Take real-time social listening to the next level

February 11, 2016

As the most romantic weekend of the year approaches, I am once again filled with joy as I get to spend it working with one of my favourite clients, working in a fast-paced, action-packed, real-time social media command centre.

Social listening has become more than accepted by almost every business worth its digital salt. However, conducting this effectively in real-time scenarios can vary vastly in quality. Many scrape online conversations at a basic level, but how do you build high-quality listening that delivers over and above your competition?

Here are 5 of the top tips that will set you on the route to world class real-time listening:Make sure you are truly real time

1. Make sure you are truly real time

Tools vary in how ‘real-time’ they truly are. Ensure that your check the frequency of the updates for the live streams and the latency settings when selecting and setting up your tool. Some crawl websites using the same sort of algorithm as Google spiders (every time the website content updates), whereas others use standard timings – do your homework.

2. Use monitors and tabs to make the important stuff easy to reach

Setting up key tabs or separate monitors that put the important things for your projects under a microscope at the click of a button will make your life far easier. There is nothing more frustrating than digging for data in a real-time scenario. So put the important information at your fingertips.

3. Map core metrics to geography

Mapping the important metrics (such as sentiment) to geographical locations can help you identify problems in advance of a potential crisis. For example, if you can see a lot of negativity coming from a particular area, you may identify that your business operations in that area are suffering. You can then communicate with them and fix the problem at source, rather than waiting to hear about it through customer complaints.

4. Create alerts that map your key criteria

Setting up email alerts that flag core criteria for you can ensure that nothing is missed and you get to potential problems or areas for celebration before the rest of the world notices. For example, setting up alerts for patterns of behaviour, escalation criteria or consumer trends may help you get ahead of the curve.

5. Capture and repurpose the good bits

Real-time monitoring isn’t all about crisis prevention. Having a holistic view of how people are interacting with your brand will allow you see the good bits, capture UGC and repurpose amazing customer content for fantastical marketing purposes.

Happy hunting!

Latest Posts

AI is helping B2B organic content rebound on LinkedIn and Reddit, so SEO optimisation for posts has never been more important. We’ve got a playbook to help you get started on boosting that organic visibility on Google and LLMs. First things first – we do often preach here at Immediate…

B2B marketing feels slower because you’re selling to a buying group, not a decision maker. Forrester says the average buying decision involves 13 people and 89% of purchases involve two or more departments. Add three generations with different trust cues and you get rework, internal debate, and “one more version” forever. Buyers are also doing more research without sales, which makes guessing expensive. This LinkedIn Live with Tejal Patel is about buyer behaviour, trust cues, and what social is doing in research and validation, so you can build one narrative that travels across the group and saves your team time.

We’re only a couple of weeks into 2026, and social already feels…different, in the best way possible. This year isn’t just about flashy new features or the next viral sound; it’s about making the internet feel more human, more useful, and a lot less exhausting.