Beyond Social Media Metrics: Using Social Listening to Make Better Marketing Decisions

Knowing a post performed well is useful. Knowing why it performed well can help shape the next one.

Maybe one social post significantly outperformed the rest. Maybe the same customer question keeps appearing in your comments. Or maybe a competitor is getting attention around a topic your brand never thought to address.

That is where social listening comes in.

According to Sprout Social, 55% of social media users globally believe brands are listening to their audiences but are not always turning those insights into action.

Social listening helps brands look beyond individual metrics and conversations to better understand what their audience is saying, how they are responding, and what those patterns could mean for future marketing decisions.

What is Social Listening?

Metricool defines social listening as the practice of monitoring and analyzing conversations around a brand, industry, topic, or competitors. Rather than simply counting mentions, social listening looks at the context and sentiment behind those conversations to uncover useful insights.

It can help answer questions like:

• What topics are our audience consistently interested in?
• What questions or concerns keep coming up?
• What are competitors talking about?
• Which types of content are getting the most attention?
• Are there trends we should be paying attention to?

The value comes from understanding what the data is telling you and using those insights to guide future decisions.

Social Listening vs. Social Monitoring

Social listening and social monitoring are closely related, but they serve different purposes. Social monitoring focuses on what is happening in the moment. This can include responding to comments, direct messages, mentions, customer questions, and feedback. Social listening takes a broader view. It looks for patterns across those conversations, along with content performance, competitor activity, and audience behavior.

For example, responding to a customer question in the comments is social monitoring. Noticing that several customers are asking the same question and deciding to create a post, video, or website resource about it is where social listening starts to influence strategy.

Both social monitoring and social listening are important, the real impact comes from what you do with the information.

What Can Social Listening Tell You?

Social listening can support several areas of a social media strategy, from content planning to competitor research.

What Your Audience Cares About

Comments and messages can reveal what your audience wants to know more about.

If the same question keeps appearing, that may be a sign that the topic deserves more attention. A recurring question could become a FAQ post, short-form video, blog topic, email, or even an update to your website.

The same applies to feedback. Looking at common questions, concerns, and reactions can help brands better understand what matters to their audience.

What Content is Worth Creating

Your own content performance can provide another source of listening data. If educational posts consistently earn more saves or shares, that may be a sign your audience values useful, reference-style content. If a certain product, service, or topic repeatedly generates comments, there may be an opportunity to explore it further.

User-generated content (UGC) can also provide useful insight into how customers are actually using or talking about a product.

As we’ve discussed in our blog Staying Relevant on Social Media, testing different approaches and paying attention to audience response can help brands make more informed content decisions. 

What Your Competitors Are Doing

Competitor research is another useful part of social listening. It helps you understand what conversations are already happening in your industry and look for opportunities to approach them differently.

Competitor activity can help you see:

• Which topics appear frequently
• What types of posts generate interaction
• What audiences are responding to
• Where there may be gaps your brand can address

Monitoring competitor activity works best as one piece of a broader social listening strategy rather than a strategy on its own.

How Your Brand is Being Perceived

Context matters when a high number of mentions or comments comes in.

Social listening can help brands pay attention to the sentiment behind conversations and identify whether feedback is positive, negative or neutral. Looking at those conversations over time can help brands identify recurring concerns, positive feedback worth amplifying, or potential reputation issues that may require a response.

How Social Listening Fits into a Marketing Strategy

Social listening is most useful when the insights lead to action.

A marketing strategy gives those insights context by helping determine what matters, what should be prioritized, and how the information can influence future content, campaigns, and messaging.

For example social listening can help inform:

• Content planning: Recurring questions, audience interests, and common pain points can become future social posts, videos, blogs, emails, or website content.
• Competitive research: Competitor activity can reveal common industry topics, content gaps, and opportunities to approach a subject differently.
• Audience messaging: The language customers use in comments and conversations can help marketers better understand how people talk about their needs and concerns.
• Campaign planning: Trends and audience feedback can help guide campaign themes, messaging, and creative direction.
• Reporting and optimization: Performance data can help explain what is resonating and what may be worth testing again.

The next step is turning those insights into action.

Go Beyond Reporting

One of the biggest opportunities with social listening is moving past surface-level reporting.

Instead of stopping at: “Engagement increased by 15%,” ask:

• Why did engagement increase?
• What content contributed to that change?
• What does that tell us about the audience?
• Is there something we should repeat, test, or change next month?

That shift from reporting what happened to understanding why it happened is where social listening becomes valuable. A metric tells you the result. Listening helps you look for the context behind it.

Turn Social Media Insights Into Better Decisions

There will always be more social media data to look at, so pay attention to those signals that can help you make a better decision.

Social monitoring tells you what is happening. Social listening helps you understand what it means. When those insights are combined with a thoughtful social media strategy, brands can make more informed decisions about what to create, what to test, and where to focus next.

If you’re struggling with reading the signal in your social channels or with managing social media for your B2B or professional service organization, Waypost can help. Reach out today to get help thoroughly integrating social media into your marketing strategy.