6 Key Things to Track in Social Listening (And Why They Matter for Your Brand) 

TLDR: Most brands only track their brand name on social media and miss the bigger picture. To do social listening properly, you need to track brand mentions (including abbreviations), product names, common misspellings, leadership names, sentiment (positive/negative/neutral), and branded hashtags for UGC. Together, these six signals give you a complete view of every conversation happening around your brand.

Social listening is one of the most powerful and most underused tools in a brand’s digital marketing arsenal. When done right, it gives you a real-time window into how people actually talk about your brand, your products, and your competitors. Done wrong (or not at all), you are flying blind while the conversation happens without you.

But here is the thing: most brands that try social listening set up a basic keyword alert for their brand name and call it a day. That is a start, but it barely scratches the surface. True social listening requires a more systematic approach to tracking the full spectrum of conversations happening around your brand. 

Social listening goes beyond simply monitoring notifications. It’s about tracking, analyzing, and extracting insights from online conversations to guide smarter marketing, communication, and business decisions. 

6 Key Things to Track in Social Listening 

Here are the six key things every brand should be tracking and how to do it effectively.

1. Brand Mentions

The foundation of any social listening strategy is tracking your brand name, but it goes further than simply typing your company name into a search bar.

Most brands have multiple ways in which they are referenced online. Your full company name, your abbreviated version, and common shorthand all need to be in your tracking setup. For example, if your brand is called Brand Moran, you should be tracking both “Brand Moran” and “BrandMoran” as separate keyword strings — because people will use both, especially on platforms like X (formerly Twitter) where brevity is the norm.

Why does this matter? Because every mention is a data point. Whether someone is praising your service, venting about a bad experience, or simply recommending you to a friend, you want to capture that signal. Monitoring brand mentions allows you to respond to customer feedback in real time, jump into relevant conversations, and build a clearer picture of how your brand is perceived in the market.

2. Product and Service Names

Here is where many brands drop the ball: people frequently talk about your products without mentioning your brand name at all.

For example, someone might post  “This burger is amazing” or “That coffee is overpriced” without tagging or naming the company behind it. If you’re not tracking product-specific keywords, you miss these valuable conversations.  The same principle applies to your brand.

Make a list of every unique product or service name you offer, especially those with distinct, standalone identities, and add them to your social listening dashboard as independent keywords. This ensures you capture conversations about what you sell, not just who you are. It also helps you understand which products are generating the most buzz, which ones are attracting complaints, and which are driving organic word-of-mouth.

3. Misspellings

People make mistakes. Humans are notoriously bad spellers, especially when typing quickly on mobile devices. If you are only tracking the correct spelling of your brand name, you are missing a significant slice of the conversation.

Take Hyundai as an example. The automotive brand is commonly misspelled as “Hundai,” “Hyundia,” and “Hundai.” If Hyundai’s social listening setup only tracked the correct spelling, all of those misspelled mentions — including complaints, compliments, and purchase queries would simply vanish into the digital ether.

To build your misspellings list, start by thinking about the most common ways your brand name could be mistyped. You can also use tools like Google Search to see what autocomplete suggestions come up for variations of your name; this often surfaces the most frequent misspellings organically. It is a small step that can make a meaningful difference in the completeness of your social listening data.

4. Leadership and Key Faces

Your brand is not just your logo; it’s also the people behind it. In the age of personal branding and founder-led marketing, your leadership team is often the subject of online conversations — sometimes even more than your brand name itself.

This means your social listening setup should include the names of your C-suite executives, founders, and any spokespeople who represent your brand publicly. A best practice is to track their names in combination with your company name — for example, “[CEO Name] + [Company Name]” — to filter out unrelated mentions and focus on conversations that are clearly about your brand’s leadership.

Why does this matter? Because how people perceive your leaders directly impacts how they perceive your brand. A viral post about your CEO, whether positive or controversial, can shift brand sentiment overnight. Tracking these mentions keeps you informed and allows you to respond, address misconceptions, or amplify positive coverage before it fades.

5. Sentiment Analysis

Knowing that people are talking about your brand is only half the picture. Understanding how they feel about your brand is what turns raw data into actionable insight, and that is exactly what sentiment analysis delivers.

Sentiment analysis categorises online conversations into three buckets: positive, negative, and neutral. This allows you to go beyond vanity metrics like mention volume and start asking the more meaningful questions: Are people happy with our new product launch? Did our last campaign land well with our audience? Is there a growing wave of negative sentiment we need to address before it becomes a PR crisis?

Using a tool like Brand Moran helps you track sentiment over time, and also allows you to measure the impact of your marketing efforts and spot trends before they fully emerge. A sudden spike in negative mentions, for example, could be an early warning signal that something a product issue, a customer service failure, or a public misstep, needs your immediate attention. The brands that act quickly on sentiment data are the ones that protect their reputation most effectively.

6. Hashtags

Hashtags are one of the most direct ways audiences engage with brands on social media — yet many brands fail to systematically track their own branded hashtags as part of their listening strategy.

Branded hashtags like Kenya Tourism Board’s #MagicalKenya are goldmines of User-Generated Content (UGC). When your audience uses your official hashtag, they are essentially creating free marketing material and publicly endorsing your brand. Tracking these hashtags lets you find, celebrate, and repurpose that content — which is invaluable for social proof and community building.

Beyond branded hashtags, you should also monitor campaign-specific hashtags you create for product launches, events, or seasonal activations. This helps you measure the reach and engagement of each campaign in real time, identify your most active advocates, and understand whether your audience is actually using the hashtag or ignoring it entirely.

Bottom Line

Social listening is not a set-it-and-forget-it exercise. It requires intentional setup, consistent monitoring, and a willingness to act on what you find. By tracking all six of these elements, brand mentions, product names, misspellings, leadership names, sentiment, and hashtags, you build a comprehensive and accurate picture of your brand’s presence in the digital world.

The brands that win at social listening are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones who ask the right questions, track the right signals, and show up in the conversation with intention.

Start with these six, and you will already be ahead of most of your competitors.

Ready to Take Your Hashtag Tracking to the Next Level?

If you’re searching for the best way to track hashtags, measure campaign performance, and understand audience engagement, it starts with using the right tool.

Brand Moran’s hashtag tracking solution helps you:

• Monitor hashtag performance across multiple platforms
• Measure reach, impressions, and engagement in real time
• Identify top influencers and high-performing content
• Track user-generated content (UGC) linked to your campaigns
• Generate actionable reports to improve future campaigns

Whether you’re running a campaign or building brand visibility, effective hashtag tracking is essential for modern digital marketing success.

Also: Learn how to track hashtag campaigns effectively:

Start making data-driven decisions and turn every hashtag into a measurable growth opportunity with Brand Moran.