Social Listening
What it is
Social Listening monitors public social media conversations in real time so your team can track brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook. Every captured mention is automatically analyzed for sentiment (positive, neutral, or negative) and surfaced in a unified dashboard with configurable alert notifications.
The module gives your marketing, support, and communications teams immediate visibility into how your brand is perceived online. Rather than manually searching each social platform, Social Listening aggregates everything into a single feed where you can filter by platform, sentiment, date range, and engagement level. This enables fast responses to emerging trends, early detection of reputation-threatening events, and data-driven measurement of campaign impact on social channels.
Beyond reactive monitoring, Social Listening supports proactive intelligence. You can set up topics to track competitor brand names, industry keywords, or event-specific hashtags. Combined with sentiment trend charts and exportable mention data, the module serves as both a real-time alerting system and a historical analytics tool for social media strategy.
When to use
| Scenario | Why Social Listening helps |
|---|---|
| Monitoring brand reputation | Track mentions of your company name, product names, and key executives to stay informed about public perception at all times. |
| Measuring campaign impact on social | After launching a marketing campaign, monitor the campaign hashtag and related keywords to measure organic reach, engagement, and sentiment shifts. |
| Detecting crises early | Set up alerts for negative sentiment spikes so your team can respond to complaints or PR issues before they escalate into full-blown crises. |
| Competitive intelligence | Monitor competitor brand names and product mentions to understand market sentiment and identify positioning opportunities. |
| Identifying influencers and advocates | Spot positive mentions from high-engagement accounts that could become brand ambassadors or partnership opportunities. |
Steps
1. Open Social Listening
Navigate to Account > Social Listening in the sidebar. The main dashboard displays your configured topics and a real-time mention feed. If this is your first time, the dashboard will prompt you to connect your social platforms and create your first listening topic.
2. Connect social platforms
In the Sources section, connect your Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook accounts. For each platform, authorize BotBat to access public mention data by completing the OAuth flow. Connected platforms appear with a green status indicator. You can connect multiple accounts per platform if your business operates several brand profiles.
3. Create a listening topic
Click Add Topic to define what you want to monitor. Enter the keywords, hashtags, brand names, or phrases you want to track. Use the AND/OR logic builder to combine terms for precise matching. For example, you could track ("BotBat" OR "Bot Bat") AND NOT "bot battle" to capture relevant mentions while filtering out noise. Select which platforms to monitor for each topic.
4. Configure alerts
For each topic, set alert thresholds that trigger notifications when specific conditions are met. Alert conditions include negative mention count exceeding a threshold per hour, mentions from accounts with follower counts above a specified number, or overall mention volume spiking beyond a percentage of the daily average. Choose your notification channels: email, in-app notification, or both.
5. Review the mention feed
The main dashboard shows a real-time feed of all captured mentions across your topics. Each mention card displays the sentiment tag (color-coded as green for positive, gray for neutral, and red for negative), the source platform icon, the author handle, the post text, and engagement metrics such as likes, retweets, and comments.
6. Analyze sentiment trends
Open the Sentiment tab to view sentiment distribution over time as a line or area chart. The chart shows the daily or hourly breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative mentions. Use this to identify patterns, such as sentiment dipping after a product issue or spiking positively after a successful launch event.
7. Drill into individual mentions
Click any mention card to expand its detail view. The detail panel shows the full post text, the author's profile information (name, handle, follower count, bio), engagement statistics, and a direct link to the original post on the source platform. From this view, you can also tag the mention for follow-up or assign it to a team member.
8. Export mention data
Click Export to download mention data for a selected date range and topic. The export includes sentiment scores, timestamps, author information, engagement metrics, and post URLs. Choose CSV format for spreadsheet analysis or JSON for programmatic processing.
Common pitfalls
| Pitfall | How to avoid it |
|---|---|
| Monitoring too many generic keywords | Tracking broad terms like "support" or "service" generates overwhelming noise. Be specific with brand names, product names, and campaign hashtags. |
| Ignoring neutral mentions | Neutral mentions often contain questions or product suggestions. They represent engagement opportunities that teams frequently overlook when focusing only on positive or negative sentiment. |
| Not acting on alerts | Setting up alerts without assigning someone to review and respond to them defeats the purpose. Assign a team member or create a rotation schedule for alert handling. |
| Over-relying on automated sentiment | Sentiment analysis struggles with sarcasm, slang, and context-dependent language. Spot-check flagged mentions manually, especially high-engagement posts, to calibrate your trust in the scores. |
| Forgetting to update topics after rebranding | If your company or product names change, update your listening topics immediately. Otherwise you will miss relevant mentions under the new name while still tracking the old one. |
Create a "Crisis" topic that combines your brand name with negative keywords such as "outage," "down," "broken," and "scam." Set aggressive alert thresholds on this topic so it acts as an early warning system for reputation-threatening events, giving your communications team time to prepare a response.
Supported platforms
| Platform | Mention types captured | Sentiment analysis | Real-time alerts |
|---|---|---|---|
| Twitter/X | Tweets, replies, quote tweets, retweets with comments | Yes | Yes |
| Posts, comments, story mentions (public accounts only) | Yes | Yes | |
| Public posts, page comments, group posts (public groups) | Yes | Yes |
- Social Listening Overview
- Add Listening Topic
- Alert Configuration
- Sentiment Trends
- Mention Detail
- Export Mentions