Were you aware that all your witty tweets, enthusiastic Instagram posts, comments on Facebook, are all surveyed, collected and analysed? If you are like me, probably not. Today, social media monitoring market represents US$2.4 billion just in Europe and is even expected to grow more than twice by 2030.

But when does it all start? As early as 1998, James R. Beniger (1998), president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, had the idea that the Internet could profoundly renew the way pollsters study ‘how we form our attitudes and opinions, are influenced by mass media and by each other, make decisions as consumers and as voters’. This early recognition of the Internet’s potential to transform opinion research laid the groundwork for what would later become social media listening. As digital communication expanded, and social networks became central to public discourse, businesses, researchers, and policymakers saw unprecedented opportunities to harness online conversations. By the 2000s, numerous start-ups and agencies emerged, advocating for the systematic collection and analysis of social media data as a means to gain deeper insights into public sentiment. This shift marked a turning point in how organizations sought to « know what people think, » a concept epitomized by Brandwatch and other leading social media listening vendors.

Social media listening, also known as social media monitoring, is defined by the process of monitoring online chatter, in order to understand what is being said about a brand, organization, or topic. In practical terms, it involves monitoring and analysing mentions, comments, hashtags, opinions and even nowadays emojis from users across various platforms. The goal? To extract actionable insights from the billions of data points: emerging trends, customer opinions on products, audience expectations, or even early signals of a potential crisis.

In today’s hyper-connected world, social media listening has become an essential tool for both private businesses and public institutions.

How Social Media Listening Works

Social media listening goes beyond just monitoring or tracking mentions. It involves qualitative analysis of the « mood » and nuances of online conversations. In other words, it’s not just about counting how many times your brand is mentioned but understanding how, why it’s being discussed and what is the context. To achieve this, professionals rely on specialized tools and structured methods for collection and organization of the ongoing information flow.

The best-known tools that you might have heard of are Hootsuite, Talkwalker, Brandwatch, Meltwater, Mention, and even local platforms like Digimind. These platforms aggregate data from a variety of sources: major social networks (Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok…), forums, blogs, review sites, and even online media. They use keyword-based queries (including complex Boolean operators for refined searches) to filter relevant mentions on a given subject. The collected data can include text (post content, tweets, captions, comments…), quantitative metrics (number of mentions, likes, shares, engagement rates), and even multimedia content (photos, videos or logos).

Social listening also focuses on context: who is speaking (user profile), tone (sentiment analysis: positive, neutral, or negative), and the reach of the message (influencer status, audience size). The software used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) comes from decades of scientific research on people’s language and behaviour. Its employs a dictionary that classifies several hundred words as indicators of positive emotion (love, nice, sweet) and several hundred words as indicators of negative emotion (hurt, ugly, nasty). Subsets of negative emotion words assess manifestations of anger (hate, annoyed), sadness (sad, crying), and anxiety (worried, fear). It then calculates an emotional tone score based on the negative and positive emotion words. However, studies have shown the difficulty to being 100% certain: posts that did not align with any category could be skipped and not categorized. So, it is important to keep in mind that human judgment remains crucial to properly interpret the nuances (humour, sarcasm, irony) that algorithms may miss. Now that we know how social medial listening works, let’s dive deeper into some examples.

Adjusting Marketing Strategy: Ben & Jerry’s

To put all that into practice, lets look at an example from the cream brand Ben & Jerry’s, which uses social listening not only for brand management but also to inform product development and marketing strategies. By analysing advertising performance and customer conversations on social media, Ben & Jerry’s discovered an unexpected trend: it was during winter that engagement with their online ads peaked, as many customers mentioned enjoying ice cream in the colder months, often while binge-watching Netflix. Countered intuitive, isn’t it?

Thanks to this insight, the company adjusted its marketing strategy to target these « winter snackers. » For instance, it launched a new flavour called “Netflix & Chill’d”, a playful nod to this behaviour of pairing ice cream with streaming on cold nights. This new flavour, directly inspired by online discussions, allowed Ben & Jerry’s to show that it was listening to its clients and adapting to their lifestyle. Beyond product development, the company also optimized its strategic advertising calendar, investing more in winter months when its audience was most engaged. This case demonstrates how social listening can help identify hidden opportunities in consumer behaviour and adjust marketing strategies accordingly.

Ethical Dilemmas and Limitations of Social Media Listening

While social media listening opens up exciting possibilities, it also raises important ethical concerns that need to be considered. Indeed, monitoring users’ conversations online, even when publicly available, does not come without its challenges regarding privacy, consent, and bias.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018, where millions of Facebook profiles were harvested and analysed without explicit consent for political targeting, highlighted the potential pitfalls of mass data collection. Since then, public awareness has grown, and 70% of American consumers are now concerned about how their data is used. In order to adapt, businesses should pursuit a more transparent social listening practices and ensure they respect users’ consent. Furthermore, businesses operating in Europe should always anonymize any collected data as much as possible and focus on broad trend analysis rather than individual information. It is also strongly advisable to inform users in privacy policies that their social media mentions may be monitored.

Biases are another important point to kept in mind. Not all populations use social media in the same way, and not all opinions are equal in terms of volume or visibility. On top of that, automated analysis algorithms can have their own biases (e.g., misinterpreting sarcasm as a negative sentiment or overrepresenting popular topics at the expense of more subtle but important conversations). Furthermore, more and more people are using emojis to express their opinion or share a though, but it is still very hard to correctly identify the meaning (for example, a crying emoji is not always used to identity sadness or negative emotions, it can be used to express joy or even love). Therefore, it’s crucial to maintain a critical perspective on the insights generated by social listening and cross-reference them with other sources (such as traditional customer surveys or market studies) to avoid making unfair or misguided decisions.

But where do we put the line between helpful listening and invasive surveillance?

Authors like Shoshana Zuboff (2018) have theorized the concept of ‘surveillance capitalism’, arguing that the continuous capture, extraction, and valuation of data are now a key feature of today’s capitalist societies, reconfiguring market positions and political power. However, can we really capitalise on all the data there is?

When a company reaches out to an individual who hasn’t directly tagged them in a negative post, it may be perceived as either a thoughtful customer care response or an unwelcome « tracking » of the users every move. Is it even possible to collect and utilise such data? Legally, in Europe regulations such as the GDPR impose strict requirements on the use of personal data, including publicly available social media information, demanding transparency, proportionality, and security for any organization that collects this type of data. Users should also be able to exercise control over the data they share and how it is being used.

To conclude, social media listening is not a new concept. However, with the over-personalisation of products and services, it has become a crucial tool for businesses and public institutions. Like many digital technologies, the power of this tool comes with increased responsibility. Social media listening, when done thoughtfully and ethically, can truly enhance communication and decision-making in the digital age.

But aren’t we entering a new era of total surveillance by the Big Brother? And can we put all our trust in the governments?

Nadejda STEFANOVA

References :

Grandviewresearch.com. (2025). Europe Social Media Listening Market Size & Outlook, 2030. [online] Available at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/horizon/outlook/social-media-listening-market/europe

Barari, M. and Eisend, M. (2024). Computational Content Analysis in Advertising Research. Journal of Advertising, pp.1–19. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00913367.2024.2407642#d1e313

Pew Research Center. 2015. Methodology: How crimson hexagon works. April 1. https://www.journalism.org/ 2015/04/01/methodology-crimson-hexagon/

Barnett-Smith, R. (2024). Social Listening Examples: 9 Brands Getting It Right | Mention. [online] Mention. https://mention.com/en/blog/social-listening-examples/

Auxier, B., Rainie, L., Anderson, M., Perrin, A., Kumar, M. and Turner, E. (2019). Americans and Privacy: Concerned, Confused and Feeling Lack of Control over Their Personal Information. [online] Pew Research Center. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/11/15/americans-and-privacy-concerned-confused-and-feeling-lack-of-control-over-their-personal-information/.