Reasons Your Brand Needs Social Listening in 2025
Imagine a customer in Nakuru posts a complaint about your brand on X. She’s not tagging you, but the post is gaining traction. Hundreds engage, media picks it up, and suddenly you’re facing a PR issue you didn’t see coming.
That’s the risk of ignoring social listening.
Brands that only track tags or DMs miss the full picture. Today, conversations happen across X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, blogs, forums, and news sites. Many of them don’t include your official handle.
Social listening helps you catch those untagged conversations, understand the tone, and take action early.
What is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking online conversations and mentions about your brand, industry, competitors, or relevant keywords. It helps you understand what people are saying, how they feel about it, and what trends are emerging.
Instead of waiting for tagged mentions or complaints, social listening allows you to proactively monitor and respond to public sentiment across digital platforms.
What is the Difference Between Social Monitoring and Social Listening?
Social media monitoring is reactive. It tracks direct mentions, comments, and messages, mostly where your brand is tagged. It’s useful for customer support and basic engagement.
Social listening, on the other hand, is proactive. It looks at the bigger picture. It analyzes all relevant conversations, even untagged ones, and provides insights on sentiment, trends, and emerging issues.
Monitoring tells you what was said. Listening tells you why it was said—and what to do next.
Here are five practical reasons your brand should be using social listening in 2025:
1. Track Untagged Mentions in Real Time
Social listening tools go beyond notifications. They track specific keywords, hashtags, and phrases related to your brand, even when people don’t tag you.
Brand Moran allows you to follow mentions across multiple platforms. This means you’ll see what users are saying in comments, captions, reviews, and threads.
If someone says, “Equity app keeps crashing,” and doesn’t tag the brand, you still catch it.
2. Spot Trends Before They Explode
Trends in Kenya move fast. What starts on TikTok or X in the morning can lead the news cycle by evening.
Social listening helps you notice rising keywords, viral hashtags, and new sentiment clusters. You get alerts when a topic tied to your brand starts to gain momentum.
With Brand Moran, you see what’s bubbling beneath the surface. This helps you act fast, either to engage or prepare a response.
3. Detect and Respond to Crisis Early
Crises often start small. A negative review here. A critical post there. Then it spreads.
Social listening helps you catch the early signs. Brand Moran tracks the volume and tone of conversations. When negativity spikes, you get notified.
This gives your comms or PR team a head start. You control the narrative before it spirals.
4. Learn What Customers Actually Think
Social listening gives you unfiltered feedback. You don’t need a survey to hear what users really think about your app, service, or brand experience.
People are more honest online. They talk about what they love and what annoys them. From poor UX to excellent customer service, you get the full picture.
Brand Moran organizes these insights into clear reports. You can use them to improve products, customer experience, or messaging.
5. Measure Campaign and Brand Impact
You launch a campaign—how do you know if it worked?
With social listening, you can measure:
- Volume of mentions
- Hashtag performance
- Audience sentiment
- Reach and impressions
Brand Moran shows you all of this in one dashboard. You can track how people are reacting to your campaign in real time, and adjust if needed.
This is especially useful for PR teams, marketers, and agencies that need to show ROI.
Conclusion: Listen, Learn, Act
In 2025, you can’t afford to operate blindly. Conversations are happening with or without you. The smartest brands are the ones that listen, learn, and act based on real-time data.
Whether you’re a marketer, PR lead, corporate brand, or public figure, Brand Moran gives you the tools to stay ahead.
Book a demo today and see how social listening can work for you.
You can contact us info@brandmoran.com
