and views. Where a platform does not supply one of those, it stays empty rather than becoming zero, because those are two different things.
Every post then goes through two judgements: is this about you, and what is the tone. The first is harder here than elsewhere, because people misspell names, abbreviate them and use nicknames.
Posts from your own accounts are kept apart. Without that distinction your own campaign counts as attention you received.
The engagement figures are shown for information. They do not weigh into the sentiment figure, because reach is counted differently on every platform and an estimate inside a formula makes the end figure impossible to follow.
- Two weeks now waiting for a reply from @acmeX · 14:02 · 41 replies0.18
- Video: honest test of the new Acme rangeTikTok · yesterday · 12,400 views0.62
- Acme launches new service for small businessLinkedIn · own channel · 2 days0.81
- TikTok
- YouTube
- X
- Bluesky
- Snapchat
What the research shows
Responding to what is not addressed to you has a name in the literature: proactive webcare. Van Noort and Willemsen studied its effects in the Journal of Interactive Marketing. Their finding is more nuanced than the usual advice to reply to everything.
Proactive responding works in places the consumer owns, such as a forum or a comment thread: there it stands out when a brand shows up unasked. On a brand's own channel, reacting works better. What carries the effect is not speed but a human tone.
The practical meaning: first know the post exists, then ask whether replying is wise.
Social listening or social media monitoring
These two words get used interchangeably and the distinction is useful.
In software they merge, because both start with the same step: pull every mention and judge whether it is about you. The distinction is in what you do next, and in whether the tool shows a timeline or only an inbox.
| The question it answers | What you see | When you use it | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monitoring | What is happening now? | Individual posts: who says what, when, and with what reach | Today, at the post itself |
| Listening | What is changing? | The pattern across all posts: recurring subjects, shifting tone | In the quarterly review |
Image and video count
A large share of what happens on social channels is not text. A complaint inside a video, a screenshot with a three-word caption, a story that disappears after a day: tooling that only reads text sees none of it.
We have image and video judged on what is shown and said in them. For a video that means the spoken words, for an image what is depicted. The caption is then no longer the only thing the judgement rests on.
The difference shows most clearly in short video, where the caption is often neutral and the content is not.
What Reptor does here
Social mentions sit in the same system as news, reviews and the answers of assistants. So you see not only what is happening on one platform, but whether the same subject is surfacing elsewhere.
Beside your own picture sits that of the parties you compare yourself with, over the same period and with the same weighting. That is what makes a rise or fall meaningful.
What the dashboard shows per post: the platform, the tone, whether it is about you, and whether it came from your own channel. Posts with an outspokenly negative tone trigger an alert by email, Slack or WhatsApp.
About the figures
How we determine the tone of a post, and how individual judgements add up to a period figure, is set out in the measurement protocol. It also explains why we do not weight by reach.
How we calculateSources
The research this page refers to, with its scope attached. A figure from a US consumer survey is not the same as a figure about a business market, and that belongs on the page.
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What Reptor offers here
Questions about the offering on this subject: what you get, what it costs, and where we stop.
Which platforms do you track?
The social channels where organisations get written about, with the platforms that apply to your sector set per client. Which those are is established during setup, because it varies: a consumer brand has a different list from a law firm.
Do I get an alert for a negative post?
Yes, for an outspokenly negative tone, by email, Slack or WhatsApp. You set the threshold and the recipients yourself.
Can I reply to posts from within Reptor?
No. We signal and weigh; the reply is written in the channel itself or in your own management tool. Replying takes tone and knowledge of the case, which is different work from measuring.
Do you track private accounts?
No. We track public mentions of your organisation and of the people who publicly represent it. No profiles of private individuals, no closed groups.
Frequently asked questions
What is SOCMINT?
Social media intelligence, tracking social channels for investigative purposes, used in policing and security work. We do not cross that line: we track public mentions of organisations and their public representatives, not profiles of private individuals.
Do videos and images count?
Yes. Image and video are judged on what is shown and said in them, not only on the caption. In short video that difference is large, because the caption is often neutral and the content is not.