The Ultimate Guide for Effective B2B Social Listening

What is social listening?

Social listening is the practice of tracking online conversations about your business, industry, or competitors, often by monitoring specific keywords.

From there, you can analyze these discussions to identify patterns, understand emerging pain points, and step in when someone signals a problem your product can solve.

When to prioritize social listening

Social listening can add the most value when you’re trying to grow fast with limited resources. Here’s when to prioritize it:

When you lack brand recognition

If your company or product is not well known, social listening helps you find conversations that are relevant to your product, even if your name isn’t mentioned. This allows you to participate and build awareness from the ground up.

When advertising budgets are limited

Instead of spending heavily on ads, you can use social listening to find high-intent users and engage them directly. It is a more cost-effective strategy when resources are tight.

When your team is small

At this stage, your biggest advantage is authenticity and proximity to your users. Social listening helps you discover relevant user needs without requiring a dedicated marketing or sales team to do outbound research.

When you need fast feedback

User conversations reveal honest reactions and uncensored opinions about your product. Social listening gives you access to these without needing to conduct surveys or interviews, speeding up your product feedback loop.

How to monitor for high-intent mentions

Knowing when to listen is important, but knowing what to listen for is where the real value begins. Here’s how to monitor for high-intent mentions:

Step 1: Identify key platforms

Before you start listening, it’s important to figure out where your customers spend most of their time online. Sometimes you might find them being active more than one channel.
Some of the best places to monitor for B2B SaaS conversations include:

• Reddit: Ideal for honest, uncensored discussions. Subreddits often host deep threads on specific problems, tools, and workflows.
• Slack communities: These are usually for more niche and focused discussions. Members often share pain points or tool recommendations in real time.
• LinkedIn: Professionals use it to discuss trends, share frustrations, or ask for recommendations—especially in B2B SaaS.
• X (Twitter): Great for quick, real-time conversations and finding sentiment around news, launches, or competitors.
• Product Hunt: Key launchpads where feedback is immediate and sentiment is highly transparent.

Start by focusing your efforts on 1-2 platforms where your target customers are most active. Monitor these closely to gather meaningful insights and then gradually expand your listening to additional channels.

Step 2: Identify your keywords

Once you know where to listen, determine what to listen for. To build your keywords list, start with your brand name; this includes your official name, website URL, product names, and common misspellings. For example, at Mevrik, we’ve noticed some users accidentally type “Mevrick” instead of “Mevrik,” so it’s important to cover those variations.

Next, add broad terms that describe what your product does, such as “customer service software” “customer support tool” or “ Customer experience platform”. These keywords help you find people talking about solutions like yours.

Don’t forget to include competitor names as well. People often complain about or compare different tools (for example, “X vs. Y”), and tracking these mentions gives you a chance to offer helpful advice or present your product as an alternative.

Step 3: Start monitoring the keywords

Once you have your keywords ready, it’s time to start monitoring the conversations. If you’re just beginning, you can search manually by setting aside time daily or weekly to look for your keywords on your chosen platforms.

Using advanced search techniques, like Boolean operators (for example, searching for “alternative to” AND CRM), can help you get more precise results.

However, manual monitoring can be time-consuming and may cause you to miss important posts or delay responses.

To save time and improve consistency, consider using social listening tools like Brandwatch, Sprout Social, or Meltwater that automatically track your keywords and alert you when relevant mentions appear.

You can also use Mevrik. Though originally built for support, Mevrik helps identify real-time mentions, trends, and user feedback across multiple platforms.

Whether you are doing it manually or through software, record important conversations in a shared spreadsheet, or a CRM. This helps your team analyze patterns and refine keyword targeting over time.

Step 4: Engage with high-intent mentions

After you find a relevant post or conversation, how you respond can make a big difference. Here’s a simple approach:

• Provide helpful information: Before introducing your product, be helpful. Offer a thoughtful answer, resource, or opinion that addresses the user’s concern - without jumping straight into a pitch.
• Be transparent about your role: Let people know who you are. If you’re a founder, team member, or support lead, mention it. This adds context to your response and helps users understand your perspective.
• Follow up thoughtfully: If the discussion gets detailed, sensitive, or sales-oriented, suggest continuing via private messages. Also, if you want to share or quote someone’s post, always get their permission first; this builds goodwill and respect.

Step 5: Turn insights into strategy

Now that you’re collecting valuable customer feedback and monitoring conversations, it’s time to turn those insights into concrete actions that drive growth and improve your product.

You can do this by creating targeted content based on recurring questions. For example, when users consistently ask about a particular feature or topic, write blog posts, LinkedIn threads, or FAQs that directly address those concerns. This not only boosts your SEO but also positions your brand as a helpful authority.

Pay close attention to the language your audience uses and refine your messaging accordingly. For example, if users refer to your product benefits as “ email automation,” make sure your marketing and sales copy use that exact phrasing instead of more generic or corporate terms like “email marketing”.

Also, if you repeatedly hear concerns about pricing, integration issues, or onboarding difficulties, address these objections preemptively by tackling them directly in your website copy, sales collateral, and support materials.

Key signs your social listening strategy is stuck in reactive mode

If your team is doing social listening but not seeing results, it might be too reactive. Here are some signs to watch for:

• Your engagement is inconsistent, so you’re only showing up sporadically instead of having a repeatable process for monitoring and responding.
• You haven’t updated your keyword list in months, which means you’re probably missing new terms, trends, or emerging pain points your audience actually uses today.
• You don’t log or revisit insights, so even if you’re catching great feedback or user questions, they’re not being tracked in a way that informs your product, marketing, or sales efforts.
• You treat social listening purely as a support channel, engaging only when something goes wrong instead of using it proactively to uncover leads, spot content ideas, or improve positioning.

How do you get stakeholder buy-in for investing in social listening platforms?

If you’re not the decision-maker, securing buy-in for social listening tool can feel challenging, especially in a small startup where every initiative competes for attention. Here’s how to make the case to your founder or leadership team:

• Show real-world outcomes: Share success stories where social listening directly led to product improvements, new customers, or positive press.
• Tie it to metrics that matter: Explain how it lowers customer acquisition costs (CAC), surfaces expansion opportunities, or reduces churn.
• Propose a small pilot project: Suggest a 30-day trial where you track specific metrics like mentions logged, conversations joined, and leads captured—then review results.
• Use competitor comparisons: Show how others in your space are actively engaging with customers online. This builds urgency and helps make the case for prioritization.

How is AI changing what your audience talks about, and how should listening adapt?

AI is shifting the vocabulary and speed of online discussions. From new buzzwords to evolving job titles, your audience’s language is changing fast. To stay relevant, your social listening strategy needs to adapt in three key ways:

Continuously refine your keyword sets

New tools, acronyms, and terminology emerge fast. To keep up, regularly review and update your keyword list. This ensures you’re capturing the most current conversations and identifying high-intent signals as they appear—before your competitors do.

Filter for real, high-quality signals

With AI-generated content on the rise, not every post reflects a genuine user need or opinion. Train your eye—and your tools—to detect authenticity. Focus on mentions that reveal true pain points, intent, or emotional cues that warrant a thoughtful response.

Use AI to improve your workflow

Try AI yourself (e.g., summarization or sentiment detection) to prioritize which posts to respond to and where to dig deeper. AI can help you quickly scan large amounts of content, understand the tone of conversations, and spot important trends—saving you time and helping you act faster.

Final thoughts

Social listening opens a window into genuine conversations happening around your product and industry. It helps you connect directly with people who need what you offer, making every interaction more meaningful and your efforts more focused—especially when resources are limited.

The key is to keep social listening active and intentional. Regularly update your approach, involve your team, and use smart tools to discover insights that guide real improvements and build stronger relationships over time.

‍