But throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks is ineffective and burns teams out. Social has become so fragmented and algorithms so personal, that marketers are increasingly unsure where their true audience really is. The report found that the #1 thing marketers say would make their strategies more effective is real-time insights about what their audience wants to consume.

We’re back with the latest edition of our series, @Me Next Time, where we invite Team Sprout and some of our favorite social experts to share how they really feel about the latest trends and industry discourse.

This time, we sat down with Paula Perez, Social Content Specialist at Oatly, to learn why brands don’t need to show up everywhere. What they need is better intelligence about where their audience is and what they want to see. If you spend any time digging into the Swedish company’s social presence, it’s clear how well they understand their audience and the role their products play in their lives. You can watch our entire fireside chat with Perez on-demand.

What are social media audience insights?

Social media audience insights are actionable insights that reveal who your audience really is, what they care about and how they behave online. It’s important to remember that audience insights aren’t limited to quantifiable performance metrics. Instead, you analyze:

• How users are talking about your brand, product, industry and competitors (even when you aren’t tagged)
• Tone and comment sentiment
• The demographic makeup of your audience
• Which networks your audience likes to spend time and engage with brands

Perez elaborates, “We’re big on qualitative metrics and data storytelling. We ask ourselves: Are we reaching audiences we haven’t seen before? Are we receiving inbound creator messages from new types of online communities? What is the reaction to our outbound comments on our partners’ pages? But we also look at reach and engagement to bring in hard numbers.”

Why social media audience insights are crucial 

Brands are no longer built by advertising firms. They’re built by audiences, and shaped by the millions of moments that make up the patina of online culture. Social audience insights are the key to tapping into this parallel world, and breaking through saturated social feeds and algorithm fatigue.

But it isn’t about dominating the conversation. As Perez describes, “We talk about it like being invited into someone’s home. Our online audience has already created a space, built a vibe and welcomed us in. Our job isn’t to rearrange their furniture or tell them how to host. Our job is to add value to the moment and respect the tone of their ‘house.’ That mindset shapes everything about how we build community. We lead with intention and respect, and remember that we’re participants—not directors—in the conversations people are having about Oatly.”

Here are the ways the Oatly team relies on social media insights to inform their social strategy.

Develop truly original content 

Feeds are inundated with AI slop and lightning pace trend cycles. Consumers are overstimulated. Per the Q4 2025 Sprout Pulse Survey, human-generated content is the #1 thing consumers want brands to prioritize on social in 2026.

Perez and team went all-in on human touch when cultivating the social rollout for Oatly’s Lookbook campaign, a couture-inspired series that highlights barista-level recipes.

“We worked with cultural intelligence platform CultureLab to dive deep into the world of beverage trends. Plus, we have an in-house barista team and a head of food and beverage experience who craft the beverages. Together, they developed the Taste Report, and the recipes followed. On social, our in-house team executed from start-to-finish. They had creative ideas inspired by online culture (i.e., ‘model-inspired polaroids,’ matcha ping pong, custom Oatly icecubes). So many people commented asking whether our  creative was AI-generated, but it wasn’t. It all came from real, talented people.”

Because of social audience insights, the Oatly team was empowered to ground their campaign creative in the emerging trends and cultural signals their audience cares about, from flavors like cardamom and rosemary to unexpected lattés like custard and chia seed pudding.

Find niche audiences inside of niche audiences 

The internet is growing increasingly niche. Most of us have disparate algorithms informed by our quirky hobbies, favorite TV shows and even favorite products. It’s impossible to tell what someone’s corner of the internet looks like based on demographics like age or location alone.

Perez describes: “We never assume a generation is a monolith. Even within Gen Z, there are pockets of subcultures inside other subcultures. Social is so saturated right now that it can feel overwhelming to decode what’s an actual signal vs. what’s just noise. So we look for the communities that genuinely love us, even if they seem totally unrelated to each other. One recent partnership was with EF Pro Cycling. We featured their team in content cross-posted with their social accounts and received a ton of love from the cycling community for highlighting the sport during Tour de France. Plus, we realized athletes love Oatly to help them carb load and fuel up for their workouts. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we get so much love from the aesthetic ‘romanticizing life’ girls who always find creative ways to add Oatly to their matcha during their morning routines. These groups could not be more different, but they are both passionate about Oatly.”

The Oatly team delves deep into researching these hyper-niche communities so they can build long-term relationships and credibility. “We’ve filmed at the University of Alabama with frat boys and cheerleaders. With Miami city girls at nightclubs. With the cycling community across Europe. We go deep into these niches not to chase trends, but to understand which ones have the potential to produce our superfans and ambassadors,” explains Perez.

Ensure brand relevancy in an always-changing world

Consumer preferences for how and where brands show up online aren’t changing every few years—or even annually. Marketers need to embrace new expectations quarterly (or more) to keep up with culture.

Perez and the Oatly team have relied on audience insights to keep up with the constant evolution. “Our social activity looks a lot different today than it did even five years ago. When we were first gaining traction, especially in the US, people loved to see us bucking trends (think: Instagram captions that were basically three-paragraph essays). Millennials loved disruption, and DTC brands were built around being the disruptor. But Gen Z? They set the tone and expect brands to follow it. We never used to jump into random threads unless we’d been tagged or deliberately invited. If we showed up unprompted, it would feel off. People would comment, ‘Oatly…why are you here?’ But now the expectation has shifted—especially on TikTok. When we’re late to a conversation, people call it out. ‘Oatly, y’all are late.’ And they’re right. The community now expects us to be part of the moment.”

To meet the consumer call to show up in comment threads or conversations proactively and unprompted, many social teams are adopting a newsroom model, helping them access audience insights that predict trends, spot emerging conversations and assess risk.

Social media audience insights serve the entire business—not just marketing 

The potential for social audience insights doesn’t end at refining your content strategy. This data serves a vital role in sharing social intelligence company-wide. By harnessing insights around customer behavior, expectations and emotions on social, you can influence everything from product development to market expansion. This data analysis can shape the next product variation you release, the feature upgrades you prioritize and the retired items you decide to bring back.

That’s exactly what happened when Oatly launched their matcha oat beverage in the EU after demand for the flavor profile reached a fever pitch.

“Launching matcha in the EU is one of my favorite examples of a time when community input shaped the direction of our product development. The explosion of matcha and custom beverages on social in several markets including DACH, Spain and France created massive demand. We always stay really close with our product teams, regularly sharing feedback and trends we’re seeing online. We work in tandem with their own market research process and, in this case, we all knew the trend was too big to ignore.”

Social audience insights aren’t a replacement for other market research, but they can be a valuable (and fast) way to validate the signals your company hears in other venues.

Finding your audience requires going deeper, not wider

Meaningful audience growth and resonance doesn’t come from being everywhere. It comes from understanding where and how your brand belongs, and what your audience expects of you. As Oatly shows, social media audience insights give brands the clarity to prioritize the right networks, subniches and content strategies.

When brands listen to their audience and act on real-time signals, they not only create better content, but develop better products, too. The future of social (and business) belongs to brands that trade more accounts for better intelligence.

To dive deeper into the network-specific trends and consumer behaviors, download The 2026 Social Media Content Strategy Report.

The post Brands need more social audience insights, not more accounts appeared first on Sprout Social.

“Some of our early feedback from the market was, ‘This is too good to be true!’ Potential customers were naturally skeptical,” according to David Walsh, Head of Digital, CX & Marketing at pay.com.au.

As a result, traditional marketing channels like paid search struggled to gain traction. The team needed a better way to educate audiences about the validity and credibility of their products, and social gave them a meaningful path forward.

Turning social intelligence into action

The team created a series of authentic customer success stories for social media, brought to life through structured video content. pay.com.au identified customers across various industries that represented its broad customer base. Each story was captured in a two-minute video highlighting how customers overcame inefficient payment processes using pay.com.au to achieve tangible travel and cost savings, as well as capturing rewards for required business expenses. To maximize reach, these videos were repurposed into 30, 15 and 6-second clips for distribution across Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn and TikTok.

pay.com.au supported these channels with platform-optimized paid media, to directly address customer doubt with specific messages and approaches per channel. To do this with precision, the team leveraged Sprout Social for rich, granular insights that helped them go beyond basic engagement data. By analyzing content themes, audience sentiment and emerging customer questions, the team gained a deep understanding of how business owners and advisors responded to their messaging, and used those insights to inform and iterate their paid media strategy.

These social insights do more than just refine content; they inform the entire business. Key takeaways regarding audience motivation and confusion were shared across pay.com.au’s Product, Customer Support, Partnerships and Growth teams. Through regular summaries and campaign readouts, social intelligence now directly shapes the company’s FAQs, onboarding processes and product decisions.

This agile, data-driven approach led to an impressive 529% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) between 2022 and 2025.

With the help of Sprout’s Publishing, Listening and Reporting, we were able to quickly test, learn and optimise our content format across a range of social channels.

David Walsh
Head of Digital, CX & Marketing

This iterative approach enabled the team to find content that broke through skepticism and built a lasting foundation of trust.

Optimizing conversions through care

Social media offered business owners a direct line to the company for quick eligibility checks and to ask detailed questions about how rewards work.

The team quickly recognized that their ability to capture, classify and respond to these inquiries would be critical to scaling their growth. They began measuring and benchmarking their response rate as a key service metric to improve the speed and quality of support. Before implementing Sprout, their response rate was just 20%. After using Sprout for just one week, their response rate dramatically improved to 98%.

“Using Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox monitoring and response handling, we were able to improve our response rate all the way up to 98%,” Walsh explained. “We see this as an essential part of how we support and guide businesses through their initial contact.”

This proactive monitoring and response using the Smart Inbox not only improves customer experience, but also delivers substantial business impact by reducing the immediate load on the sales team and dramatically increasing the overall conversion rate to sign-up. A proactive, Smart Inbox-driven workflow cut down the noise and manual load on the sales team and increased the overall conversion rate of new customers progressing through to sign up.

Scaling content for global ambition

As pay.com.au’s social strategy scaled up, the end-to-end process of scheduling and publishing content across channels became a major workflow bottleneck. By activating the Sprout Social and Canva integration, the team streamlined their creative production by pulling final assets directly from Canva into Sprout for scheduling and publishing. This eliminated manual steps like saving and re-uploading files, and enabled faster, more efficient content delivery.

Off the back of its Australian success, pay.com.au launched a new brand, PayRewards, to embark on an ambitious mission to become the number one business rewards platform in North America. The team used Sprout Social Groups to clearly separate the Australian and US social accounts, allowing them to manage region-specific content, workflows and reporting so each market receives locally relevant messaging without cross-posting or operational overlap.

Scaling trust into a global blueprint

By unifying their social presence within Sprout Social, pay.com.au has transformed social media from a simple communication channel into a high-velocity growth engine. What began as a mission to dismantle market skepticism has evolved into a data-driven culture where real-time audience sentiment guides everything from product roadmaps to their ambitious North American expansion.

For Walsh and his team, Sprout is more than a management tool—it’s a strategic partner that proves social intelligence is a core driver for decision-making across the entire enterprise. As they scale PayRewards globally, they’re leveraging a proven blueprint of customer trust, fueled by the insights that only social can provide.

Unlock the benefits of social intelligence for your business. Request a demo with Sprout Social today.

The post How pay.com.au built trust and fueled massive growth with a social-first strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

While Paychex already maintained an active social media presence, social media publishing was often an afterthought in campaign planning, and customer care on social platforms involved manual processes that compromised efficiency and speed in responding to customers. The teams recognized an opportunity to evolve. Paychex adopted Sprout Social, transforming its Organic Social and 24/7 Care teams into a strategic, cohesive social powerhouse that exemplifies measurable business impact and operational excellence.

The cost of operating in silos

Before implementing Sprout, the Organic Social team primarily operated in a reactive, publishing-only model, where social posts were treated as merely a “checkbox” function fulfilled at the end of campaign plans. The team had little strategic influence or feedback mechanism to inform future campaigns and operated as a just-in-time service organization to broader marketing efforts.

At the same time, the Care team used a separate platform to manage customer responses on social channels, and relied on complex legacy systems and manual spreadsheets for daily executive reporting and performance tracking. Valuable time was spent forwarding communications and reconciling data instead of maximizing efficiency to respond thoughtfully and quickly to customers’ requests for support.

These challenges highlighted the limitations of the tools themselves. Brittney Luedtke, Lead of Organic Social Media at Paychex, had extensive experience using the organization’s legacy social platforms, finding other social media management platforms so complicated and technically complex that her team relied on near-constant support from the vendor. Her team needed a platform that did more than consolidate social tasks: It had to connect the work, accelerate cross-team visibility and empower teams to take swift action.

Sprout’s intuitive UI was a key factor in their decision to choose Sprout Social, ensuring that the entire team, including Care supervisors who weren’t daily users on the platform, could onboard immediately without leaning on technical support or extensive training. Combined with the social media management suite’s extensive reporting capabilities and support for integrated workflows across functions, the switch to Sprout offered collaborative efficiency and ease unmatched by other vendors.

Social as a business intelligence engine

For Luedtke, with her team’s focus on social publishing and employee advocacy, the goal was simple: Elevate social from a marketing function to the backbone of a data-driven business strategy.

Leveraging Paychex’s guiding principle is that “data is only powerful when it drives decisions.” Luedtke uses Sprout’s Reporting and Analytics tools to empower the Organic Social team to deliver on meaningful business metrics, including engagement rate by reach, social share of voice and lead attributions.

Paychex tracks the impact of their internal brand advocates using the financial metric of Earned Media Value (EMV) in Sprout Employee Advocacy, calculating the value based on Paychex-specific CPMs and reporting it back to executives in dollars—a critical metric they could never have reported on using prior tools. In the first month after onboarding Sprout Employee Advocacy in August 2025, Paychex’s Organic Social team has generated over $300,000 in EMV. The team also leverages Sprout’s Salesforce integration to link social actions directly to leads, another source of attributable financial impact for the social strategy.

Sprout is the backbone of how we manage our social channels, how we’re measuring our social channels and our impact at Paychex.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Beyond performance data, Luedtke’s team now captures qualitative social insights that add value far beyond marketing. For example, Sprout Listening identifies trigger events (such as a CFO or CHRO change in an enterprise account) and provides the sales team with immediate, actionable intelligence. It also tracks real-time small business conversations around regulatory changes, insights the social team shares with the Brand, Creative and Engagement team to inform proactive communications campaigns that cement Paychex’s position as an industry thought leader.

The ability to manage online reputation is critical for Paychex, especially in volatile economic times. Luedtke notes that even informational posts about tax or regulatory updates can quickly draw hundreds of comments, escalating into politically charged, high-brand-risk conversations unrelated to HCM. Instead of intervening, which can exacerbate rising tensions, the team uses Sprout Tagging and Reporting to monitor conversation volatility, identify which content triggers debate and report on emerging risks to executive stakeholders without engaging directly in the conflict.

Care at lightning speed

Michelle Latoy, 24/7 Enterprise Manager, leads the team dedicated to Paychex’s elite customer service standard that maintains non-stop, year-round coverage with a strict 15-minute service level agreement (SLA) for responding to customers on social channels. Their success at meeting this goal was hamstrung by manual administrative processes and tracking when working in prior social media tools.

“One of the biggest pain points was we had to manually track everything. I could show you the ugly spreadsheets! Now we can do it all within Sprout,” adds Latoy.

Bringing the Care team along on the move to Sprout’s centralized social management suite eliminated manual tracking and immediately streamlined workflows for the 13 dedicated social support representatives, allowing them to focus entirely on speedy customer response and resolution.

The Care team quickly adopted Sprout’s dedicated case management capabilities and delivered a monumental efficiency win: Paychex decreased its average SLA response time by 67% within 60 days. Supervisors use Sprout’s Inbox Team Reports to track individual agents’ progress on cases, ensuring the team workload is balanced and they are successfully complying with the 15-minute SLA.

Since care representatives are trained from a traditional phone service approach, they often need help crafting appropriate social-friendly responses that adhere to the brand voice and tone.

The team embraces Sprout AI to move away from scripted templates and deliver a more authentic and personalized response for every social interaction, while striking the right balance between automation efficiency and a high-quality human interaction that Paychex customers expect from the industry-leading brand.

Latoy shares “We’re not trained on social media. Our agents are thinking about it with the service mindset. Using Sprout’s AI functionality to help rewrite responses makes them more personable.”

One source of shared social intelligence

The greatest win for Paychex was the unification of Organic Social and customer care workflows into one integrated platform, breaking down departmental silos and creating a shared view of customer interactions on social media.

Prior to Sprout, I don’t think we had a really good relationship between the two teams, because we worked in two different systems. The easy collaboration we have now is a huge win cross-functionally.

Michelle Latoy
24/7 Enterprise Manager at Paychex

The Smart Inbox is now an operational hub. The ability to instantly tag, assign and track messages—everything from a positive customer comment for Organic Social to a complicated customer relations issue which Care resolves—replaces hours of internal emails and administrative work.

“If you add up all of these tasks, even the three-minute ones, it’s so much time during the week that was being taken away from other important work. Not having to do that manual handoff with Sprout, where we have one voice of truth, is phenomenal,”adds Luedtke.

This single, integrated system ensures that whether a customer is celebrating a win or raising a critical issue, Paychex is ready with a unified, professional and swift response.

The new standard for social enterprises

Paychex’s success proves that in the modern era, all business is social. The right platform is one that empowers their teams to be thoughtfully engaged, efficient and driving strategic impact no matter the economic environment.

It doesn’t matter if you’re B2B or B2C, your business is shaped by online conversation. Those that listen, those that respond and who engage authentically, will lead the future of social media.

Brittney Luedtke
Organic Social Lead at Paychex

Learn how Sprout Social can help your organization transform social insights into business strategy. Request your free demo today.

The post How Paychex unites social media management and customer care for a strategic advantage appeared first on Sprout Social.

For example, you begin by asking a conversational AI what your audience is talking about today. It quickly surfaces a clear opportunity in the form of an emerging trend, a shared question or an unexpected moment of enthusiasm about a product feature gaining momentum.

With that insight in hand, you collaborate on content the same day, from writing a decisive brief to using tools like Canva to create social assets that reflect what your audience already cares about. You publish this content while the conversation is still relevant, engage in real time and close the loop by tracking performance tied directly back to the original insight—all within a normal day’s work.

This is what social listening should enable. A practical, connected workflow that helps social teams respond with speed and confidence instead of insights that live in reports or get revisited after the moment has passed.

This guide breaks down how to turn social listening insights into action so your team can move from understanding what’s happening to making an impact when it matters most.

Why turning listening into action on social media matters to your audience

Active social listening goes beyond tracking mentions or monitoring keywords. It’s about engaging with your audience and using what you learn to guide real decisions—what you publish, how you respond and where you show up. When you treat listening as a passive exercise, insights stall. But when you approach listening as an active practice, social becomes a two-way relationship.

The gap between listening and action is noticeable to audiences. According to Sprout’s Q4 2025 Pulse Survey, 55% of global users say most companies do a good job listening to what audiences say on social media, but they don’t always act on those insights.

That disconnect can quietly erode trust. When people take the time to share opinions, questions or feedback, they expect to see some reflection of it in how brands communicate and evolve. Turning insights into action lets audiences know their feelings and opinions matter.

Turning listening into action informs original, audience-aligned content that feels intentional. Instead of chasing every trend, you can build content series, themes and narratives grounded in real audience interests. The result is content that’s more consistent and relevant and has a bigger likelihood of earning long-term engagement and loyalty.

The core social listening challenge: Connecting insight to action

Brands are collecting more social insights than ever, yet struggle to turn them into action—hence the reason why audiences feel like brands aren’t listening to their feedback. The challenge isn’t access to data; it’s that teams don’t know how to turn social listening insights into action. The struggle is about connecting insights to the teams and moments where engagement actually happens.

When listening lives in isolation, insights fail to influence content, conversations or decisions in real time. Closing this gap requires breaking down the barriers that prevent teams from acting on what they hear.

The silo problem

Social listening data often sits within marketing or digital teams, limiting its impact across the org. When insights aren’t shared beyond social, teams like R&D, sales and customer care miss valuable signals about customer needs, objections and emerging opportunities. This creates a disconnect where the brand is technically listening to audiences, but not moving in a way that informs product decisions, revenue conversations or support experiences.

When you operationalize social insights by building shared workflows and regular cross-team touchpoints, insights move easily to the teams that can act on them.

The reactive cycle

Social teams are often flooded with data spread across too many tools, making it hard to see which insights actually deserve action. Without a central place to prioritize and organize signals, insights get logged, revisited later or lost altogether. This creates a reactive cycle where teams are constantly trying to keep up, responding after the moment has passed. Or, defaulting to what’s most urgent rather than most meaningful. As a result, you’re playing catch-up rather than pursuing proactive marketing.

When insight-to-action takes too long, relevance suffers and opportunities to engage slip by. The way forward is to centralize your listening data and enable your social team to prioritize insights, take action and measure impact in real time.

How to move from passive monitoring to active intelligence with Sprout

Moving from passive monitoring to active intelligence can show you how to turn social listening insights into action. According to the 2025 Impact of Social Media Report, 60% of marketing leaders from around the globe say social media drives new customer acquisition. And 54% say social insights drive R&D and decision making.

In this section, we’ll explore how Sprout tools enable you to move beyond reactive workflows, turning data into social intelligence that drives meaningful audience engagement.

Act fast on trends and insights

Social listening surfaces high-stakes opportunities that demand immediate action, including:

• Proactive crisis detection: Spot emerging issues before they escalate, protecting brand reputation and maintaining audience trust.
  
• Discovering product pain points: Identify customer challenges or questions early so product, R&D, marketing and customer care can respond quickly.
  
• Spotting micro-trends for content: Capitalize on growing conversations to create timely campaigns, content series or social activations.

Turning these insights into action requires a structured approach. A social media newsroom centralizes insight collection and content coordination, enabling teams to respond to trends, allocate resources and publish content quickly. Similarly, a social media center of excellence (CoE) provides a scalable framework that breaks down silos, sets consistent standards and ensures insights flow across marketing, customer care, sales and product teams.

Tools like Sprout’s Agentic AI Trellis help surface insights faster by organizing social conversations and identifying emerging themes in real time. Together, these models and tools create a system where high-value insights don’t just sit in dashboards. They enable you to inform decisions, shape content and drive measurable impact across the business.

Democratize insights across departments

Democratizing social insights ensures data isn’t just collected, it’s acted on, creating alignment and a truly data-driven culture across the organization. That’s how you can turn social listening insights into action to empower the entire org.

Listening helps you build a stronger business when the data is accessible to other departments beyond the social team. It ensures decisions across the board are informed by audience intelligence and encourages action.

The good news is leaders want cross-functional departments to use social data to inform their actions, according to the 2025 Impact of Social Media Report.

When democratized, social insights can drive impact across other departments in several ways:

• PR & communications: Access to trending topics or emerging sentiment allows teams to craft timely press statements or messaging that resonates with the public.
• R&D and product teams: Identifying recurring customer pain points or feature requests informs product development and prioritization.
• Customer care: Visibility into common customer questions or frustrations helps support teams proactively address issues and improve satisfaction.
• Marketing & campaign planning: Understanding audience preferences and micro-trends allows marketing teams to create content that aligns with what people are actually talking about.

By sharing insights in clear, digestible formats such as shareable links, dashboards or automated reports, you enable all teams outside of social to be in sync with market sentiments and act quickly and confidently.

In practice, this can look like:

• Ongoing visibility into sentiment and trends through live listening dashboards shared with PR, product and CX teams.
• Automated weekly or biweekly insight reports highlighting key shifts, risks and recommended actions.
• Recurring cross-functional reviews in the form of weekly standups or monthly insight meetings to align on patterns and next steps.
• Real-time alerts or shareable links delivered via Slack or email for fast-moving issues or opportunities.

These approaches transform social listening into shared intelligence, helping teams across the organization align, collaborate and make decisions grounded in audience needs.

Breakdown data silos with seamless integration

Robust integrations are critical to turning social listening into actionable intelligence. When social data flows directly into CRM tools, like Salesforce, Slack or Tableau, that teams already use, it becomes part of existing workflows rather than an extra step to manage. This ensures signals from social channels reach the right people at the right time and empowers teams to act upon customer feedback or emerging opportunities quickly.

Integrations also help break down traditional data silos. Social teams, marketing, sales and customer support can all see the same insights in the platforms where they work, reducing duplication and improving alignment. For example, a customer data point that surfaces in Sprout Social can automatically appear in Salesforce for the sales team, in Slack for immediate alerts or in Tableau for enterprise-level reporting.

By connecting social insights with operational tools, brands can move from passive monitoring to proactive, coordinated action across the organization.

Turn social listening insights into action

Turning social listening insights into action transforms how brands engage with audiences. By acting on real-time data, breaking down silos and sharing insights across teams, you move beyond passive monitoring and inform key decisions across the organization that drive both meaningful connections and revenue. In the end, it’s not just about listening, it’s about responding, adapting and showing up in ways that truly matter to your audience.

Schedule a live Sprout Social demo and find out how to turn social listening insights into action.

Schedule a Demo Today

The post How to turn social listening insights into action and connect with your audience appeared first on Sprout Social.

Less than half (44%) rate their social team at the expert level when it comes to measuring the business impact of social, according to the same report. They aren’t seeing the metrics that matter most, to them or to other teams across the company. Although digital marketing teams are the most likely to use social data to inform decisions—by a long shot—leaders want teams like customer experience and success, customer care and support, and business development to use social insights to drive their decisions, too.

For that to happen, teams need to democratize access to social and share reports that go beyond engagements and conversions. If they don’t, they risk falling short of consumer expectations. Only 31% of consumers say companies effectively listen to what audiences say on social and act on their feedback, according to Sprout’s Q4 2025 Pulse Survey.

The solution: Turning social media insights into social business intelligence. By transforming social from a siloed marketing channel into a centralized insights hub, your team can play a critical role uniting your entire company around audience, industry and competitor intelligence.

Four ways to use social business intelligence across your org

Social business intelligence starts with social listening. Social listening is the practice of collecting and analyzing conversations across social media platforms to draw useful, actionable business insights. Marketers today know what people say in influencer reviews and on Reddit threads shapes perception more than any billboard, ad campaign or website copy ever will.

Though listening is the foundation of social business intelligence, other social data sources—like influencer marketing tools and media monitoring platforms—feed social intelligence ecosystems too.

When all of this data converges, teams have trend predictions, consumer insights and market and competitive intelligence at their fingertips.

Trend predictions: Be proactive instead of reactive

To win in the world of social search, you can’t rely on lagging indicators or internal assumptions. You need to spot trends early, optimize content and publish at the right time. Social business intelligence helps with all three.

By tapping into social intelligence, you can identify rising trends, creators and search behaviors on networks like TikTok, Reddit and Instagram. Rather than launching campaigns and hoping they land, your team can craft content that aligns with what your audience is already searching for—with the right keywords, structure and platform-specific cues.

By maximizing discoverability and relevance, you capture high-intent search traffic and turn social discovery into website visits, conversions and revenue.

Consumer behavior: Understand the voice of the customer

With social intelligence, you can build a direct line to customer behavior, expectations and emotions at scale—detecting sentiment shifts in real-time. A sudden spike in negative mentions about delayed shipping or a buggy app update can alert teams before support tickets flood in. Social teams can flag the issue, respond publicly and route insights to customer care or product, preventing a single complaint from turning into a widespread crisis.

But you can also use voice of the customer data on social to better understand your audiences’ motivations and desires. By analyzing recurring questions, complaints and comments on social, brands can spot friction points customers may never report through traditional feedback channels (i.e., confusing onboarding steps, unclear pricing tiers or features that don’t deliver on expectations). These insights help teams prioritize fixes that actually improve the customer experience.

Market intelligence: Inform product, market and customer strategy

Used strategically, social business intelligence doesn’t just inform how you go to market. It informs what you go to market with. It can shape the next product variation you release, the feature upgrades you prioritize, the retired items you decide to bring back and more.

By analyzing recurring themes in social conversations—feature requests, comparisons to competitors or unmet needs—teams can validate what to build next and what to deprioritize. Instead of relying solely on internal assumptions, product and marketing leaders use demand signals to guide roadmaps and launches. Social intelligence identifies emerging use cases, audience segments or category shifts by tracking how people talk about products they wish existed (or ways they’re adapting existing ones). These insights can inform expansion into new markets or the timing of when to introduce a new offering.

Social insights empower your team to seize opportunity early, anticipating customer needs and demands so you can iterate and evolve faster.

Competitive intelligence: Strengthen your brand’s market position

Use competitive intelligence to analyze your competitors’ messaging and product positioning to confirm the customers and pain points they’re targeting. Determine how effective they are at winning over your shared audience. What’s resonating? Where are they leaving gaps? Use performance insights to take note of their engagement benchmarks, and social listening and media monitoring tools to assess how well they’re permeating the market.

How to connect social intelligence across the enterprise

What does it take to move from your current state to teams across the organization accessing social intelligence? The answer lies in rethinking workflows, embedding AI into data processing and using Sprout Social as the connective tissue between social and the rest of your company.

Speed up time to social insights

Historically, business leaders might have only reviewed social data retrospectively to gauge performance and progress to goals. We’ve entered a new era of social media management where that data can and should be used to drive proactive-decision making.

For example, social content focused on an older product might still consistently drive engagement, link clicks and website traffic. Your product team might use that data to upgrade the product in question, inspire a new product or bring back an old favorite, like when KFC brought back their beloved potato wedges.

Or maybe a wave of customers suddenly seek support through your social channels with concerns about a service outage, product flaw or website error. Based on those messages, your communications team can publish a statement while product or IT teams investigate. Meanwhile, customer service representatives can coordinate a support plan, monitor the situation and update customers as your business works toward a solution.

Beyond your product, you can also detect conversations bubbling up in your industry. Today’s news breaks on social before it reaches traditional media, and culture is born in niche online communities and comments sections. Which is why so many teams adopt a social media newsroom model. It enables visibility and cross-collaboration—allowing teams to surface critical insights across your organization, from the latest audience trends to competitor news.

In all scenarios, the resulting qualitative and quantitative social data helps your business make decisions in real-time, assess the impact and apply learnings in the future.

How Sprout fits in: Our Analytics and Listening solutions give businesses the power to harness real-time and retrospective social intelligence with ease.

With our Analytics tools, users unlock deep insights to learn what resonates with customers, identify market trends and prove the ROI of social impact so your organization can strategically wield social to increase future business impact. You can access social media performance across channels, from a network-level perspective all the way down to individual post performance. The intuitive interface makes it easy to navigate to the key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics that matter most to your business, and to benchmark your performance against competitors.

Our AI-driven Listening technology processes billions of data points automatically, delivering actionable learnings to help your brand stay ahead of the competition and exceed consumer expectations. You can track millions of conversations happening around key topics and turn data into actionable exec-ready learnings. More on that in the next section.

Democratize social listening data

As more businesses embrace social data as a business intelligence source, social professionals must be trusted and empowered to share their insights (check out our social media scorecard and executive summary templates for guidance on how to craft reports that go further than follower count and likes).

But moving forward, extracting value from social should be something anyone across a business can do. To truly make social a part of business transformation, brands must democratize social data.

Marketing departments are already challenged by a lack of technology adoption. If they have tools at all, they are typically cumbersome or prohibitive to users who aren’t deep analytics experts. Only 55% of social teams report using social media management platforms, per The Impact of Social Report.

At Sprout, employees outside of the marketing team are empowered to use listening data. Our sales representatives often use listening reports around timely events, and use the takeaways in their sales process. Listening also helps cross-functional teams reevaluate our business plan and hone in on what our customers need most.

How Sprout fits in: Sprout’s platform is intuitive enough for anyone to use, without a significant investment in technical training. With Sprout AI, social data becomes a central intelligence layer for your entire organization. Sprout AI isn’t a collection of features. It’s a new way of working that empowers marketers to:

• Spot emerging trends, sentiment shifts and potential risks.
• Identify what’s resonating with your audience and how to optimize for discoverability.
• Provide analyst-level insights and recommendations from complex data sets to inform strategy, product innovation and competitive intelligence.

Our new AI Agent, Trellis, is a strategic teammate that automates tedious tasks and surfaces real-time insights to drive better, faster decisions across every department. Teams can delegate complex research to Trellis and get custom, clear answers to pressing business questions with a simple, conversational query.

And Sprout’s ChatGPT connection is another secure, conversational way to get instant insights. Teams can analyze campaigns, discover top content and plan strategy with a simple conversation, empowering marketers to make faster, smarter decisions with solutions they already know and use.

Use social intelligence to drive business growth

Sprout customers have used our platform to answer questions like, what are the latest holiday shopping trends? Which creator should I partner with next? What are our competitors doing? But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Ultimately, social intelligence is a business growth lever. As Papa John’s Director of Social Media & Brand Engagement said, “Social listening is my favorite part of social media. You can find opportunities you would have never known about just by listening and paying attention.”

But social intelligence can only become a true operating system for your organization if it flows across all of the systems your team and customers touch. Social data is too critical to live only in dashboards.

How Sprout fits in: Teams need a deeply embedded ecosystem where social intelligence flows directly into the tools they already use. At Sprout, we enrich Salesforce cases with full social context for faster, empathetic service. We pipe social data into Tableau for wider business insights. We push critical trends into Slack for coordinated action.

Our platform also makes it possible to seamlessly move from a trend signal in Sprout to building a campaign brief in Asana to creating assets in Canva or Adobe Express, eliminating unnecessary friction.

Unlock social business intelligence for all

Social media already shapes every stage of the customer journey. But its full value is only unlocked when insights are shared beyond marketing. By democratizing access to social business intelligence, organizations can move faster, listen better and make smarter decisions rooted in real audience behavior.

When social data flows across teams, it becomes a unifying intelligence layer that fuels product innovation, customer experience and competitive advantage. The brands that win next will be the ones that treat social not as a channel, but as a core operating system for the business.

To see our social intelligence platform in action, request a demo today.

The post Why your entire team needs access to social business intelligence appeared first on Sprout Social.

When it came to social media, American Honda needed more than just a publishing tool. Tasked with transforming the company’s digital presence, Allie Coulter, Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead, sought a partner to help establish social as the primary engine of two-way dialogue between the brand and its customers. To overhaul the existing social content engine, Coulter and her team needed to do more than routine maintenance. They needed a partner to help lay the foundation for social engagement to become a core strategic asset, driving the company’s future.

A stalled social practice required a bold shift

Coulter was tasked with ensuring American Honda’s social practice measured up to the lofty standards of a global leader—a high-stakes mandate for a brand that prides itself on continually redefining automobile industry standards.

The social media team was trapped by a previous platform that was clunky, outdated and required ongoing manual maintenance. Honda’s four-person team needed technology that allowed them to prioritize customer conversations over technical troubleshooting. Meanwhile, the number of those customer conversations on social media was growing quickly. These began to pick up speed during the pandemic, when customer communication relied primarily on social media. The existing technology simply couldn’t keep up with the demand of so many messages, and forced the team into survival mode with a critical consequence: Community management was deprioritized entirely.

The existing relationship fractured further when vendor support failed alongside the technology shortcomings. Coulter’s team struggled with a lack of vendor responsiveness, putting in repetitive customer service tickets and not getting responses back. For a team tasked with moving at the speed of social, the lack of support was a breaking point.

“If we don’t have vendors that are able to support us at the speed that we need, that’s hard,” Coulter explains. It was clear: If Honda was going to iterate and innovate, its technology stack had to change as well.

Grabbing the keys to true partnership with Sprout Social

Coulter sought a solution that was intuitive, ready to go out of the box and being fed by ongoing innovative updates and feature releases. The decision to switch was strongly influenced by organic peer feedback that consistently praised Sprout’s ease of use and superior customer service. Once implemented, the entire Enterprise Social Media team, including Senior Social Strategist Heather Epstein, were able to shift their focus to being purely customer-centric. The unified nature of the Sprout products allowed Honda to coordinate multi-platform publishing alongside on-brand customer community building and responsive care, and proved indispensable.

“Most of our team is in Sprout every single day, whether it’s clearing queues and responding to key customer questions or scheduling content and pulling metrics. Sprout is there for whatever we need,” shares Epstein.

The Sprout platform’s intelligent queue management and Tagging created fast, measurable relief for the small team. This shift from time-consuming triage to decisive action was monumental. Epstein details the shift in daily operations: “We reduced [inbox management] from about five hours a day to two hours a day, and are still able to answer all of our critical customer questions.”

Co-creating the future of social

What truly solidified Sprout as a partner was the dedicated, two-way relationship that mirrored Honda’s commitment to its own customers—and the strategic dialogue that became Sprout’s greatest differentiator. Sprout didn’t just hand over a tool. The product team listened to feedback and worked alongside Honda to build a solution tailored to their complex business needs.

This partnership was proven when Sprout approached Honda about the opportunities of engaging in influencer marketing. Although Honda initially declined to proceed with Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, their team sat down with Sprout’s engineers and walked them through Honda’s robust, in-house influencer vetting protocol. Sprout took these notes seriously, and incorporated elements of Honda’s unique process directly into the updated Influencer Marketing product.

This collaborative effort led Honda to adopt Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, centralizing all of their social media efforts in one cohesive platform. The result: an ecosystem that simplifies and accelerates Honda’s ability to evaluate major partners, including Olympic athletes, alongside its social community management and customer support programs.

The fact that the Sprout team listened and really understood our process, which then helped influence certain integrations and enhancements to the tool—that’s a game changer. That’s truly a partner listening to their customers.

Allie Coulter
Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead

This spirit of collaboration was evident during implementation. As Epstein confirms, “When it came to our influencer marketing tool, that was something newer to our team … the Sprout representatives were really helpful in onboarding us. We had someone walking us through each step of the process, making sure that it was a seamless transition for us.”

Accelerating audience engagement and strategic impact

The shift to Sprout immediately restored Honda’s ability to connect with its customers. In the first year, Honda achieved a massive 251% increase in community engagement. In year two, with the foundation set, the team leveraged Sprout’s automations and filters to move their focus beyond the growing volume of conversations.

By prioritizing high-value engagements like shares, comments and direct messages, the team was able to decrease time spent in the Smart Inbox by up to 40%, freeing up 40 hours a month for valuable content strategy work and proactive data analysis. This focus on engagements also resulted in an impressive 91% high-quality engagement action rate for the Honda brand, significantly outperforming the 75% industry standard.

Social becomes a powerhouse data source

With its core functions running efficiently on Sprout, the social team leveraged Sprout Social Listening capabilities to elevate its role in the organization to strategic business partnership. The team began proactively sharing social trends and insights with internal stakeholders from R&D to marketing about customer sentiment on innovative products like electric vehicles.

This proactivity in connecting social data to business strategy has propelled social media marketing from an afterthought to a core data source. Today, American Honda relies on its mature social practice as a key driver in major business initiatives, including its proud partnership as a founding partner of the 2028 Olympics—fondly known as “LA28”—and Team USA.

We’re really grateful for the hard work that Sprout put into changing and refreshing our technology stack with us. Our relationship has really paved the way for us to operate in a better, more efficient way.

Allie Coulter
Enterprise Social Media Practice Lead

Put the pedal down on your own social authority

Honda proved that making social a strategic business asset starts with finding a true technology partner who understands and supports your needs. By leveraging Sprout’s intuitive platform and dedication to customer conversations, the team eliminated operational bottlenecks and secured social’s role as an essential data source—defining what best-in-class social execution looks like for a global leader.

Accelerate your own business through social with a platform that delivers instant efficiency and acts as a true innovation partner. Request your free Sprout Social demo today.

The post How Honda shifted social into a strategic asset appeared first on Sprout Social.

Oatly’s loyalty comes from recognizing and celebrating micro-cultures—letting fans feel seen and heard in their own language and co-creating with the communities that influence culture.

From the Oatly Lookbook to sparking dialogue around sustainability to uncovering niche micro-communities in the depths of Reddit, Oatly’s social team proves that listening is more than reputation management: it’s predictive advantage.

Watch this fireside chat featuring Paula Perez, Social Content Specialist at Oatly. Paula will share how Oatly uses community insights and social data to shape business strategy—from international product launches to creative campaigns—by deeply understanding their audiences and the cultural moments that move the market.

You’ll walk away with:

• Real examples of how Oatly turns community insights into meaningful brand and product decisions
• Strategies to foster loyalty by showing up authentically in the comments
• A blueprint for using social as your early-warning system to anticipate market shifts

The post Predictive Power: How Oatly Turns Social Community Into Business Strategy appeared first on Sprout Social.

Against this backdrop, marketers are recalibrating their strategies for a world where traditional brand accounts can’t do all the heavy lifting. Social teams are diversifying their organic ecosystems, investing in intelligence and analytics, and meeting audiences in the private spaces where real conversations already happen.

To help you prepare for what’s ahead, we asked industry leaders and creators to weigh in on what the future of social media will look like, and paired their predictions with marketer and consumer surveys we conducted this year.

1. More brands will join Substack, Bluesky and Reddit—for different reasons

It’s indisputable that most social media users are turning to alternative social media networks, especially younger consumers. According to Sprout’s Q2 2025 Pulse Survey, around half of all global social media users plan to increase their time on emerging, community-driven and creator-driven platforms. Millennials and Gen Z are even more likely.

Interest in these networks is juxtaposed with algorithmic shifts on traditional networks. Users report their feeds have started to look like TV, with endless short videos starring people they don’t know. While that doesn’t mean people will turn away from traditional networks, it does mean they’re craving closed spaces to supplement those experiences.

They turn to Reddit for discussions about niche topics, and to get unfiltered answers and product reviews. To Bluesky for a decentralized, user-controlled feed. To Substack  for long-form content and an intentional scrolling experience. Each network offers something different users can’t find elsewhere.

Sprout’s CMO Scott Morris summed it up like this: “The social spotlight is shifting from mass reach to meaningful connection. Platforms like Reddit, Substack and Discord are powering private groups and micro-communities that build loyalty and spark movements.”

Lia Haberman, creator economy expert and author of the ICYMI newsletter, has already noticed intense interest in Substack. “Interest in Substack will explode in 2026. As a Bestseller on the platform, I’m fielding constant calls and speaking requests. Every brand and agency marketer is scrambling to develop a POV, whether that means partnering with established writers or launching their own publications. The appeal is obvious: direct audience access, more intentional engagement with the content than the average social post and the opportunity to be part of the cultural zeitgeist. It’s giving 2020 TikTok energy, and no one wants to miss the rocket ship.”

2. Brands that formalize anti-AI content creation policies will grab headlines

AI content creation is expected to proliferate across feeds in 2026, but consumers are weary of brands turning production over to the machines. When we asked global consumers what their top concerns were related to brands on social media, their #1 answer was companies posting AI-generated content without disclosing it, per Sprout’s Q3 2025 Pulse Survey.

On the other hand, brands that prioritize human-generated content will stand out for the right reasons. 55% of social users said they are more likely to trust brands that publish human-generated content, and this rises to two-thirds of Gen Z and Millennials, according to the Q3 Pulse Survey. Look how UK retailer John Lewis’ 2025 holiday ad resonated compared to ads made with AI.

According to Sprout’s Q4 2025 Pulse Survey, consumers event went as far to say the #1 effort they want brands to prioritize in 2026 is crafting human-generated content.

Morris adds, “AI drives a new premium on authenticity. The flood of easily generated content and deepfakes will push consumers to seek out content that feels human-generated and real, shifting authenticity from a brand differentiator to a prerequisite for engagement.”

But that doesn’t mean consumers are against teams using AI in their workflows. The Q4 Pulse Survey also found that 69% of users are comfortable with companies using AI chatbots and tools to help humans refine their responses to deliver faster customer service on social. That’s true for 78% of Gen Z and Millennials. Marketers should invest the time savings AI offers back into human-led content creation.

3. The brand account takes a backseat

It’s not just your brand: Most marketers, even those who manage accounts with millions of followers, have seen a steady drop-off in engagement (or at least unreliable engagement) in the past year. Today’s algorithms on traditional social channels are built around discoverability and topical interest, and many brands still take a broad, evergreen approach to content creation.

While that approach isn’t wrong, marketers can’t put all of their eggs in this basket. They need to differentiate and invest in efforts like influencer partnerships and emerging networks. Like when Arby’s let the creators known as @ArbysBoys host an actual rave inside of one of their restaurants.

As Tameka Bazile, Creator and Associate Director of B2B Social & Content at Business Insider, said, “Brands will need to reimagine what ‘organic social’ means. Their future won’t be focused on the growth of traditional B2C brand handles, but by a more diversified organic social ecosystem, including influencer collaborations, B2B storytelling and exec-level personal brands. As consumer trust in brands continues to dissipate, audiences will gravitate toward individuals and communities that feel more human and transparent. Brands will have to adapt by building social strategies that extend beyond their owned channels and into the spaces—and voices—where their audiences already feel seen, and exchange of information feels more accessible.”

4. Social intelligence & analyst job listings will proliferate

55% of all social media users say most companies do a good job of listening to what audiences say on social media, but are less confident brands take their input seriously. Only 31% say brands do a good job of listening to and acting on consumer feedback.

Marketing leaders also recognize more could be done to harness social intelligence and apply it across their businesses. The 2025 Impact of Social Media Marketing Report found that of the 75% of marketing leaders increasing their headcount, more than half want to hire for specialized roles—including social analytics and listening. Sprout’s own Social Media Intelligence Manager told us about her unique career path earlier this year, and why betting on social intelligence means turning conversation into action.

This investment in social intelligence signals how much the business value of social media is increasing. AdAge reported brands like Unilever, Amazon and Clorox are shifting billions to their social budgets, reorganizing their teams and letting social data dictate their work on other channels (like TV, out-of-home and retail). Leading CMOs are taking a social-first approach to their 2026 plans, which means they need these insights to fuel every department.

Kendall Dickieson, Freelance Social Media Consultant and writer of No Filter, commented on this evolution “Social is no longer operating in isolation. It’s becoming a core part of the broader digital ecosystem. As a result, social teams will be increasingly embedded in cross-functional planning, gaining visibility into brand initiatives from the outset and contributing to strategy earlier in the process.”

5. Brands will think smaller when it comes to community management

As mentioned, consumers are moving to more private spaces, like Discord, Reddit, Instagram Broadcast Channels and Facebook Groups. As consumers migrate, brands will follow. The Q4 2025 Pulse Survey found that one of the top five things global social media users say brands should prioritize in 2026 is interacting with audiences in smaller digital spaces.

Some social teams are just focused on listening to conversations about their brand and industry, while others are popping up in comment threads to answer questions and provide customer service. A smaller percentage are launching their own private spaces, like the 40,000-strong Facebook Group managed by Lodge Cast Iron.

Greg Swan, Senior Partner at FINN Partners agency, summed it up like this: “The future of social media for brands will re-center community, not just content. People want connection, transparency and real value from the brands they follow. And the AI slop isn’t helping the content overload. The next wave will focus less on how often a brand posts, and more on how well it listens, engages and builds lasting relationships. We’ll see more private communities, deeper investment in creator collaborations, and smarter use of AI to personalize content and customer experiences. The brands that win will treat social as a two-way street and a long-term investment in trust, not just a content calendar to fill.”

Kara Redman, CEO of Backroom brand strategy and activation agency, calls on marketers to adopt an empathy marketing ethos to create stronger communities. “[Brands should prioritize] more niche relatability to their specific customers. Less trend following, more curiosity about the people who get excited about your brand.”

6. Content creators go corporate

As in-house social media roles become more specialized, some career tracks will veer toward top-tier content creation, like Under Armour’s content studio. We also wrote about how we’re leaning into this on Sprout’s social team.

Angelo Castillo, the creator behind ProfitPlug, says, “Content creators will become the next coveted roles. Strategists, scriptwriters and producers will be highly sought after. Creative strategists who can blend data with storytelling will be especially competed for. The traditional social media manager role will split, with some focusing on community and analytics, others on content production.”

Many brands will also work with creators on a contractor basis. As Jim Lin, Director of Enterprise Social Media at Caterpillar, sums it up, “Creator-led content will surely become more prevalent in brand social media. Not influencers, but people who have certain creative skillsets (e.g., food photography, get ready with me, tutorials, etc.) Their value will not be their following or influence, but the content creation skills they possess. This adds more variety in locations, formats and subjects, but also fills the feed with a larger variety of people and content types.”

7. Marketers worldwide will have to confront social media age limits

Social media bans and age limit parameters will start taking effect over the next few weeks, impacting brands across sectors and countries. Overall, consumers support limitations on social usage, especially for minors. 78% support social media bans for children under 16, per the Q3 2025 Pulse Survey. This rises to 81% for parents.

Even consumers who don’t support bans still want stronger education about the risks of using social media, with 28% of global consumers asserting young people should be educated rather than enforcing a complete ban. Around one-quarter say access to social should only be restricted during certain hours.

When it comes to how social bans and age limit policies will be enforced, much is still unknown. When asked, half of consumers say verified ID checks should be conducted, according to the same Pulse Survey.

These bans are a harbinger that social media is becoming a more legitimate form of media. For brands, compliance can’t be an afterthought. Governance playbooks are required to ensure brand safety.

The future of social belongs to brands that evolve

The next era of social will be defined by intentionality. As consumers gravitate toward smaller spaces and human-first storytelling, brands need to adapt accordingly. Leaders are already investing in social intelligence, specialized talent and diversified ecosystems that empower them to listen more closely and act more meaningfully.

The throughline across all seven predictions is simple: The brands that win in 2026 will stay rooted in what audiences value most. Connecting with other people. And committing to showing up where conversations are happening, not just where content performs. Marketers who embrace these changes now will shape the next chapter of social, marketing and business overall, not react to it.

For a deep-dive into consumer behaviors shaping the future of social media, join Sprout, IKEA, Lia Haberman and Coco Mocoe to unpack practical tactics for 2026 planning.

The post The future of social media: 7 expert predictions for 2026 appeared first on Sprout Social.

Social media listening tools monitor and track social media conversations related to a specific brand or topic, giving you insights that inform your marketing decisions.

Learn how social listening fuels relevance, responsiveness and results—and explore the tools that help your team move from insight to impact.

Why are social media listening tools important for your brand?

Social media listening tools help you find meaningful insights in millions of online conversations.

They cut out hours of manual digging, letting you focus on what matters—turning real audience opinions into strategy.

Here’s why social listening tools are so important as you grow your brand.

Spot emerging trends

Social media listening platforms detect patterns in conversations around specific keywords and hashtags. This helps you identify when certain topics begin to gain traction. Being early to a trend or leveraging it in the right way helps your brand stay relevant and memorable. And it’s what your customers expect from you.

According to The 2025 Sprout Social Index™, 93% of consumers think it’s important for brands to keep up with online culture.

Social listening helps you do this by surfacing real-time shifts in conversations. As new discussions emerge and trends evolve, you can respond quickly and craft your messaging to meet the moment.

Understand customer interests and pain points

The Index also indicates that 90% of consumers use social media to stay updated on trends and cultural moments. This makes it a goldmine of audience data to inform your business strategies.

Social listening lets you tap into those signals.

Listening in on social media conversations helps you understand what topics people like to engage with and what inspires or frustrates them.

These insights fuel more relevant content, smarter product ideas and more empathetic customer care.

Understanding customers’ values and pain points makes you speak directly to what matters most.

Monitor and manage brand reputation

The Index reveals that how quickly a brand responds and how they engage are two of the most important factors that make brands stand out on social.

Social media listening tools track every relevant brand mention, even if you are not tagged. That means you can identify and address conversations that could harm your brand reputation—amplify conversations that create positive sentiment.

Quick, thoughtful responses deliver the standout experience customers are looking for. It shows you’re paying attention and that their opinions matter.

Take Penn State Health, for example. By using Sprout Listening to track sentiment and conversations in real time, Penn State Health can now spot potential crises early. This enables them to proactively address patient concerns and shape content that builds trust with their community.

Identify sales opportunities

Social isn’t just about visibility. It also drives revenue.

In fact, there are more people who buy things on socials than you probably think. According to the Index, 81% of consumers say socials drive them to make spontaneous purchases multiple times a year.

Social listening platforms help you spot these revenue opportunities. They highlight relevant conversations from users that seek a solution you can provide.

So it’s important for your brand to engage in ways that feel timely, relevant and genuinely helpful. As The Index also highlights, 73% of buyers say they turn to a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond to their needs—so being present and adding real value can make all the difference.

Identifying high-intent conversations early allows you to engage at the right moment, offer useful solutions and optimize conversion tactics.

Keep an eye on the competition

Social listening isn’t just for your brand. It’s also a powerful form of social media competitive analysis.

When you track what audiences say about similar brands, you can see what’s hitting the mark and what’s missing it.

These insights help you benchmark your brand performance and identify gaps in the market. Spot negative feedback aimed at competitors and position your brand as the better alternative.

Before diving into the full list of best-in-class tools, you can get started with the industry leader right now.

Try Sprout for 30-days free

Best all-in-one social media listening tools

Some tools provide deep listening for one specific platform or they specialize in certain functions.

Others offer cross-channel listening and a variety of functions, like sentiment analysis and trend predictions.

If your brand is present across multiple social networks, an all-in-one tool provides the breadth of coverage and capabilities you need to manage multiple conversations simultaneously.

Here are the best all-in-one tools to listen in on social.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social’s social listening tools automatically sift through millions of data points, uncovering conversations and insights relevant to your brand. With powerful cross-platform integrations, it’s easy to track conversations across social networks, blogs, forums and news outlets so you never miss a beat.

At the trend level, Sprout helps you learn what’s gaining popularity in your industry—from rising product categories to cultural conversations. See how audiences feel about specific products, campaigns or topics to stay ahead of strategic or emotional shifts. Sprout surfaces the influencers and thought leaders driving those discussions, so you know who to engage with to expand your reach.

Sprout also highlights brand-specific conversations and indirect mentions, giving you a sharper, on-the-ground view of customer experiences and expectations. With custom alerts, you see potential brand crises early, giving you the time and context to respond thoughtfully—before things escalate.

And because Sprout combines social listening, social media management and analytics in one platform, you can move from insight to action in seconds within a unified solution.

Sprout’s AI capabilities further streamline your social listening efforts.

AI Assist automatically summarizes long Listening messages (800+ characters) giving you key takeaways to quickly zero in on essential insights.

Analyze by AI Assist goes one step further to take the guesswork out of social media listening.

It analyzes trends in words, phrases, hashtags and even emojis. This clarity enables you to identify what’s gaining momentum and prioritize your efforts accordingly. With sentiment flagged automatically, teams stay agile and ahead.

Want to keep an eye on your competitors, too? Sprout’s competitive monitoring tools track what’s resonating or falling flat with rival brands. This helps you fine-tune your strategies to stay one step ahead.

Sprout offers a free trial to test out its publishing and analytics capabilities. The social listening tools are part of a custom-built plan for enterprise users.

Start a free Sprout Social trial

Now, lets look at some other social media listening tool options:

2. Brandwatch

Brandwatch extracts valuable conversational insights from millions of sources. It analyzes both historical and real-time conversations to identify current trends and how they change over time.

Gain deeper clarity on your audience and market, so you know what’s trending and popular. You’ll be able to see the top topics they’re talking about and identify relevant brand mentions.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for measuring brand awareness and reach. It lets you track conversations from 25 million online sources to gather valuable consumer insights.

This gives you a better understanding of what people like or dislike, especially when it comes to your brand. You can even measure brand sentiment and quickly identify reputational risks.

4. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive listening tool that specializes in content discovery and research. The platform lets you track trending topics and popular content to inspire you.

You can use the monitoring features to track mentions and industry trends across leading social networks. It lets you set up alerts for brands, topics and keywords to help you stay on top of the latest conversations.

5. Keyhole

Keyhole offers enterprise-grade social listening to gain a deeper understanding of your audience. It provides insights to identify who they are and get a better sense of what they like. You can use the platform to track specific hashtags and keywords as well as identify relevant influencers.

The volume predictions feature lets you anticipate when your posts are going viral, allowing you to come up with a game plan.

6. Meltwater

Meltwater helps you cut through the noise and uncover the conversational insights that matter to your brand. It provides you with a full picture by capturing historical data to help you research changes in trends over time.

The platform gives you a better understanding of your audience and allows you to analyze their sentiment. This helps you monitor mentions of your brand in real time and stay on top of upcoming crises to quell them on time.

While Meltwater provides historical data for trend research, brands looking for advanced, AI-powered analytics should see how Sprout Social and Meltwater stack up on core social listening features.

7. YouScan

YouScan is one of the top social listening tools that comes with image recognition capabilities. It gives you access to AI-powered visual insights to gain a better understanding of your buyer persona.

The platform identifies upcoming trends so you can align your marketing strategy accordingly. It tracks brand sentiment and consumer perceptions to show you how people feel about your brand. It even detects possible threats to your brand reputation in real time.

8. HubSpot Social Media Management Software

HubSpot’s social media management software lets you create custom keyword monitoring streams. This makes it easy to surface interactions that could turn critical and manage them on time.

You can also set up email alerts, allowing your sales team to follow up when prospects mention specific keywords. It even provides AI-generated recommended actions to speed up your analysis.

Social media listening tools for Twitter (X)

X is a place where all the trending conversations take place. It’s where people go when they want to complain about a brand or discuss a trending topic. As such, Twitter listening can uncover valuable insights into your target market.

Here are social media listening tools that specifically focus on X.

9. X advanced search

X’s built-in advanced search tool is highly robust for listening in on relevant conversations. You can track conversations containing specific words, phrases and hashtags. It even lets you narrow your search by excluding certain words.

To get even more specific, look for posts from one specific account to another. The tool gives you plenty of additional filters to help you narrow your search by engagement, date range and so on.

10. X Pro (formerly TweetDeck)

X Pro is a paid tool that offers the same features as the formerly free TweetDeck. Pull up hundreds of conversations across the platform and display them in several columns.

This makes it easier to look out for posts around specific topics and news stories as they come in. X Pro even lets you pull up X posts from the dedicated lists you’ve created. This makes it easier to narrow down conversations from accounts that are most interesting to you.

11. Awario

Awario provides real-time insights on specific brand and keyword mentions in any language. This makes it a great social media listening software for brands that want to grow an international customer base. It even helps you identify top influencers and brand advocates leading the conversation.

Awario supports your social selling efforts with a feature that identifies hot leads. It tracks X posts and zeroes in on ones that are looking for a product similar to yours.

Social media listening tools for TikTok

TikTok’s reach and influence are rapidly expanding. Now it’s the hub for all the latest social media trends and conversations. So being able to tap into the conversations happening on the network gives you leverage to stand apart.

Let’s take a look at a couple of TikTok tools to conduct social listening on the platform.

12. Exolyt

Exolyt gives you comprehensive insights into TikTok conversations and trends. You can use the tool to monitor what people are saying about your brand and how they feel about it.

It lets you track specific TikTok accounts, hashtags and videos to gather granular insights. Also, discover trending sounds, hashtags, effects and accounts to inform your content strategy.

13. All Ears

All Ears is an AI-powered social listening platform that focuses on voice and video conversations. It analyzes millions of TikTok videos to identify relevant brand or topic mentions.

The platform automatically transcribes these mentions, saving you hours of time having to comb through the noise. All Ears also provides relevant metrics like reach, PR value and net sentiment to streamline your listening analytics.

Free social media listening tools

If you’re not ready to invest in a paid tool just yet, there are a few free social listening tools that come with basic listening capabilities.

14. Answer the Public

Answer the Public pulls up search volumes and trends for a given topic, brand or product.

It gives you a breakdown of the associated search terms. So it shows you what questions people are asking about it and what comparisons they’re making. This gives you a better understanding of their needs and pain points as well as their interests.

15. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another free option that lets you set up alerts for conversations taking place across the web. Use it to monitor specific keywords and topics or even brand names.

The tool lets you filter your results based on sources, language and region. Customize the frequency of alerts and choose to show only the best results.

Use Sprout Social’s platform to turn listening into action

Social listening data is powerful—but only if you know what to do with it.

Sprout highlights the trends that matter and helps you put them into action.

Its advanced capabilities like customizable Listening Topics and sentiment visualization empower teams to truly understand audience signals and respond strategically.

Build custom Listening Topics to track what matters

Sprout’s Listening Topics let you track signals that are relevant to your brand, industry or audience. Using the Query Builder, you can tailor topics around anything—from customer pain points to competitor mentions. You cut straight through the noise to find what matters to your brand.

Filter by platform, location, intent, emotion, product name and much more. Set alerts to flag conversational spikes or sentiment changes, making it easier to act fast and stay ahead.

Visualize sentiment and trends at scale

With Sprout, you no longer have to comb through endless messages to find out what’s going on. Sprout’s sentiment analysis and trend tracking give you a holistic view—and fast.

Sort audience feedback by emotion, keyword or campaign and turn thousands of data points into digestible dashboards and reports.

While these insights are powerful for fueling marketing strategies, they also help streamline workflows throughout the whole business.

Take James Hardie® as an example.

The clothing brand uses Sprout’s sentiment and trend analysis to identify themes and feed these insights to their sales, product and customer care teams.

“Not only is it good from a brand health and marketing angle, it’s also important information we can pass on to our sales teams and product teams,” explains Senior Digital Marketing Manager Bridget Kulla.

“We can find trends and common themes that come up in conversations. We can identify not only our own brand advocates, but brand advocates for our competition.”

Spot emerging opportunities before they trend

Most customers enjoy brands that keep up with trends—though according to the Index, almost a third agree that it’s only cool if you act on them within the first one or two days.

Ideally, you want to act on a trend before it explodes. But how?

Sprout’s real-time social listening surfaces emerging trends early, so teams can act before they go mainstream.

The platform flags fast-moving conversations the moment they start to gain momentum. This helps you seize trending moments or protect your brand before it’s too late.

Trek Bicycles taps into this capability to make smarter business decisions. They use Sprout’s Advanced Listening to unearth valuable business intelligence from social conversations to work out what’s about to trend in the industry.

“We’re trying to get more data inputs directly from consumers,” said Eric Rosch, Digital Marketing Manager. “What we are trying to do is make more informed decisions by being better listeners.”

Which social media listening tool is best for your business?

The best social media listening tool depends entirely on your business’s unique budget, required features and industry-specific goals. It’s about finding the perfect fit for your distinct needs, not a universal “best”.

So, when selecting a social media listening platform, consider the following critical factors:

Industry orientation

When selecting the best social listening tool, it’s critical to consider your industry’s unique aspects, as the most effective platform will directly address your sector’s distinct challenges and opportunities. For retail, this means a tool adept at monitoring product sentiment and consumer trends; for fintech, it necessitates robust reputation management and risk detection capabilities; and for hospitality, it requires strength in analyzing customer feedback and identifying emerging travel preferences.

Coverage

The platform should monitor all relevant social networks, forums, blogs, news sites and review platforms where your target audience may discuss your brand or industry.

Real-time capabilities

Look for features that deliver instant alerts for critical mentions or significant shifts in sentiment, allowing your team to react swiftly to opportunities or challenges.

Sentiment analysis accuracy

Evaluate the tool’s precision in determining the emotional tone (positive, negative, neutral) of mentions, particularly across various languages, slang or nuanced contexts.

Customization and filtering

The ability to establish highly specific search queries and effectively filter out irrelevant data is crucial for focusing on actionable insights relevant to your business objectives.

Data visualization and reporting

An effective platform will present complex data in clear, digestible formats, offering customizable dashboards and comprehensive reports that can be easily shared with stakeholders.

Assess whether the platform integrates seamlessly with your existing CRM, customer service or other marketing software to ensure a unified view of your customer interactions and data.

Careful evaluation of these points will help you select a listening platform that not only enhances your market understanding but also empowers your team to make data-driven decisions and foster stronger brand connections. Many businesses find comprehensive capabilities in platforms like Sprout Social.

Listen, learn and grow on social

Social listening tools empower you to learn what makes your audience tick. They give you actionable insights to inform what content you create and how you engage with your audience.

But the challenge lies in finding a social listening platform that meets your unique needs. If you’re looking for a well-rounded tool that does everything, Sprout’s the answer you need. Try it free for 30 days to see if it’s the right match for your brand.

Start a free Sprout Social Trial

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