What is social listening, and what changes when you analyse the video

Social listening is the analysis of what people say on social media about a brand, a product, a topic or a person. It does not stop at your own profiles. It listens to the public conversation, the one that happens even when nobody has tagged you.

It is different from your account statistics. Statistics tell you how what you posted performed. Social listening tells you what is being talked about, who is saying it and how that conversation changes.

What it is for

• Tracking a brand's reputation. How much it is talked about, in what tone and when that changes.
• Spotting trends. Which topics, formats or products start gaining weight in a category.
• Understanding the audience. What worries people, what they ask for and what they criticise, in their own words.
• Watching competitors. What is said about other brands and what content works for them.
• Anticipating a crisis. Seeing a conversation heat up before it reaches the press.

How it works, in four steps

1. Define the question. "What is being said about my brand?" is not the same as "Why has the conversation about my category dropped?".
2. Collect the conversation. Posts, videos and comments that fit the question, on the agreed networks and period.
3. Classify it. Topics, tone, emotion, format. Today this is done with AI, but AI needs criteria and someone to check them.
4. Read it. Move from data to a conclusion that helps you decide something.

What classic social listening misses

Social listening tools were built to read text: tweets, posts, news and forums. They work with keywords. If someone writes your brand name, it shows up.

But on TikTok and Instagram a large part of the conversation is not written. It is in what you see and hear. A video can talk about your product without naming it in the caption. It can use your category as the backdrop for a joke. It can show rejection with a gesture. None of that appears in a keyword search.

And even when the mention does appear, counting it does not explain why it worked. Two videos that name your brand can travel in opposite directions because of the format, the first seconds or the emotion they carry.

What changes when you analyse the video

At Trendia we do social listening from inside the piece. We read the format, pace, emotion and narrative of each video and cross it with how people responded in the comments. The models are our own, checked against hand-annotated data, and we work with official access to Meta and TikTok.

It does not replace a mention-tracking tool. They complement each other. One tells you how much people talk. The other explains which content drives it.

To see how we apply it to a brand, here is social listening for brands. And if you are choosing a tool, our guide to social listening tools may help.