r/BuyItForLife4.0M members
Women sweats that don’t SUCK
250 votes471 commentsreddit/search
Glossary · Metrics and listening
What is social listening?
Short answer
Social listening is the practice of tracking public conversations about a brand, product, competitor or topic across social platforms, forums and news, then analysing them to spot problems, trends and opportunities.
11 platforms in one Conversations search
- Reddit
X
TikTok
YouTube
Instagram
LinkedIn
Threads
Bluesky
Hacker News
Pinterest
GitHub
Mentions of “Gymshark”
Comment on Gymshark’s reel
“Havnt picked up some Gymshark in a while, hoping this is the one!”
Commentinstagram/post-comments
Real results, recorded 25 Sep 2026 and 26 Sep 2026. Authors left out.
content_analysis/summary“notion”
75%positive, of the 20 mentions with an opinion
- Positive1575%
- Negative525%
100 mentions across Google News and Hacker News; 80 more were neutral. Real response, recorded 27 Sep 2026.
Monitor · “Notion”
New post mentioning Notion
I'm switching to Google Docs until i find a good Notion alternative
97 votes124 commentsr/Notion
Sent toEmailSlackDiscordWebhook
A real post, recorded 23 Sep 2026, laid out as a monitor alert.
01
Monitoring vs listening
The two words are often used together, but they describe different steps.
Social monitoringSocial listening
QuestionWhat was said about us?What does it tell us?
OutputA feed of mentions and alerts.Themes, sentiment shifts and trends over time.
Typical actionReply to a customer, fix a bug.Change a product, a campaign or a message.
Monitoring collects the mentions. Listening is what you do with them.
02
What teams track
Brand and product names
Including common misspellings and nicknames.
Competitors
To see launches, complaints and switching talk.
Category keywords
Such as "best CRM for startups", to find buying intent.
Campaign hashtags and creators
To measure reach beyond your own accounts.
Risk terms
Such as outage, refund, lawsuit or recall, for early warnings.
In Monocrawl
Listen with Conversations
Conversations is the social listening tool in your Monocrawl dashboard. Enter a brand, product or topic, choose your platforms and a time window, and read the matching public posts in one feed, newest first.
Newest first, with the evidence
Platform, author, date, text and a link to the original post. Sort oldest first or by most interactions.
Replies in context
Switch on Include replies to collect the comments under matching posts, within a spending limit you choose.
Free filters
Narrow by platform, text, community or language at no cost. On paid plans, describe what you want and the AI filter keeps the posts that match.
CSV or JSON export
Each post with its platform, author, date, title, text, link, community and language.
Price before you search
The maximum charge shows before you start. Unused reserved credits come back.
Monitor this search
Turn a saved search into a monitor. It keeps the name, platforms and depth, and checks for new posts on your schedule.
Start with 150 free credits. No card required.
ConversationsPreview
Notion2 platformsLast 30 days
2 platformsLast 30 days- r/Notion
I'm switching to Google Docs until i find a good Notion alternative
97 votes124 commentsOriginal
- Hacker News
How Notion handles concurrent editing with CRDTs
6 pointsOriginal
- r/Notion
Notion alternative for the operations half coz the new row permissions still dont cut it
8 votes14 commentsOriginal
- r/Notion
Help: looking for a free, web-based alternative to Notion Mail
8 votes17 commentsOriginal
CSVJSONFilters and exports are free
Monitor this search
On a saved search, choose Monitor this search. The monitor keeps the search’s name, platforms and depth, checks for new posts on the schedule you set, and records only mentions it has not seen before.
New findings arrive on the monitor page, by email, in Slack or Discord, or at your own webhook, straight away or as a daily or weekly digest.
How Monitor this search works- A saved search
- Checked on your schedule
- Only unseen mentions
- Email, Slack, Discord or webhook
Prefer code?
For one-off research, search endpoints such as reddit/omni-search return matching threads with their top comments in a single call. Failed or empty calls are not charged.
search/allOne query across sources, deduplicated and scored.10 creditsreddit/omni-searchMatching threads with their top comments.5 creditsx/search-tweetsPublic X posts by keyword, newest or top first.1 creditcontent_analysis/sentimentPositive, neutral and negative split for a keyword.3 credits
03
How a listening workflow runs
- 01
Define queries
The names and keywords above, plus exclusions to cut noise.
In MonocrawlConversations - 02
Collect mentions from the sources your audience uses, on a schedule.
In MonocrawlMonitors - 03
Remove duplicates and spam, then label each mention by topic and tone.
In MonocrawlMonitors skip repeatscontent_analysis/search - 04
Alert people on what needs action now, such as a complaint going viral.
In MonocrawlEmail, Slack, Discord, webhook - 05
Review trends weekly
Volume, share of voice against competitors and recurring themes.
In Monocrawlcontent_analysis/phrase-trendsCSV export
The hard parts are coverage and noise. Every platform has its own search and limits, and a common brand name can match thousands of irrelevant posts.
04
Build or buy
- A
Listening suite
Collection, dashboards and reports in one product, behind a seat licence.
- B
Data API
The raw mentions. Build your own logic, feed a data warehouse or hand the job to an AI agent.
Teams that already have analysts or engineers often find the API route cheaper and more flexible.
Questions
Common questions
Is social listening legal?
Reading and analysing public posts is standard practice. Handle any personal data under the privacy laws that apply to you, such as GDPR in the UK and EU.
How is it different from social media analytics?
Analytics measures your own accounts: reach, followers, clicks. Listening looks at everyone else’s public posts about you, your competitors or your market.
How often should mentions be checked?
Hourly or faster for crisis and support use; daily is enough for most research and reporting.
Try it on real data
One key for public data.
Social, search and web.
Start with 150 free credits. No card required.