From Comments to Community: The Power of Social Listening
Chase Sapphire engages with creators to bring awareness to their card benefits and receives feedback from real audiences from the creators. Social content captured by BILLIONMONSTERS.
Quick Facts:
Social listening analyzes past and present conversations across social media, forums, and communities to uncover sentiment, recurring themes, and emerging trends.
Half of U.S. consumers discover new brands through social media, making online conversation a key source of insight.
Brands that act on social listening can identify trends or issues before they peak, gaining a strategic advantage.
It’s expected that over 6 billion people will be using social media by 2028, and brands that can’t keep up with the constant flow of conversation risk falling behind.
Why Audiences Talk and Brands Should Listen
Audiences are constantly talking about what they love, what frustrates them, and what they want more of. Many of these conversations happen without tagging a brand, making them invisible to monitoring. Social listening captures these unfiltered opinions at scale.
When brands understand why people feel a certain way, they can respond with messaging, content, or products that resonate.
How Brands Should Lean In
Audience Understanding: Analyze recurring conversations to know what topics, products, or messaging resonate most.
Reputation Awareness: Track sentiment over time to detect early signs of frustration, disengagement, or enthusiasm.
Competitive Insight: Monitor competitor conversations to see what audiences respond to, dislike, and where opportunities exist.
Content and Campaign Inspiration: Spot repeated questions, complaints, or trends to fuel timely and relevant content.
Strategy in Action
Brands that embrace social listening treat every conversation as an opportunity to act. An athleisure brand noticing repeated questions about sizing might respond with guides, videos, or updated product info. A tech company tracking how people use a feature could adjust marketing campaigns to match reality.
This is how Topgolf turned a viral net collapse into a community moment. A TikTok video showed one of their nets falling, and a comment from a fan named Logan joking about his upcoming Christmas party there went viral. Topgolf noticed quickly, fixed the net in time for the party, posted videos celebrating Logan, and even ran a promotion that day, creating a viral moment for the brand on socials.
Topgolf’s approach shows listening at scale can turn a single insight into a viral moment that drives engagement, loyalty, and business impact. When executed well, social listening turns observation into measurable growth.
Conclusion
Social listening is not about monitoring every comment. It is about understanding patterns, sentiment, and trends and acting with intention.
Brands that focus on audience understanding, reputation awareness, competitive insight, and actionable content strategies do more than gather data. They turn online conversation into engagement, trust, and business growth. In 2026, the brands that win will be the ones that listen closely and move purposefully.
