5 tips to maximise your social listening
Social listening is not just a reporting tool.
Used well, it is a strategic intelligence system: a way to understand audiences, spot risks, track narratives and turn messy public conversation into decisions teams can actually use.
Five things you might not know you could do with social listening
Social listening done well is a powerful source of insight for any digital strategist or organisation that’s trying to get to know their audiences, providing valuable tips to deepen audience engagement. But 90% of brands use 10% of what tools like Brandwatch, Netbase or Meltwater are actually capable of.
For the past decade I’ve been helping purpose-driven brands, charities and nonprofits use audience intelligence tools to understand audiences, build data-driven digital strategy plans, and inform campaigns. From helping charities create real-time alerts to detect emergencies before they hit the news, to defining bot landscapes and fake news narratives for government bodies.
Here’s my pick of five quirky ways you can use social listening to leverage insights people might sit up and listen to.
1. Segment your audiences into cohorts you can understand and actually target with paid media
Tools like Audiense create sophisticated audience networks based on their behaviours and affinities. At the most generic level, you can segment brand followers or people who are talking about a particular issue into segments, based on how they’re interconnected or how their shared affinities. The outputs provide tangible information you can use to recreate prospecting ad sets or if you’re targeting on Twitter you can download and target them by CSV. Where it gets really interesting is when you upload your own data into the system for analysis. It’s possible, for example, to use a tool like Brandwatch to identify people who are fundraising for you, then upload this CSV into Audiense to see how your fundraisers in particular are clustered, allowing you to define subclusters of community fundraisers and what engages them.
Find the audience
Start with people already engaging with the brand, cause, campaign or issue — then identify the clusters, affinities and behaviours that hold them together.
Understand the segments
Look beyond demographics. Analyse shared interests, motivations, influencers, media habits and the language each community uses.
Make it targetable
Translate the insight into practical paid-media audiences, creative routes, messaging angles and channel choices.
2. Recreate your audience base as segments you can actually listen to on a daily basis.
If you have a good understanding of the kind of people who support your brand, tools like Brandwatch Audiences allow you to create proxy lookalikes you can analyse over time. This is a tactic I’ve employed many times for my clients, as it allows segment-specific insight to be gathered instead of broader topical analysis. For one of my clients, I recreated their target audiences and provided ongoing deep-dives into how they felt about specific topics that were of strategic interest. But implementation of insight can be even more agile: it’s possible to provide weekly or even daily snapshots of audiences, to keep them front of mind — and to set up automatic real-time alerts, so when a particular audience starts to talk negatively about your brand you’re the first to know.
Audience intelligence
A proxy audience is a living panel.
Instead of only measuring what people say directly to your brand, proxy audiences let you track what strategically important groups are talking about over time — so audience insight becomes continuous, not occasional.
3. Detect and understand how bots are “talking about” or sowing seeds of detraction about your brand or cause
Fake news travels six times faster than truth so detecting misinformation should be on any large brand’s radar. Tools like Digimind offer a unique bot detection component, but it’s possible to use open-source solutions like Botometer to define automated accounts you can then listen to as a list. I typically define bot networks using a mix of sources and inputs, then upload them as a list into a social listening tool. Once you’re in the rabbit warren, others appear — and with some legwork, you can have a 1,000 strong bot list defined by the end of the day which you can track in your social listening tool. With constant account removal fake news detection requires ongoing updating as the initial list invariably gets smaller over time but if maintained it can be a fascinating source of insight as to what narratives are being proliferated to divide and dominate the national conversation.
Misinformation is a narrative problem, not just a volume problem.
The value of bot and misinformation monitoring is not simply counting suspicious accounts. It is understanding which stories are spreading, who they are designed to influence and how they might change the wider conversation around your cause.
4. Create real-time alerts so you’re the first to know when an emergency or risk is trending.
Social listening tools allow you to create automated alerts when certain thresholds are met. From a set number of mentions to an adjustable percentage increase, you can make your alert as sensitive or specific as you’d like — and get alerted daily or in real-time using AI predictive modelling so you can get ahead of a trend before it actually trends. For one brand I worked with, risk radars were created that alerted them when negative brand mentions spiked — with different thresholds requiring a different level of internal response. For another, I used them to detect natural disasters and conflicts from people on the ground, enabling rapid response protocols before the stories even hit the news.
Define the signal
Decide what matters: negative mentions, volume spikes, emerging keywords, sentiment shifts, local reports, misinformation narratives or specific stakeholder groups.
Set the threshold
Create alert levels that separate normal noise from moments that require internal attention, escalation or rapid response.
Agree the response
An alert is only useful if people know what happens next. Define owners, escalation routes and response protocols before the spike happens.
5. Understand what people who engage with you say more broadly about the world around them
My last one is pretty obvious, but it’s so crucial - and rarely done. In most cases, social listening is used to either measure brand engagements or how the public is talking about a topic regardless of your brand. But what’s rarely done is bringing the two together by understanding how people who engage with or donate to your brand are talking about the world or other charities in general. It’s a critical part of understanding any audience as our donors don’t live within our brand — and it’s only by understanding how they see and engage with the world around them that we truly understand who they are, how they feel and what they do. A simple trick is to create a panel of people who have spoken about your brand and use this as a seed list, then listen to what they say more broadly — and if you want to go even deeper, you can do this for specific subsegments beyond generic brand engagers.
The brand bubble
Only measures how people talk to you, about you or in response to your campaigns — useful, but too narrow to understand who they really are.
The wider world
Looks at what your audiences care about beyond the brand: the issues, communities, frustrations and cultural signals that shape how they see the world.
So there they are — my five top tips. If any of these have got you thinking about how you could better use audience intelligence tools in your organisation, but you don’t know where to get started, get in touch.
What social listening should help you do
- Turn broad audiences into usable segments.
- Track the groups that matter continuously, not just during campaign planning.
- Spot reputational risks, misinformation and emerging narratives earlier.
- Build alert systems that connect insight to action.
- Understand what your supporters care about beyond your own brand or campaign.
