What is social listening?
Also called: social media monitoring
Social listening
The practice of systematically collecting public posts that reference a brand, category, or competitor, and reading them for patterns rather than one at a time.
Monitoring catches individual mentions; listening is what you do with the pile. The difference matters operationally, one is an alerting problem, the other is an analysis problem, and tools that are good at the first are often weak at the second.
The common failure is breadth without depth: a tool that watches twelve platforms shallowly will miss the pattern that a tool watching one platform properly would surface.