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Social Listening Tools

Good things come to those who listen

Brands who ignore their digital presence do so at their own peril. More and more customers across age groups are flocking to digital channels to interact with companies. With Qualtrics, businesses can leverage the wisdom of the crowd to achieve greater sales success, stronger brand reputation, and inform strategy decisions with deep listening across ALL of your social channels.

Computer showing sources of reviews and mentions

Be a social media master

Comprehensive social listening in a single platform

Go from monitoring separate digital channels to listening to all of your customers on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SMS, Email, reviews sites, and more, all within one platform.

Surface the insights
that matter most

Discover brand influencers, optimal times for social engagement, and what consumers are saying about your brands on social media with dashboards specially created to meet your social listening needs.

Influence brand strategy with the voice of your customers

Use insights from social media analysis done in Qualtrics to understand how to best reach your customers online. Move confidently on strategy your customers will love by using customer interactions to support its success.

Many different messages showing a variety of company feedback from many channels

Listen everywhere your customers are

Qualtrics lets you listen across dozens of social media, review, and forum channels – as well as private messages – to gain a holistic view of your brands and customers. Analyse, visualise, and democratise your social media analytics across the channels your organisation cares about most.

Gain a competitive edge

Close gaps and identify where you can overtake your competitors with benchmarking and customised dashboards. Uncover how you stack up to your competitors on social media engagement, mentions, hashtags, and post volume.

Chart showing post engagement per day
Many notifications and discussions visible on phone about a brand

Become the talk of the town (in a good way)

Transform your brand by tracking metrics around brand awareness, including mentions, post volumes, influencers, engagement on social media sites over time. Perform sentiment analysis on your social media posts by default and access further natural language understanding enrichments like emotion analysis and effort scoring.

Expand your insights with XM Discover

Augment your social analytics by feeding your social data into XM Discover for more in-depth insights into competitors, brand awareness, and so much more.

  • Seamless integration with XM Discover gives your business the power of omnichannel analytics on all data.
  • Enhance the power of social insights with natural language understanding enrichments including emotional intensity, empathy detection, Intelligent Scoring, and industry-specific sentiment and effort detection.
Charts showing how topics and effort have changed on a weekly basis for customers

Trusted by the world’s biggest brands
to enable world-class listening

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There's a smarter way to listen

Social listening FAQs


Social listening is the process of tracking conversations and mentions related to a chosen topic on social media platforms, and then analysing the data for insights into what actions need to be taken to improve the experience. In its simplest form, it is about understanding the online mentions of your brand, products, and services. These mentions may be directly aimed at the brand (specifically mentioning you by name or replying to a message), or they may be indirect (talking about your brand).

With advances in technology companies no longer have to regularly request feedback via surveys or other means. Now, brands can surface insights seamlessly from social media channels without having to ask, collecting rich data at scale. Your social media listening program should be “always-on” so if there is a sudden trend or sentiment shift, you step in and problem solve where needed.

Learn more about social listening
Social media platforms should be used for more than just pushing out content to your followers and potential customers. When done right, social listening allows you to understand what your customers are talking about, what they think, how they feel, and what they need from you. Having these insights allows your business to take the specific actions needed to improve experiences for your customers, employees, product, and brand.
  1. Engaging customers
    Social listening is a great way to discover and monitor conversations related to your brand and product. Taking steps to bring value to customer conversations by sharing useful facts, blog posts, or videos you’ve created goes a long way to showing that you care.
  2. Identifying new customers
    Social listening can lead to social selling as you engage with customers online. You may discover your customer has a need that your product or solution will help fill. By listening across ALL channels you can find ways to best help people at scale.
  3. Understanding shifting trends
    Keeping your finger on the pulse will help identify what’s moving the needle with customers. Social listening enables brands to make data-informed decisions that have immediate effects on the business or even ones farther down the road.
  4. Competitor analysis
    Successful brands don’t give up an inch to their competitors. Monitoring their brand the same way you monitor your own allows you to identify what their customer pain points are. That presents an opportunity to communicate how your solution solves them.
  5. Reputation management
    You can’t put a price on having a deep understanding of your brand. Knowing what’s working and where improvement is needed not only helps your brand grow, but it also helps attract new customers and retain existing ones.
Social listening tools allow you to collect and analyse social media data for insights so you can build a solid understanding of how customers and potential customers think, feel, and need from your brand. Your social listening software should provide each of these things:
  • Be easy to use and customise. You shouldn’t have to call support for changes to dashboards and it integrating additional analytics features should be seamless.
  • Visualise how you compare to competitors. Knowing how your competitors handle their presence can help uncover how best to capture more revenue.
  • Generate deep insights into your customers. The first place customers will go to rave or rant about a brand is to social media. The right social listening tools will aggregate that content, across all channels, into one spot for analysis.
Social listening and social monitoring are both highly important to your overall listening strategy. Think of social monitoring as a brand’s customer support over social channels, happening on a micro scale. A customer care representative engages with and responds to customers posts to answer questions, resolve issues or complaints, and thank customers for positive feedback. Social media monitoring may also track key metrics like brand mentions, competitors, and relevant hashtags.

Social listening on the other hand happens on a macro scale and takes things one step further. It is a proactive process with the goal of greeting long-term solutions by taking action on the data that is collected to address problems customers are facing.