A social listening strategy decides what you listen for, where, who acts on what you find and how you measure it. In seven steps: pick one goal, write four kinds of query, choose sources, set up triage, agree how you respond, tune weekly and report monthly.
By Parth Koshti, founder of SnitchFeed. Updated October 2026.
Most guides to social listening stop at "track your brand and measure sentiment". This one is written for B2B teams, where the posts that matter are rarely about you: they are people asking for a tool, comparing vendors or complaining about a competitor. Every example below is a real public post, and each comes with the query that finds posts like it.
Finding buyers, protecting the brand, learning from competitors and shaping the product need different queries, sources and owners. Start with one. A listener that tries to do all four ends up useful for none.
| Goal | Listen for | Owner |
|---|---|---|
| Find buyers | People asking for a recommendation, comparing tools or asking for an alternative | Sales or founders |
| Protect the brand | Your brand, product and founders' names, including posts that never tag you | Support or marketing |
| Learn from competitors | Competitor names next to pricing, switching, missing features and outages | Product marketing |
| Shape the product | The problem you solve, described in users' words, plus feature requests | Product |
Brand, competitor, buying intent and problem. Write each as a Boolean query, test it against real posts before you save it, and keep a short exclusion list from day one.
"acme" OR "acme.io" OR "acme app" Include common misspellings and your domain. Exclude job posts if your name is a common word. "rivalco" AND (pricing OR alternative OR switching OR cancel) A competitor's name alone is mostly noise; next to these words it is a signal. ("looking for" OR recommend OR "any suggestions") AND "crm" Phrase the category the way buyers do, not the way your website does. ("how do you" OR "how do I") AND ("track mentions" OR "find leads") These posts never name a product, which is why no brand keyword will find them. For B2B software that is usually Reddit, LinkedIn, X and Hacker News before Instagram or TikTok. Check how fast each tool covers each platform: real time and once a day are both sold as alerts.
Where to listen LinkedIn X (Twitter) Hacker NewsDecide what reaches a person and who that person is. Filter by relevance, tag by intent, and route each kind of post to its owner: buying intent to sales, complaints to support, feature requests to product. Use Slack or email, not a dashboard nobody opens.
Relevance scoring and intent tagsReply fast, while the thread is still active, and lead with a useful answer. Say who you are when you mention your own product. Never post the same reply twice. Some threads are worth reading and not answering.
AI reply draftsRead what came through, add exclusions for the noise, tighten queries that are too broad and widen the ones that found nothing. Most setups need two or three rounds before the feed is worth checking daily.
A one-page report with five numbers, the threads that mattered, the themes and what you will change. Use the template below.
Report templateSix real public posts from LinkedIn, X, Reddit and Hacker News, the four places B2B buyers talk in public. Each was found with SnitchFeed and is quoted as written, with the query that finds posts like it and what to do with it. The company names are only examples. For more patterns like these, see buying signals.
LinkedIn Post, October 2026, 85 comments Find buyers "Looking for recommendations on CRM software that you have used or researched. Hoping to help a small company manage the day to day issues bogging them down!"
A buyer asking their network, and 85 replies from people and vendors competing for the answer. On LinkedIn the first useful replies get read most, so speed matters here too.
"looking for recommendations" AND CRM 
X Reply, October 2026 Learn from competitors "We discontinued Zapier when they sent us a 600% price increase (not even joking). Was a client for almost 10 years. Immediately cancelled. They withdrew price increase. We kept cancellation."
A ten-year customer lost over one pricing change, posted as a reply under someone else's thread. For any automation tool, that is a customer to reach and a pricing lesson to keep.
Zapier AND (cancelled OR "price increase") 
Reddit Post in r/CRMSoftware, October 2026 Find buyers "I’ve been thinking about moving away from HubSpot lately. The pricing is getting to me, and I still find parts of the platform more complicated than they need to be."
For any HubSpot alternative, a buyer naming two reasons to switch. Reply the same day with how you handle pricing and simplicity, and say who you are.
HubSpot AND ("moving away" OR "switching from" OR alternative OR pricing) 
Hacker News Comment in "IBM to acquire Confluent", December 2025 Learn from competitors "We moved off HashiCorp's Terraform Cloud when they tried to hike the price 100x on us"
A competitor's pricing change, told by a customer who left, under a story about something else. Collected over a quarter, comments like this show which customers a competitor is losing and why.
"Terraform Cloud" AND "moved off" Reddit Post in r/AIToolBench, October 2026 Shape the product "I’ve been looking for a third-party AI support agent that can work directly with Intercom as an alternative to Fin, and the options seem surprisingly limited."
A gap in an ecosystem, stated by someone who would pay to fill it. If you build for that ecosystem, this is a feature request and a buyer at once.
Intercom AND (alternative OR integration OR "can't find") LinkedIn Post, October 2026 Find buyers "I currently manage over 200 properties nationally and am looking for recommendations for a reliable, fully automated Facilities Management Helpdesk System"
The size of the account and the exact system they need, in the first sentence. The rest of the post lists their requirements, which is a ready-made brief for the reply.
"looking for recommendations" AND helpdesk Reach and impressions describe the internet, not your listening. These describe whether it is working.
| Metric | Why it matters | How to read it |
|---|---|---|
| Relevant posts per week | How much real signal your queries find. | Flat at zero means queries are too narrow; hundreds means you need tighter filters. |
| Share of posts that were relevant | How clean the feed is. | Below about half, people stop reading it. Add exclusions until it rises. |
| Time to first reply | Replies early in a thread are read by everyone who comes later. | Track the median, by platform. Hours, not days. |
| Replies that became conversations | The step between a mention and a customer. | Count DMs, demo requests and sign-ups you can trace to a thread. |
| Share of voice | How often you come up next to competitors. | Watch the trend over months, not a single number. |
| Top themes | What people complain about, ask for and compare. | Count each theme. A theme that grows two months in a row is a decision to make. |
| Sentiment trend | Whether conversation about you is getting better or worse. | Read the posts behind any spike before reporting it. |
To work out share of voice from your mention counts, use the free share of voice calculator.
One page, once a month. Copy it and fill in the brackets.
Social listening report: [month] Headline: one sentence on what changed. Numbers - Relevant posts: [n] (last month [n]) - Share relevant: [n]% - Median time to first reply: [hours] - Conversations started: [n] - Share of voice vs [competitor A], [competitor B]: [n]%, [n]%, [n]% Threads that mattered (3, with links and what happened) Themes (count, change, two example posts each) Competitor moves (pricing, launches, outages, complaints) Next month: what we will change (queries, sources, replies, product)
Keep last month's numbers next to this month's. A number with nothing to compare it to does not lead to a decision.
Most of the useful posts never name you. Buyers describe a problem or name a competitor.
More mentions is not good news by itself. Report relevant posts, replies and what came of them.
If alerts go to a shared channel with no owner, the best threads go unanswered. Name a person per kind of post.
Communities notice. Answer the question first, mention your product only where it fits, and say who you are.
The first version of every query is too broad or too narrow. Plan two or three rounds in the first month.
SnitchFeed is real-time social listening for B2B teams, built around steps 2 to 5. It watches Reddit and Bluesky in real time and checks LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Hacker News as often as hourly.
It does not cover Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, news or print, and it keeps months of history, not years.
How it works, what to listen for, and how to start.
How vendors split the two terms, where they overlap, and why most teams need both.
What AI does well in social listening today, and what it still needs a data source for.
What a small team actually needs, and how to set up a first listener.
How AI agents like Claude and ChatGPT search mentions through MCP.
Finding buyers in public LinkedIn posts.
Finding buyers in public posts on X.
Enterprise suites, mid-market tools and B2B options, with prices.
Tools that are free forever or have a free plan, with their real limits.
Compared on how fast each tool alerts you, and on which plan.
Tracking reputation, sentiment and share of voice over time.
Watching competitors' launches, pricing and complaints.
Can't find what you're looking for? We're fast to respond.
Still have questions? Reach out at hello@snitchfeed.com
Write your first queries, test them against today's posts from LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Reddit, Hacker News and Bluesky, and route the ones that matter to the right person.
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