How to Use Agorapulse’s New Social Listening Tool to Unlock Strategic Insights

Social media marketing is not just about posting content, it’s also about listening to what your audience is saying. Social listening tools, like Agorapulse Listening, track brand conversations, spot trends, and analyze how people are feeling about your content and brand across social networks and beyond.

In this article, we’ll explore the top strategic insights you can unlock with social listening.

New and Improved: Agorapulse Listening

Even though we originally launched Listening last year, we’ve continued to find ways to make it even more valuable. After all, at Agorapulse, we’re committed to innovation. We happily welcomed feedback from our customers, and now, we’re excited to announce that the new and improved Agorapulse Listening is now available.

Agorapulse Listening is social media listening software that helps marketers measure brand health, stay proactive, and refine their social media strategy. Now with enhanced search and reporting capabilities, our social listening tool helps you uncover actionable insights to inform your social media strategies.

Track brand mentions and keywords

Set up alerts for specific keywords or phrases across social networks, like Facebook, Instagram, and X, thousands of news sites, and millions of blogs.

Benefits: Get notified when your brand is being discussed,which helps you respond quickly to customer feedback, join relevant conversations, and address potential issues.

Uncover trends

Find relevant topics to your industry. Use the volume and engagement reports to spot emerging trends.

Benefits: Gain a deeper understanding of long-term shifts in your industry. Then adapt your content strategy based on the topics that matter most to your business.

Gauge sentiment

Get a clearer picture of how your brand is perceived on social media with sentiment analysis.

Benefits: Sentiment analysis gives you a snapshot of how your audience feels about your brand and how that sentiment is evolving over time.

Gain a competitive advantage

As important as tracking your own brand is tracking your competitors’ content. Understand what’s working for your competitors, what their audiences engage with the most, how often they’re mentioned, and what people say about them.

Benefits: Use this competitive intelligence to refine your content strategy. Understanding what topics, posts, or campaigns generates the most engagement for competitors helps identify gaps, opportunities, and trends in your own content.

Manage social media crises in real time

Set up alerts to get notifications of a spike in search results related to your brand keywords.

Benefit: Take immediate action to resolve issues before they get out of control and negatively impact your brand.

Make data-driven decisions

With your first search, you’ll get access to two months of data right away, with up to two years of data over time. Export listening search results in a few clicks.

Benefits: Take an informed approach to your social strategy. Report exports make it easy to share results with your team and other stakeholders.

To learn more about social listening, join our free webinar on March 25, 2025 at 10 PM EST (3 PM GMT). Our product team will dig into the power of social listening tools and how you can use them to unlock strategic insights. Reserve your spot for Understanding Social Listening: A Practical Guide.

What Is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of observing online conversations about your brand across different social networks and platforms. By tracking mentions and keywords, companies can:

• Gather data about sentiment, trends, competitors, and more
• Stay informed
• Engage with customers and prospects in real-time
• Adjust their strategies based on the information they’ve gathered

Social Monitoring vs Social Listening

The term “social listening” often gets confused with the term “social monitoring.” Despite some overlap, there’s a key difference between social monitoring and social listening.

Social monitoring is the process of tracking mentions and interactions in real-time to keep up with what people are saying about your brand or industry. Businesses use it to keep an eye on customer feedback and engage with their audiences more effectively.

Social listening includes the same elements of tracking mentions and interactions, but also focuses on analyzing trends, audience sentiment, and brand health over time to inform a company’s long-term strategy.

In short, social monitoring is reactive, focusing on immediate interactions and engagement. Social listening helps businesses be proactive while giving them an understanding of the bigger picture. It’s a valuable strategic tool.

How Social Listening Helps Marketers Make More Strategic Decisions

Social media has become the ultimate battleground for brands. With social listening, marketers can shift from a reactive approach to focus on data-driven decisions that influence their long-term success.

According to a 2024 study on the state of social listening by The Social Intelligence Lab, the top five objectives for companies using social data are competitive intelligence (53%), brand perception (44%), crisis monitoring and management (42%), trend analysis (31%), and brand health tracking (29%).

Let’s dig into the strategic uses of social listening in more detail.

Transform Data Into Actionable Insights With Social Listening Tools

Social listening is all about getting a big picture view of what’s being said about your brand online.

Identify emerging trends

Keeping track of conversations and keywords across social platforms is your key to making sure your brand joins in the right conversations at the right time.

Joining a conversation should feel natural and authentic. Joining too early might make it feel like your response is forced. Similarly, you don’t want to join too late, when the audience has already moved on from the topic. By analyzing online conversations, you can spot shifts in audience interests, topics gaining traction, and evolving audience preferences.

Armed early with this knowledge, you can adapt your content strategy and give you and your team time to plan and create content related to trending topics and emerging trends. You can join the conversation before a competitor does, which can even give you an advantage.

Agorapulse Listening lets you easily set up a search to track the keywords that matter most to your brand and industry, including:

• Brand names and variations, including common misspellings
• Product names
• Hashtags
• Industry keywords

Those searches form the foundation of your social listening software. From those searches, you can track the following metrics:

• Total posts that match the search criteria within a designated time frame
• Average per day of the total volume of posts for the period divided by the number of days in the reporting period
• Number of unique authors to show how many unique users have created posts that match the search criteria

Track those metrics to spot increased activity around specific topics you’re monitoring and spot the signs of developing trends or topics you could create content around.

Track competitor activity

Who hasn’t searched for inspiration by scrolling through a competitor’s social media profiles? Trade inspiration for insights by using social listening tools to track competitor activity. You can see what competitors are posting, how they engage with their audience, and what content resonates with their followers.

In other words, perform a competitive audit.

Tracking competitor mentions helps identify gaps in your own strategy, informs when you should adjust your approach based on content that’s performing well, and acts as a benchmark for your own social activities to remain competitive.

In Agorapulse’s social listening tool, an engagement report measures user interactions on posts included in your search results, including competitors you’re tracking. Now, you can easily get a sense of how their content is performing across platforms, including reactions, comments, and shares.

• Total engagement represents the overall engagement within the reporting period.
• Average per day represents the total engagement divided by the number of days in the reporting period.

Understand audience sentiment

Social media listening tools analyze keywords and mentions to gauge positive, negative, or neutral sentiment. The sentiment is determined by analyzing the language used in the content.

The data is then given a score from 0 to 100, which provides a quantifiable measure of how your brand is perceived. Less than 20 is considered very negative while over 80 is considered very positive.

In Agorapulse, you’ll get an overall snapshot of your sentiment, how you’re doing compared to previous reporting periods, plus a sentiment score by day.

The conversation trend report is another way to track sentiment in Agorapulse. You can see the keywords mentioned most often in your Listening search results. The words that appear most frequently will appear larger.

Each word is also classified according to sentiment, displaying green for positive, red for negative, or grey for neutral. You can quickly visualize sentiment around key searches using this report.

Sentiment insights like these help marketers adjust tone or messaging, understand audience perception, intervene when negative sentiment increases, and leverage positive sentiment to boost brand image.

Protect your brand

According to The State of Customer Experience report from Genesys, 31% of customers have stopped doing business with a company after a negative interaction with a brand.

On the other hand, 39% have recommended a company after a positive interaction. Because the customer experience now extends to social media, being proactive about protecting your brand is essential to brand health and your bottom line.

The good news: If you’re using social listening, you already have what you need to spot signs of a crisis. By monitoring mentions, sentiment, and trends, you’ll be able to gauge whether the situation will blow over or if it’s time to take action. If you’re using Agorapulse Listening, you even get a notification of a spike in search results, which could be the first sign of an issue.

Refine your content strategy

Use the data you’re receiving from social listening software to inform and refine your content strategy. Seize opportunities around trending topics that are hard to plan for ahead of time. Identify the types of content that are driving engagement and look for gaps. You can then test out different types of content or messaging you’re not seeing from competitors.

This real-time feedback will help you create more relevant, targeted content that aligns with your audience’s interests and adapt as this evolves over time.

Measure content and campaign effectiveness

With all that data at your fingertips, you’ll have everything you need to measure how your campaigns and content are performing against the metrics that matter most to you.

Whether you’re analyzing engagement or reviewing the sentiment of your audience, you’ll get a sense of how your online presence is resonating with your audience. That information can then be turned into actionable insights.

All that data may help you prove the ROI of your social efforts. Using Agorapulse, you can combine Listening insights with the power of our ROI and social media reporting features to get data-packed reports on all your social media efforts. Reports can also be exported for easy sharing with your team and other stakeholders.

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Social Media Strategy

Social listening is a game-changer for marketers looking to make smarter, more informed decisions. By leveraging listening insights, you can be proactive, strategic, and engaged with the conversations happening about your company on social networks and beyond.

Ready to unlock strategic insights and supercharge your social media goals? Request a demo of Agorapulse Listening.