Listen

Social Media Listening: Mentions, Keywords and Sentiment

Updated October 27, 2026 · Multi Post Social guide

What social media listening is, and how it differs from the inbox

The social media inbox shows what is addressed to you: comments on your posts, messages, tagged mentions. Social media listening shows what is said near you: a keyword, a hashtag, your brand name without the @, a competitor's name, a topic your audience cares about. Nobody sent it to you, so no notification fires, which is exactly why a dedicated screen exists.

A stream is a saved search across the networks you choose. Multi Post Social runs it on a schedule, stores the matching public posts, estimates sentiment for each, and draws volume over time. You read a stream like a news feed with a chart on top. Join a conversation, save a post as an idea, or send a mention to the inbox to answer it. Over weeks, the streams tell you which words your audience uses, when interest rises and who else is talking.

Streams: keywords, hashtags, handles and competitors

Streams are the unit of social media listening in Multi Post Social. A stream has a name, a query, a set of networks and an alert threshold. The query can be a word or phrase in quotes, a hashtag, a handle, or a competitor profile. Operators keep streams clean: AND, OR, a minus sign to exclude a word, and a language filter. A good query is specific enough to miss the noise and broad enough to catch misspellings, for example "multipost social" OR "multi post social" -job.

Four kinds of streams most teams keep

• Brand: your name in all the ways people write it, without the @, so untagged praise and complaints appear.
• Topic: two or three phrases your audience uses when they have the problem you solve.
• Hashtag: the one or two tags your community uses, to find posts worth joining and people worth following.
• Competitor: a competitor's name or handle, to learn what their customers love and miss.

Streams can be shared with the workspace or kept personal. Agencies keep a set per client workspace. The free plan includes one stream; Essentials three; Team ten; Agency twenty-five. Each stream can span any mix of the networks that offer public search.

Reading a stream: volume, sentiment and the posts behind them

The stream page opens with a chart of mentions per day for the chosen period, colored by sentiment: a green band for positive, grey for neutral, red for negative. Below the chart, three tiles show total mentions, estimated reach (the sum of the authors' followers, where the network shares it) and the share of negative mentions. Then the posts, newest first, each with the author, the network chip, the text, the sentiment dot and quick actions.

Click a day on the chart to see only that day's posts, which is how you find the single post that caused a spike. Sort by reach to see who with a large audience mentioned you. Filter by sentiment to read complaints together. Every post has four actions: open on the network, reply (which creates an inbox item), save as idea on the Create board, and mute author, for accounts that match your query for the wrong reason.

Sentiment is estimated by a model that reads the text in context. It is right most of the time and wrong often enough that you should read the posts, not only the chart. Sarcasm and industry slang are the usual misses. You can correct a label with one click and the correction is used for your workspace going forward.

Alerts and thresholds

Each stream has an alert threshold: mentions per day, negative mentions per day, or a percentage jump against the seven-day average. When a threshold is crossed, Multi Post Social sends a notification to the people you chose, by email, push and optionally Slack through the integrations. The notification includes the chart, the top three posts and a link to the stream. Alerts are what turn social media listening from a weekly read into an early-warning system.

Set thresholds by looking at the past month: if your brand stream averages six mentions a day, an alert at twenty catches a real event without firing every Tuesday. For negative sentiment, a small absolute number such as three per day is often right. Review thresholds quarterly as your volume grows.

Competitor tracking

A competitor stream shows the conversation around another brand: how often they are mentioned, how people feel, what features or problems come up. On the Agency and Enterprise plans, competitor profiles can also be tracked for posting frequency, follower growth and engagement rate, which feeds the benchmark section in analytics. Use competitor streams to find unanswered complaints that your product solves, to learn vocabulary, and to notice a launch early. Do not use them to copy content or to reply to a competitor's customers with ads; networks treat that as spam and audiences dislike it.

Early warning for problems

Most problems on social media are small for a few hours before they are large, and social media listening is the only part of the product that sees them at that stage. A shipping delay, an outage, a joke that landed badly, a screenshot taken out of context. Social media listening sees the first ten posts before anyone tags you. The useful setup is simple: a brand stream with a negative-sentiment alert, a notification to two people who can act, and a saved reply in the inbox for the first response. When the alert fires, read the posts, decide whether the issue is real, publish one clear update, pause scheduled posts that would look tone-deaf, and answer people one by one in the inbox.

The pause button for the queue lives in the scheduler, one tap per channel or for the whole workspace. Resume when the conversation has settled. The timeline of the stream and your replies becomes the record for the post-mortem.

Sources and plan limits

Social media listening depends on what networks offer for public search. Coverage differs: some networks expose full keyword search, some only hashtags or mentions of your own handle, and a few share nothing beyond your own account. The table shows what each source can do today and what each plan includes.

Step by step: your first three streams

1. Create a brand stream. Query: your brand name in two or three spellings, in quotes, joined with OR, minus words that cause false matches. Networks: all that support keyword search.
2. Create a topic stream. Pick two phrases your customers use when they describe the problem, not the product. Add a language filter.
3. Create a competitor stream on a paid plan, with the competitor's name and handle.
4. Let them run for a week. Read each stream for five minutes a day; mute accounts that match for the wrong reason.
5. Set thresholds at about three times the daily average for volume and a small absolute number for negative mentions.
6. Choose who gets alerts and connect Slack if your team lives there.
7. Act on what you hear. Reply to a question through the inbox, save a recurring complaint as an idea, and bring one audience phrase into next week's captions with the AI assistant.

Turning social media listening into content

Most teams set up social media listening to catch problems and then discover its second job: it is the best content research tool they own. Every stream is a list of what real people say, in their words, about the thing you post about. Here is a weekly routine that turns streams into posts without copying anyone.

Collect questions

Filter your topic stream for question marks. Each question is a post brief: answer it in a carousel, a short video or a thread. Save the post as an idea on the Create board with one click; the idea keeps the original wording so your caption uses the words people actually search and say.

Borrow vocabulary, not posts

Note the phrases that repeat across a stream: the way people describe the problem, the slang for the result they want. Bring two of those phrases into next week's captions through the AI assistant's tone profile. Social media listening is how a brand stops sounding like a brand and starts sounding like its audience.

Find the gap competitors leave

Read the negative mentions in a competitor stream for a month. A complaint that repeats is a feature or a topic you can speak to honestly, without naming the competitor. A compliment that repeats is a standard your audience expects; make sure you meet it before you post about it.

Join conversations, do not hijack them

A hashtag stream shows posts worth replying to: a creator asking for recommendations, a thread about a method you use. Reply with help, not a pitch, from the connected channel on that network. Social media listening plus a kind reply is how small accounts earn their first hundred engaged followers.

Time your posts to the conversation

Volume charts show when a topic is active each week. If your topic stream peaks on Sunday evening, a Sunday slot in the posting schedule puts your post where the readers already are. Cross-check with the best-time map in analytics, which reads your own results.

Report what you heard

Add a listening section to the monthly report: mentions, sentiment split, the three most shared posts about you, and one quote. Clients and managers understand a quote faster than a chart. Social media listening gives the report a voice, not only numbers.

Benefits and limits

The benefits of social media listening are early knowledge and better words. Early knowledge: a problem seen at ten posts instead of a thousand, a trend seen before it peaks, a happy customer found before they are forgotten. Better words: the phrases your audience uses are the phrases that make your posts land, and streams hand them to you every day. Agencies add a third benefit: a client report that shows the conversation around the brand, not only the brand's own posts.

The limits are set by the networks and by language. Several large networks do not offer keyword search to tools, so coverage is uneven and the table above is honest about it. Sentiment is an estimate; read the posts. Volume numbers reflect public posts only, never private groups or messages. And listening tells you what people say, not why; follow up with a question in the inbox or a poll in your next post.

Listening on your phone

The mobile app shows each stream as a feed with the chart collapsed at the top; tap to expand. Alerts arrive as push notifications with the top posts inside, so a spike can be judged without opening the app. Swipe a post to reply, save as idea or mute. Tips: keep alerts for the brand stream only on the phone, read topic streams at your desk, and use the share sheet to send a notable post to a teammate.